Andy Burnham, the prime minister and a lifelong football fan, spent part of this week restating a long-held personal opinion: that supporters ought to be able to have a drink while watching from the stands. It was an off-the-cuff answer to a question rather than a policy announcement, and it carried no sign of any real intention to do anything about it.
The context explains why it landed as a non-issue. Alcohol has been banned within sight of the pitch in English football since the late 1980s, and the ban has endured with good reason. The police do not want it lifted, and the UK Football Police Unit has been accused of “bringing Hillsborough” into the alcohol debate. The one place where the rules already differ is the women’s game, where fans can drink in their seats in the top two divisions; there is little indication the men’s professional game will follow.
The practical objection is straightforward. Of all the problems facing the country, insufficient access to alcohol is not one of them: an average urban centre has around 60 booze outlets per square mile, and football grounds sit in some of the best-served parts of the country. There are 174 active pubs within a one-mile radius of St James’ Park, 50 around Molineux, 33 around Arsenal and 29 around Portman Road. When Burnham sat down at Everton with Mark Carney and found himself unable to buy a £9 Peroni, he was also a 15-minute walk from 23 public bars that survive on selling liquid to thirsty people.
That is where the case against any change is strongest. Pubs operate on fine margins and matchdays are their rush hour — guaranteed rounds and captive footfall — and they are among the few physical, non-corporate elements of a matchday that exist outside football’s own force field. Lifting the ban would divert even a small slice of that trade towards clubs owned by hedge funds, in exchange for a warm, overpriced lager drunk in a thoroughly commodified setting. Nobody really needs to be more drunk at football, and a gin flask is not hard to smuggle in.
Nor is it obvious who is asking for the change. Young people drink less than previous generations, and supporters who already feel excluded — new fans, and women in particular — can find a drunk football crowd uncomfortable. As a final hard pass, within three minutes of re-legalising pitch-side drinking, someone somewhere would be throwing a pint in the air.
Burnham, though, framed the question in tribal terms, introducing the idea of “discrimination” as though people who want to drink at football were a lobby group or an oppressed section of society. Different environments have different rules: you can drink at the opera, but you cannot sing songs there, do the Poznan or call people wankers. The framing is pure 1980s, from a time when to be interested in football was to be dismissed as a thug and an unwanted emissary of the undeserving working class. Football’s position has since been reversed: it is now the cultural imperialist, inflicting itself on everything else and always selling.
That is what makes this episode more interesting as a signal about the new prime minister than as football policy. Burnham is a Blair-era special adviser who will be 57 in January, the same age as Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the pitch-side pint is a first obvious example of him playing to a base that exists most vividly in his own cultural milieu. It will not happen — the police do not want it, and this was a personal opinion, not a plan. But the slight false note it struck is useful information all the same. Time for a drink and a rethink.