Abstract
In the case of the 2020 Union of European Football Associations European Championship in men's football (‘Euro 2020’), this article investigates stakeholder perceptions on the ‘policing’ of fans. On a European-wide scale, the policing of fans is a contested topic. Meanwhile, the policing and security efforts required for sport mega-events like Euro 2020, uniquely planned to be staged in 12 different countries, require years of planning and enormous resources. Adding to this, the Championship's timeline was prolonged following the coronavirus disease-2019-related event postponement. Drawing from original insights from documentary research and qualitative interviews conducted before the postponement, this article argues that stakeholders strongly advocated for a communication and dialogue-based approach to fans. More specifically for Euro 2020, consistency in the policing approaches across all 12 countries was highlighted by stakeholders as being of paramount importance for fans’ security perceptions. The study thus extends existing insights into football policing and the wider understanding of security and policing in the present-day world.
Highlights
This article employs a sport mega-event (SME) as an entrance to understand broader trends related to ‘policing’ and ‘security’ in present-day society
This study aims to examine stakeholder perceptions of, and outlooks on football policing in the current climate deploying Euro 2020 as a case
The article’s findings build upon, and empirically extend the arguments sustaining that policing of European-wide has become increasingly convergent in styles and decompartmentalized in terms of security knowledge, activities and actors (Tsoukala, 2009) within broader globalization discourses
Summary
This article employs a sport mega-event (SME) as an entrance to understand broader trends related to ‘policing’ and ‘security’ in present-day society. Faced with an array of threats, risks, and unknowns, SMEs like the Euro 2020 call for complex security and policing operations that take years to coordinate (Giulianotti & Klauser, 2010) and require transnational collaboration (Boyle & Haggerty, 2012). Notwithstanding, this event’s pre-planning was temporally prolonged: on March 17, 2020, Euro 2020 was provisionally postponed to June 2021 following the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (Parnell et al, 2020). It was confirmed that the event’s name would remain ‘Euro 2020’ (UEFA, 2020a) and, crucially, that it would preserve its multi-host format (The Guardian, 2020)
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