English football's darkest months

The Heysel disaster in May 1985 brought to an end 11 weeks of turmoil in which 96 supporters went to watch the sport they loved but never came home. Forty years on, FFT recalls the tragic inspiration for a new fan dawn

- Richard Edwards

Margaret Thatcher's administration had spent 1984 battling the miners and dismantling the coal industry. But with that fight almost won, as the clock ticked into the New Year, she had another of the United Kingdom’s best-loved and most established institutions squarely in her sights - English football.

The early months of 1985 were among the most miserable ever experienced in the national game. Between mid-March and late May, came the Luton Town riot, the Valley Parade fire at Bradford City and the Heysel stadium disaster.

The very notion of football having a future was called into question. The establishment saw football as nothing but trouble and the beautiful game was about to realise its unpopularity with the country’s decision-makers.

“Two Britains emerged in the 1980s,” writes Andrew Marr in his History of Modern Britain. “The rich got richer but the bottom 10 per cent saw their incomes fall by about 17 per cent. A lot of people fell through the cracks. Once Britain had prided itself on not seeing people sleeping on the streets or begging. Not any more.”

Football itself was entering begging bowl territory. By the end of the 1983-84 season, the average attendance in England’s top flight had fallen to a paltry 18,834 – a disturbing drop of almost 8,000 since the turn of the decade.

Aston Villa, European Cup winners two years prior, were welcoming just 21,371 supporters through the gates. Wolves’ ramshackle Molineux, meanwhile, could only muster average crowds of 12,478.

As fan numbers dwindled, the column inches devoted to off-field events grew exponentially as unemployment levels reached 12 per cent by January 1985, in a country more divided than at perhaps any time in its history.

Lower down the divisions, fans were forced to put up with conditions more akin to the 1880s than the 1980s.