Domestic violence surges after a football match ends

REGARDLESS OF WHICH team wins the European Football Championship on July 11th, three things are certain. The first is the large viewership in sports bars and homes: 600m watched the final of the tournament in 2016. The second is the soundtrack. Italian fans will urge their team on by singing the melody to “Seven Nation Army”, as they have done since the World Cup in 2006. English fans will chant “It’s coming home, it’s coming home…” The third given is alcohol consumption. Ahead of the semi-final between England and Denmark on July 7th, the British Beer and Pub Association estimated that 10m pints would be sold on match day. During the game itself, they reckoned around 50,000 drinks would be purchased every minute.

A fourth behaviour has also become grimly predictable: a surge in domestic violence after the final whistle. A study in 2014 by academics at Lancaster University looked at the number of reports of abuse to a police force in the north-west of England during three football World Cups. They found that such reports increased by 26% when the national team won or drew, and by 38% when the team lost (other studies suggest abuse is worse when England wins). A new study, published on July 4th, goes much further. Ria Ivandic, Tom Kirchmaier and Neus Torres-Blas of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) have analysed 523,546 domestic-abuse incidents reported to the Greater Manchester Police between 2012 and 2019, alongside detailed information on 780 games played by Manchester City and Manchester United in that period. They have been able to disentangle why intimate partner violence increases after games and to create a timeline of when women are most at risk. (The changes are “driven exclusively from male perpetrators on female victims”, the authors observe.)

In much discussion of this scourge, researchers and activists often refer to the “heightened emotion” involved in supporting a team. “Show Domestic Abuse The Red Card”, a promotional campaign around Euro 2020 led by local councils in England, suggests that the “hope, excitement, frustration and ultimately disappointment” of a match can push perpetrators to take out their anger on their partners. The authors of the CEP study suggest that is inaccurate. They used betting data to gauge pre-game expectations and categorised the results into “upset loss”, “predicted loss”, “close loss”, “upset win”, “predicted win” and “close win”. They did not find that upset losses precipitated an increase in domestic abuse, compared with other types of result. Nor did incidents increase immediately after the games finished (when emotion of any kind would be highest). They also looked specifically at the outcomes of high-stakes football clashes—knockout matches, derbies, finals—and did not find that the probability of violence was affected.

Instead, the increase in violence after fixtures is entirely driven by alcohol, the authors argue. There is no statistically significant increase in domestic abuse by people who have not been drinking. (The data from Greater Manchester Police includes such information on the perpetrator’s behaviour from the victim.) During the two-hour span of a game, when attention is focused on the players and on drinking beer, abuse decreases. In the first four hours after the match is over, it starts to pick up again, reaching a peak ten to 12 hours after kickoff. That means for a match that begins at 3pm, the authors write, the uptick in calls to the police and helplines would begin around 7pm, with the busiest period between one and three in the morning.

The problem is neither new, nor unique to football, nor to Britain. In the late 1980s researchers examined the frequency of admissions of women to hospital emergency rooms in Virginia around the time of American football games. They found that “gun shots, stabbings, assaults, falls, lacerations and being struck by objects” increased when the Washington Football Team (formerly the Washington Redskins) won. A study of rugby-league competitions in Australia found an escalation in domestic and non-domestic assaults in the evenings of contests and concluded that “shifting the focus of major sporting events away from alcohol is likely to reduce the magnitude of these effects”. Other researchers have observed a surge in arrests for vandalism and disorderly conduct, misdemeanours associated with alcohol consumption, that coincide with sporting contests.

There are some straightforward solutions to this ghastliness. The authors suggest that a “considerable amount of domestic abuse” could be mitigated by arranging football fixtures on weekdays or later in the evening. This would prevent all-day binges (including after matches), which the authors reckon are responsible for most of the additional violence. Restricting the sale of alcohol at sports venues, as France does, would also help. The Euro 2020 final on Sunday will inevitably be accompanied by lengthy drinking sessions. Whatever the outcome of the match, some women will suffer.