Send the crisp eaters instead

They complain these days about the lack of atmosphere at many leading English football grounds, especially Old Trafford, the reluctance of the crowd to `sing their hearts out for the lads' and display a bit of emotion, rather than eat crisps and expect to be entertained, as Alex Ferguson put it recently.

True enough, Old Trafford, at weekends in particular, has become drearily lifeless, not because the crowd has become immune to success, simply because a large section of them are, well, too busy eating crisps, expecting to be entertained, talking on their mobile phones while all the time confusing Nicky Butt with Paul Scholes and Dwight Yorke with Andy Cole.

I remember going to see a baseball game at New York's Shea Stadium a few years back and while mightily impressed by the facilities, organisation and sheer comfort of the place I found it all a bit soulless, to be honest. Most of the crowd was too busy eating hot dogs to pay much attention to the game, but then it's a different sporting culture. Or it used to be.

Old Trafford is fast becoming Shea Stadium and that, of course, is exactly what the club's money-men want. After all, non-native day-trippers - who seemingly find it a lot easier to get match tickets these days than the natives - are much more likely to spend silly amounts of money in the Megastore buying David Beckham wallpaper for their nephews and Roy Keane slippers for their grannies than the lads from Salford. They drink in the local pubs, the non-natives drink Manchester United beer and eat Manchester United crisps at the ground. Can you hear the cash registers sing?

The thing is, though, perversely, it is precisely because of that change in the make-up of the crowd (caused by football coming in to fashion again, better stadia and greater security, amongst other reasons) that it now feels a whole lot safer going to English football games than it ever did in the past. Back then you sometimes felt you were entering a war zone, so nasty, ugly and menacing was the atmosphere, especially when the opponents were old enemies.

If David Mellor thinks that the behaviour of Leeds fans (as witnessed by TV cameras) was acceptable, then perhaps it's no big surprise that trouble continues to follow English football supporters wherever they go.

The price has, of course, been huge because many local and life-long supporters of clubs like United, Arsenal and Chelsea have discovered their seats have been taken by crisp-eaters on corporate trips. The presence of the latter, though, for all their faults, has helped dilute the ugliness and even if they'll never sing or get excited there's a reasonable chance they won't spit on you or threaten you with a Stanley knife. If they did they'd probably lose their jobs in the City.

True, in the old days not every lad between the ages of 16 and 40 was there to fight with opposing fans and racially abuse players, but sometimes it felt like most of them were, especially when they were tanked up on lager. Now what does that element do to entertain themselves? They follow their clubs to Europe, safe in the knowledge that most of the crisp eaters are at home and they can drunkenly maraud through city centres insulting the locals and looking for a bit of trouble.

I saw one such group of English supporters in action in Turin a year ago and while, by their own standards, they were well behaved by any reasonable definition most of them were drunken yobs who spent much of the afternoon in the build-up to the match abusing locals going about their business and attempting to demonstrate just how hard they were. It was depressing stuff.

On Thursday's Channel Four News, John Williams, the director of the Football Research Centre in England, spoke about the trouble in Istanbul between Leeds fans and Galatasary supporters and the different accounts of what happened. "On the one hand we heard that English fans were being boisterous, noisy, loud, doing the kind of things that are expected and predictable; the Turkish view was that the English were being disrespectful, abusive and behaving without dignity - they're both describing the same behaviour and that's one of the problems. Our expectations of what goes at football are quite different from those in other countries and some of the things we think are acceptable are seen locally as highly provocative."

David Mellor, former Tory minister, professional Chelsea fan and former "lifelong" Fulham supporter, didn't give quite as thoughtful an analysis of the trouble when he appeared on BBC's Newsnight on Thursday evening. He absolved Leeds supporters of all blame and rounded on the Turks, using the kind of language that will cause those in charge of security at Euro 2000 (where the English and Turks may meet up again) a sleepless night or two.

The Turks, of course, have nothing to be proud of after the events of Wednesday night, but if Mellor thinks that the behaviour of Leeds fans (as witnessed by television cameras) was acceptable, then perhaps it's no big surprise that trouble continues to follow English football supporters wherever they go. The last thing those lads need is an establishment voice reinforcing their sense of injustice. Maybe they should just all stay at home next time and give their tickets to the crisp eaters.