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Diverse football crowds could aid World Cup bid
More women and supporters from ethnic minorities are going to games says report
Diverse Premier League Football crowds are helping to rid the country of its reputation for hooliganism, and could prove vital in the run-up to England's World Cup bid.
Research conducted by Populus found that 19 per cent of fans going to Premier League games in the 2008-09 season were women and eight per cent were black or from ethnic minorities. The same percentage of the country's population was listed as ethnic in the 2001 census.
It also emerged that the sport has become more family friendly and more children are attending matches. According to the survey 13 per cent of season tickets now belong to young people.
The research also included a poll of 2.3m fans who attended matches over the past five years. That found 33 per cent were women and 16 per cent black or from an ethnic minority.
The Premier League said the diversity of crowds attending its matches was a "powerful advert for English football", and something that it hoped would not go unnoticed by the Fifa delegation assessing the country's World Cup bid.
Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore said: "Football is increasingly attractive to more sectors of society, which is fantastic because it was only a generation ago that people used to look down their nose and see it as a rather narrow preserve."
However, English fans still have an unwanted reputation for violence. Even though there were no instances of English hooliganism during the 2010 World Cup, the problem still exists among some die-hard fanatics.
Less than a fortnight ago two members of the Tottenham firm 'Yid Army' were jailed for 15 months and banned from attending football matches for six years after being part of a 20 strong mob that smashed up a pub used by Arsenal's firm, 'The Herd'.
But the problems in England, certainly inside the grounds, are now much less pronounced than those in the rest of Europe where racism and violence still occur.
Liverpool and Aston Villa players have been subjected to sustained abuse, some of it racist, from fans at European games this season and at the weekend Lokomotiv Moscow fans shamed Russia by 'thanking' West Brom for buying mixed-race striker Peter Odemwingie, who was born in the Soviet Union but plays for Nigeria. They expressed their gratitude with a banner that read 'Thanks West Brom' and featured a picture of a banana.
Russia will hope their bid to host the 2018 World Cup won't be damaged by such racist behavior, after Fifa President Sepp Blatter acknowledged how impressive their campaign had been. ·
