Ian Hart: Some football chants are horrific, but should the CPS be spending their time making them criminal offences?
It has been revealed that Leeds United, last winners of the Football League Championship before soccer was reinvented in 1992, have contacted the Crown Prosecution Service in attempt to make fans chanting about notorious serial sex offender Jimmy Savile a criminal offence.
For the uninitiated, Savile was born and bred in Leeds, and many readers will recall when many in the said city lined the streets for the aforementioned individual’s somewhat garish and over the top funeral service.
And in recent years visiting fans to Elland Road have taunted the home supporters with the chant “Jimmy Savile, he’s one of your own”.
Surely in this currently horrible world, haven’t the CPS got more pressing matters to be dealing with?
For many long-time football fans it’s all a little bit hypocritical, because for years some Leeds fans have sung songs about the Munich air disaster, the Heysel and Hillsborough tragedies, and even, on occasions, the Holocaust.
On the flip side of the Munich chants, when legendary former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly died in 1981, at the following game at Manchester United there were a number of inflatable skeletons on show at the Stretford End, mocking the sad event.
Some Palace fans, for their part in recent years, have sung a quite horrible and slanderous song about a well loved Albion player.
Quite simply, for the time being at least, it is still the game of the masses – and supporter bases go right across the demographic. In fact some might comment that most football crowds in the UK contain every stage of Charles Darwin’s pattern of evolution.
Unfortunately we’ve even got a few idiots at the Albion.
However much lobbying Leeds make to the legal authorities, even if it did become a law, can you imagine West Yorkshire Police attempting to nick 1,000 or so fans en bloc when they fire up the chant at Elland Road? Anyone can bang on about the need for change, but ultimately you won’t stop certain fans singing songs, however offensive they might be. They’ve been doing it for decades and will continue to do so.
If they did stop them, congratulations – they will have sanitised football, the missing chapter from George Orwell’s 1984.
Leeds have to be realistic and have to acknowledge that their fans are, as previously mentioned, historically not totally innocent.
Whether the moral majority like it or not, Savile and his back-story remain infamous, and this song may well continue to be sung.
Perhaps Leeds should accept that and go on an all-out campaign to help local charities in their area who look after victims of sexual abuse – make something positive from a horrendously negative situation.
And let the CPS get on with going after real criminals.