Who pays for hooligans?
22 January 2025
Every professional football league in Europe has specific football matches where the supporters of the two opposing clubs hate each other to the core. The result is so-called "high-risk games", which include an extraordinarily high police presence to avoid confrontation and violence between the fans. In Germany, 1 out of every 12 games is considered such a high-risk game.
But now, Germany's constitutional court seems to have pushed for a revolution in German football. It ruled that the cities where these games are played can force the clubs to contribute to the policing costs of high-risk games. The decision comes nine years after the German football league sued the city-state of Bremen for an invoice they passed on to the league for a high-risk game in the city.
 | Jasper Bennink Other states in Germany will likely follow suit. Hamburg has already announced its willingness to take Bremen's practice as an example. However, on a European level, the biggest football leagues have not yet found common ground on the issue: while France and Italy have had their football clubs pay their share for high-risk games since 1995 and 2014, respectively, England and Spain still have the state cover all football-related police operations. |
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