Every major tournament seems to be accompanied by headlines about football and domestic violence. FSA vice chair Chris Paouros (below right) takes a closer look at a complex issue…

Last month, the UK Football Policing Unit (UKFPU) reported 384 domestic abuse incidents during the recent World Cup, the highest figure recorded for a comparable tournament, making up 17% of the 2,322 football-related incidents logged.

Cue the familiar story: England play, men drink, women get hurt, football is to blame.

That story made me cross. Not because the harm isn’t real but because the story is wrong in a way that helps no one, least of all the women it claims to speak for.

© Hannah J Taylor

The rise is real and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. The foundational work here is the 2014 Lancaster University study by Stuart Kirby, Brian Francis and Rosalie O’Flaherty, which found domestic abuse reports rose by 38% when England lost, by 26% when England won or drew, and stayed 11% higher the day after a match, whatever the result.

Women are at greater risk around these tournaments.

But football does not create abusers. The men reported this month were abusing before the World Cup and will abuse long after the final. Domestic abuse is a pattern of coercive control, a sustained campaign of power over another person, as our own law now recognises. It is not an event that a match result switches on.

This matters because of what the football framing does. When we treat a tournament as the trigger, we hand perpetrators the oldest excuse there is. ‘He lost his head’. ‘The game got to him’. ‘He’d had a few’. Oona Brooks-Hay and Nancy Lombard made this argument in their 2018 study, the first UK-wide look at the supposed link.

They warned that treating football as the cause re-incidentalises domestic abuse and detaches it from the feminist understanding of abuse as sustained behaviour rooted in gender inequality. Their more blunt finding: scapegoating football trivialises the issue and risks handing offenders an excuse.

The alcohol line does the same job. Extended licensing and heavy drinking escalate what is already there. They do not manufacture a man’s decision to control and hurt his partner. Women’s Aid, who have led on this for years, are clear that abuse is rooted in power and control, and responsibility always sits with the person choosing to behave abusively.

Alcohol is a tool and a disinhibitor. It is not a defence.

England’s semi-final defeat to Argentina drew a peak of 24 million viewers and was the most-watched live television moment of the year across every broadcaster. Nothing else came near it. Football is the dominant sport in this country by a wide margin, and a World Cup pulls the biggest audiences of all, far beyond anything cricket or rugby command.

That scale is a large part of why football tournaments produce the biggest abuse figures. The men who abuse are already abusing. A tournament locks millions of them into the same charged night at the same time, drinking, keyed up, watching the same result land.

When the audience is that big, the number of abusive men inside it is big too, and the reported total climbs with it. Give cricket or rugby a 24 million audience and you would expect the same pattern at the same scale. The reach tells you nothing about whether the game makes men violent.

There’s something about class underneath this, too. Football fans have been treated as a public-order problem since the game began, the working-class crowd cast as a threat to be contained. Clifford Stott and Geoff Pearson documented decades of this in their work on the policing of the so-called ‘English disease’, much of it driven by media panic and inaccurate reporting.

Blaming football lets the wider culture look at a particular kind of man, in a particular kind of pub, and feel the problem lives over there. It does not. Men abuse women in every postcode, every income bracket, every profession. The banker and the season-ticket holder are not different populations.

Look again at how these latest figures reached us. Domestic abuse counted as a subset of football-related incidents, released by a unit whose core business is treating supporters as a risk to be managed.

That tells you how the problem is being understood: as football’s mess to be policed, rather than as men’s violence against women. Fans are not the enemy of this cause. Most people watching a game are appalled by abuse and would act to stop it. Handing the narrative to an enforcement body that starts from suspicion of fans sets us up to blame the crowd and miss the man.

If we mean it, the work does not begin when England reach a semi-final and end when they go out. Rather we should: Name it as men’s violence against women, year-round, and resource the services that women rely on all year, not for the length of a news cycle.

Put accountability where it belongs, on perpetrators, and fund the programmes that challenge them.

Use football’s reach for good. The game sits in front of millions of men every week, which makes it one of the best platforms we have to confront abuse. That is a reason to work with fans, not against them.

The women living with this do not need football turned into a villain for a fortnight. They need us to see the man in front of them clearly, all year, and to act. The abuse would happen anyway. Our job is to stop excusing it.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, the free 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline is on 0808 2000 247.