The Match They Made Political

When Aston Villa drew Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa League, it should have been just another football fixture. But in modern Britain, where everything is now a proxy battlefield, even a game of football can turn into a referendum on identity, religion and political loyalty.

West Midlands Police did what they’re paid to do: assess risk and protect the public. Their intelligence officers, having watched what happened in Amsterdam last year – the riots, the violence, the arrests – classified the match as high-risk. The Safety Advisory Group agreed. Away fans banned. End of. It wasn’t anti-Israel, it was anti-violence.

But the minute Israel is mentioned, reason leaves the room. Within hours came the cries of “antisemitism,” as if the police had suddenly turned into a branch of Hamas. Lobby groups and backbenchers seized the opportunity, denouncing a safety decision as prejudice. Then Downing Street waded in, demanding the ban be reviewed – not because of new intelligence, but because of political optics.

And in the middle of it all, there was Kemi Badenoch, waving her flag and climbing aboard the outrage express. She never misses a culture-war bandwagon. One week it’s “woke headteachers,” the next it’s “anti-Israel bias.” Her moral compass is magnetic – it points wherever the cameras are.

The irony is that the police are now being punished for doing their jobs. If they bow to political pressure and violence erupts, those same ministers will claim they “failed to keep order.” It’s a no-win situation, engineered by people who wouldn’t know a matchday policing plan if it landed in their lap.

This was never about football. It was about opportunists turning a safety call into a moral crusade. The police acted to keep people safe; politicians acted to keep themselves in the news. And that’s the real disgrace – not antisemitism, not discrimination, but the corruption of professional judgment by political vanity.

Maccabi’s travelling fans aren’t the monsters some portray, but neither are they saints in yellow and blue. They are part of an ultra culture that feeds on defiance, and when that meets Europe’s febrile politics, sparks fly. The Amsterdam riot proved it – football becomes the stage on which bigger arguments are fought. The police saw that, understood it, and acted accordingly. What followed was not a stand against antisemitism, but a failure to distinguish between prejudice and prudence. And once again, the shouting drowned out the sense.  

When politicians start leaning on the police, the rot sets in. The public begins to suspect that every operational call is political – that safety advice is tailored to suit the headlines. It’s the same disease that hollowed out the civil service and warped the BBC: truth and professionalism subordinated to whatever keeps the populists fed.

The tragedy is that trust, once lost, is almost impossible to rebuild. The police didn’t create this storm – they walked straight into it, trying to do their job. Now, instead of being backed for taking a calm, apolitical stance, they’re being paraded as villains in someone else’s narrative. And all because, in the age of permanent outrage, nothing is allowed to stay professional. Everything has to be political – even football.