Andy Burnham's recent comments about allowing drinking in the stands at football matches have been widely dismissed as a pointless idea. The prime minister, a lifelong football fan, was restating a personal opinion, not making policy or expressing any real intention to act. Alcohol has been banned within sight of the pitch since the late 1980s, and with good reason.
Of all the many problems facing Britain, insufficient access to alcohol doesn't seem like a hot-button issue. Currently the average urban centre has 60 booze outlets per square mile. Nobody really needs to be more drunk at football, and if you must drink, it's not that hard to smuggle in a gin flask.
A Dead Issue or a Cultural Signal?
Young people don't really drink, and many people who already feel excluded, including new fans and women in particular, feel doubly uncomfortable around a pissed-up football crowd. Within three minutes of re-legalising this, someone somewhere would be chucking a pint in the air.
Burnham chose booze and football as an obviously tribal issue, introducing the idea of "discrimination" as though people who want to drink at football are a lobby group or an oppressed section of society. But different environments have different rules. You can drink at the opera, but you also can't sing songs there or call people wankers.
The Pub Economy Argument
This is a bad idea because it would help to close down pubs and shovel money instead into the pockets of clubs owned by hedge funds. That minor prohibition has helped create a culture of external football drinking, and this is one of the few physical match-day elements to exist outside football's corporate force field.
Pubs are great and vital places, providing a third space where people can meet and where men actually speak. They thrive around football grounds. There are 174 active pubs within a one-mile radius of St James' Park, Molineux has 50 pubs, Portman Road 29, and Arsenal 33. When Andy Burnham sits down at Everton with Mark Carney and feels annoyed he can't buy a £9 Peroni, he is also just a 15-minute walk from 23 public bars that survive purely on selling liquid to thirsty people.
A Reflexive Way of Thinking
All pubs operate on fine margins, and matchdays are their rush hour. Diverting even the tiniest bit of that money to the wildly commodified institutional leisure facility up the road would be a mistake. The idea that this is a vital cultural issue is pure 1980s, from a time when to be interested in football was to be dismissed as a thug.
Football is now the cultural imperialist, out there inflicting itself on everything else, always selling. This is a first very obvious example of playing to a base that exists most vividly only in his own cultural milieu. The response to that slight false note is useful information. Time for a drink and a rethink.
