German police said today they arrested more than 20 soccer fans - most of them German and English - amid unrest overnight in the city of Frankfurt following the World Cup opening matches.
Three German and three English fans were taken in after a brawl close to the city's central station.
Police said they had also arrested 15 people in another part of the city following brawling in a restaurant, among them were five Germans, one English and two Polish fans.
In a third incident in the region four more people were taken in, two of them German.
A spokeswoman for Frankfurt police said the arrested had been drunken fans and not, as initially reported, hooligans.
"They were simply soccer fans who had been drinking too much," she said, declining to be named.
"I don't think last night was anything out of the ordinary. It's rather a positive result for an event of that magnitude."
British police, in Germany to support the hosts' security effort, were awaiting more precise details before commenting.
An English Football Association spokesman could not comment on the specific cases, which follow a trouble-free World Cup stay in Japan and a quiet Euro 2004 in Portugal.
But he added: "Obviously, as a general issue we have been calling, since we qualified, for fans to carry on the positive behaviour we showed in Portugal (Euro 2004) and Japan (World Cup 2002).
"We need to be good guests in someone else's country. "Players and fans alike are ambassadors for our country and the overwhelming majority take that on board and take it seriously."