[St Charles Owl]

At the end of the day the only thing most football fans hold dear is the club itself!! Banning of English clubs in Europe because of hooliganism hurt the teams, and therefore hurt the fans as well and while it wasn't the only thing to reduce the instances it certainly helped. Other draconian measures were used as well, initially mandatory segregation, no pay on the gate, then fences and finally all-seater stadium, all of this backed up with banning orders for fans by both the authorities and the clubs themselves. Now you rarely see any trouble at football games, but its still there albeit outside the grounds, but then that is societies problem, not footballs. Surely its the same with this.

I agree with Worthing, the police nor the stewards can wade in and arrest all those who may have been singing a song, that will just cause a riot whichever team is involved. But as with most things there will be a hardcore who generally start the songs in the first place, the technology is there to spot these guys and pull them out during the game if need be or arrest them afterwards. The clubs then need to act and ban these supporters, and all this needs to be publicised so that a deterrent is created. But the clubs as a group will need to support any measures beyond that, especially fines etc against the clubs and football chairman are very slow at introducing measures that actually might eventually effect them directly, so I don't hold out much hope there. Maybe it will take government intervention just like we saw with hooligans to force the clubs to deal with it, but the big difference I see is that it was universally accepted by society that fighting in the ground or on the street was unacceptable, can we seriously say that is the case on the streets in Scotland with the ordinary guy with regards to sectarianism??