That's definitely true and the next generation try to emulate it. What happens is a few of the local clowns come along and get people riled up with alcohol. It's chaotic and less organised than the past.
Policing has gotten very strict and steward numbers get tripled. Portsmouth and Southampton go into lockdown when they clash and even the highway is constantly monitored by police.
While the deep-seated cultural hatred tracing back to the 50's/60's remains a multi-generational memory, those infamous 70s/80's 'casuals firms' like West Ham's ICF and the Millwall Bushwackers are largely relics of history. Modern stadium surveillance, facial recognition, and mandatory life-long bans have successfully driven out the organised mass violence seen in decades past.
Of course as Beretta said there's the occasional lapse but it wasn't in 2011/12 it was in 2009.which saw the big pitch invasion after the game.at Upton Park. The former ICF 'top boy' Cass Pennant stressed in a Guardian article at the time that non of original ICF were really involved more a new breed of younger thugs much smaller in numbers and nothinglike the old days in terms of thuggery and arrests.
Football should not be punching itself on the nose over what happened at the West Ham game with Millwall
www.theguardian.com
The two league fixtures in 2011/12 saw the Met launched massive, London-wide lockdown operations to keep those fixtures trouble-free....
The people trying to keep the violent side of the West Ham vs. Millwall rivalry alive are chasing a ghost from a completely different era of British society.
Most of the modern friction exists purely online. Younger fans who never witnessed the genuine hostility of the 1970s or 1980s trade insults on TikTok, X, and YouTube. They mimic the behaviour of their fathers or grandfathers, but it is largely theatrical performance rather than actual casuals or hooligan culture.....
It was those C-grade films like Green Street Hooligans and The Football Factory and all that Hooli-literature that came out over the last 20 years that heavily romanticised the feud for the younger wannabe's!
