British politicians have actively endangered the safety of Aston Villa supporters and the local community in Birmingham

UEFA is entirely at fault for the fact that the city of Birmingham had to make a decision on whether to allow away supporters at Aston Villa’s next Europa League home match.

Villa face Maccabi Tel Aviv on the first Thursday of November for what will be their fourth league phase match. It’s a fixture that comes with serious implications and should have been treated seriously as a result.

Instead, the draw that rang alarm bells from the second it spewed out of the European governing body’s fixture bot has become a circus. When order collapses around Villa Park next month, it’s the club, the supporters and the communities of Aston and Birmingham as a whole who’ll have to deal with the consequences.

There are specific circumstances that explain why Birmingham’s Safety Advisory Group (SAG) had to consider whether to allow access to away supporters. They range from matters of genuine geopolitical import to the slightly more trivial question of where Israel plays international football.

Those circumstances are not a joke. They’re not a toy. The meetings that led to the current situation will have been taken seriously, and that’s been lost in the shambolic discourse after it was announced that visiting fans wouldn’t be admitted.

The SAG decision was based on the advice of West Midlands Police and probably isn’t for any single reason. Away supporters weren’t banned for their own protection or for the furtherance of some antisemitic agenda.

Multi-agency partnerships like SAG do not, cannot, work like that.

The decision will have been made on safety grounds in the fullest definition. Irrespective of the background behind any disorder and the nature of any retaliation, it is a disgrace that the recommendations of the police and SAG, which we know to be based on various intelligence, have been disregarded without insight by the nation’s most senior politicians.

Sometimes it’s smarter to mind your own business

The decision was the decision. I have an opinion on it but my opinion doesn’t matter. That’s the point. I don’t have all the information, nor the remit to keep people safe at and around a football match, nor the responsibility for public money, nor the risk of taking the blame when something happens.

Keir Starmer, Kemi Badenoch and the utter pondlife sticking their oars in this weekend don’t have any of that either.

So, while I’m irritated beyond belief that it’s resulted in the decision being attributed to the club and the city and has unleashed a barrage of slander upon them, that’s not actually the biggest problem with how this has played out.

The Prime Minister and Culture Secretary have inserted themselves into the this issue on political grounds. It’s disingenuous, opportunist, populist and entirely unacceptable. Badenoch is despicable anyway. There was no surprise that she got involved in an appalling manner that was entirely in character.

These lazy, knee-jerk, cheap, political interjections have exacerbated the issue and brought other players into the game.

The repercussions of these politicians’ interference belong to them and we’ll be saying it long and loud when it bears its poisonous fruit, because, regardless of the parties under the microscope, this was already a match identified as unsafe by the authorities.

By reacting in the way they have, Britain’s politicians have actively chosen to place Villa supporters and local people in Birmingham in more danger.

Whatever inputs went into those SAG meetings, what came out of them was a clear decision.

It was bound to rile plenty of people on social media but to have the most senior figures in government working overtime to overturn that decision, to choose to ignore what they were told was a threatening set of combining factors, is borderline criminal.

Take whatever side of the war you want. Agree or disagree with the original decision. Approve or not of football having to close its doors to some teams and not others.

But political overreach of this nature is shameful, irresponsible and dangerous. The match was a powder keg with or without away fans in the ground. It was decided that it wasn’t possible to manage it safely in the first place.

It certainly isn’t now. Villa aren’t to blame for that. Villa fans aren’t to blame. Birmingham isn’t to blame. Football isn’t to blame. But we’re the ones who’ll get hurt and told it was our fault.

What happens now is squarely on Starmer. I hope it was worth the political kibble.

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