Unacceptable tragedy chanting by football fans is getting worse – it needs stamping out

There was a moment midway through the second half of Sunday’s FA Cup quarter-final when the ear-popping cacophony of sound that had thundered through Old Trafford all afternoon took on a malevolent tone. With their team leading 2-1, the 9,000 Liverpool fans went into gloating mode. “Manchester is full of s----,” was the insistent chant. They knew what was coming. And indeed almost immediately from the Stretford End the response arrived: “The Sun was right, you’re murderers.” This was not a few isolated cries. This was a wall of noise.

It is a chant only ever voiced when Liverpool and Manchester United meet, a song born of a rivalry as fierce as any in the game. It is a reference to the story printed on the front page of the tabloid in 1989 which parroted a line fed by South Yorkshire Police that drunk Liverpool fans were responsible for the Hillsborough disaster. Never mind that official inquiries have subsequently exposed the headline as a horrible lie, never mind that those United fans who had seen their team at FA Cup semi-finals there were more than aware of the dangers lurking at Sheffield Wednesday’s then decaying ground, such tragedy chanting remains a central part of the repertoire at games between the sides. Something which, if anything, over the past five years, has only grown in intensity, voiced by a new generation of supporters who were not even born when the disaster happened.

In football fan circles, whataboutery is a favoured defence mechanism. And whataboutery colours everything about the United-Liverpool rivalry. For those United supporters chanting on Sunday, much of the motivation will be the collective memory – passed down in fan folklore – of Liverpool followers mocking the Munich air disaster, the sort of noise that soundtracked meetings between the clubs when terrace violence was at its peak in the mid-80s. The motive behind that chant was the same as that driving Sunday’s stuff about Hillsborough. For the Liverpool Reds back then, the purpose was to sneer at the phoenix from the flames narrative which defined United. For their current Manchester counterparts, the idea is to taunt the cliche of Merseyside’s adherence to self-pity: “Always the victims,” they chant, “never your fault.”

The question is, given its foul taste, what can be done to expunge it from the game? Both clubs have frequently requested that their supporters desist from such material. Ahead of the last league meeting between them, Jürgen Klopp and Erik ten Hag issued statements together encouraging vociferous support, but asking for the tragedy stuff to stop. It did not work. After Sunday’s game, the FA announced it is to make inquiries. Greater Manchester Police arrested a United fan who was seen on social media apparently miming someone being suffocated in the direction of the Liverpool followers. But it is unlikely such actions will make any difference. Indeed it is not ridiculous to predict when the two teams meet again in the league next month, the chants will be as loud as ever. Perhaps, because of the outside effort at restriction, even louder.

It is the same when attempts are made to stop Spurs fans chanting the word ‘Yid’. Jewish groups may well frequently insist it is anti-Semitic, the club might beg its followers not to do it, but still it happens with monotonous regularity. Like when Celtic meet Rangers, the more the authorities argue against sectarian bickering, the more it goes on.

So at United against Liverpool. For those involved, the louder the official dismay, the more it becomes a point of principle, of defiance, of collective opposition. “We’re Man United, we’ll sing what we want.”

This is what football fans do. While there is no moral equivalence with what was happening at Old Trafford on Sunday, at Luton Town on Saturday, the home fans jeered at Nottingham Forest’s supporters that “points deduction it’s coming for you”. If any club’s followers might be expected to demonstrate sympathy for rivals under threat of such sanction, it is Luton’s, whose own experience is one that shows the dire consequence of points removal. But no. Here the chance to mock was too good to miss.

That is what fans do. They hide behind the collective to deliver the kind of verbal assault they would never attempt in isolation. Which means the only thing that works against it is internal dissuasion. Cut off the collective camouflage; make such stuff unfashionable. It was that, rather than official action, that removed the racist bile that clouded the game in the past. Fans telling their fellow supporters that this was not on was what ultimately cleaned up the filth.

Not that it is easy. Peter Hooton, the man behind the influential Liverpool-based fanzine The End, recalls back in the eighties trying to explain to groups of his fellow supporters why it was not a good idea to chant about Munich and being told that if that was what he thought then he obviously preferred the other lot to his own team. Sometimes the resistance to his logic became physical.

But decent United fans need to keep doing the same. Tell their fellow Reds to sing about how we have won the lot and we are never going to stop. But cut out the tragedy stuff. Ninety-seven people lost their lives at Hillsborough in 1989 and 23 at Munich in 1958. That really is not material for sneering.

Red on Red, a history of the Manchester United/Liverpool rivalry, by Phil McNulty and Jim White is published by Harper North.