The World Cup, that great global festival of joy and despair, has claimed its first casualties of this tournament. Four dead in Mexico City. Not on the pitch but in the streets, where the beautiful game meets the brutal realities of crowd psychology in a city of 22 million souls. As the news broke, a curious thing happened: the British police forces found themselves being held up as a model for how to prevent such tragedies. It is a strange moment for us to be the ones giving lessons in crowd control, given our own history of disasters from Hillsborough to the current concerns about the safety of our stadiums. But here we are, on a continent where the line between carnival and catastrophe is often paper thin.
The deaths in Mexico City have a particular horror. They occurred not in a stadium, where security is tight and paramedics are on standby, but in the sprawling public squares where fans gather to watch on giant screens. These are the unofficial fan zones, the places where the city breathes and lives its football. And it is exactly this kind of informal gathering that British policing has been quietly refining, moving away from the old model of containment and control towards a lighter, more adaptive presence. It is a shift that has not been without controversy; there were howls from civil libertarians when the approach was first trialled at Premier League matches. But the results, in terms of reducing serious incidents, have been hard to argue with.
The tragedy in Mexico is a grim reminder that when crowds become crush points, the margin between a happy roar and a screaming panic is almost invisible. What makes the British model work, say the experts, is a combination of things: better stewarding, more permeable barriers, and a willingness to let the crowd move and breathe. There is also a cultural factor. The British fan base, while often raucous, has become accustomed to a certain level of order. We queue. We respect the lines. This is not a universal trait. In many parts of the world, the jubilant surging of a crowd is seen as part of the spectacle, not a threat to it.
And yet, as we hear these plaudits for our constabulary, we must ask ourselves what this says about our own society. Are we simply more risk averse, more willing to trade a little chaos for a little safety? Or have we lost something in the process, some vital spark of collective joy? The dead in Mexico City are a reminder that football is not just a game; it is a social phenomenon that can, in the wrong conditions, turn lethal. And for all our British pride in our orderly fan zones, we should remember that the best policing is the kind you never notice, the kind that allows people to lose themselves in the moment without ever losing their lives.
