Football clubs should pay for policing

Football clubs should pay all the costs of policing games, says the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

Clubs currently have to pay back only the costs incurred inside their ground or on their property, with the police footing the rest of the bill.

Assistant Chief Constable Stephen Thomas, ACPO lead for football policing, said local communities were in effect “subsidising the clubs”.

Freedom of Information requests from BBC Radio Five Live to the police showed it cost £7.5 million to police 13 Premier League clubs, with the teams paying £4.3 million and £3.2 million coming from police budgets.

All the constabularies policing the Premier League were contacted. Of those, six forces provided comparable data covering 13 of the 20 clubs in the league.

“If we have to take officers away from the communities to police football, we are not able to recover the cost of that,” said ACC Thomas.

He said it is difficult to calculate the true cost of policing football matches. “Is an officer who was on patrol in the vicinity of a football ground and intercepts a hooligan a general policing cost, or should the club contribute?”

A spokesperson for the Premier League disagrees that clubs should pay any extra for policing. Head of communications, Dan Johnson, said clubs already contributed £700 million a year to the Treasury through taxes.

“The law is quite clear – clubs pay for any policing inside the ground and on immediately adjacent property under their control on matchday.”

The amounts paid by clubs varied:

• Manchester United was the most expensive club to police. The club paid £904,059 towards the policing cost of £1,447,501.
• Fulham cost £110,000 to police, after it paid £150,000 towards the sum of £260,000.
• West Ham`s cost was £300,000, after it paid £200,000 towards the policing cost of £500,000.
• Arsenal`s was £290,000 – it paid £600,000 of the total £890,000 needed to police its games.