It is five past three on Saturday afternoon and the teenage ultras of Hednesford Town are running late. They have arrived in Chester for their team’s National League North fixture and have hailed taxis, determined to make their presence felt at the ground. But word appears to have got out about their arrival. As one car turns away from the city’s charming half-timbered houses and into narrow residential streets, half a dozen local youths appear, haring round the corner in balaclavas. They try to attack the cab and chase after it as it pulls away. The smell of pyro is everywhere. As the taxi finally gets clear, the Chester gang stops in the middle of the road, shouting and gesticulating. One lad, no older than 16, pulls a long blade from inside his trousers and brandishes it.
The incident ended there and no one was hurt, though a police investigation has been launched. The match went off without trouble too and the Hednesford gang – known at home as the “schooligans” – were escorted safely back to the station by Cheshire police. It was just another weekend in English non-league football, where a wave of antisocial behaviour is causing concern and leading the UK Football Policing Unit (UKFPU) to declare it its “most important” priority. As the disorder continues, a question remains: how long will it be before teenage trouble-making becomes something more dangerous?
This year clubs from the south coast to the north-east have reported disorder caused by supporters under the age of 18, some seemingly as young as 10. In February, Aldershot Town experienced a series of disorderly incidents involving young people that included brawls outside the ground, behaviour the club described as “wholly unacceptable and [which] will not be tolerated”. In August, Enfield Town said they were “concerned and disappointed” by young fans at a fixture in Lewes. Two weeks ago, a Gloucester City fan was hit by a rock thrown by teenagers at Redditch United during an FA Trophy tie. Even Soham Town Rangers of the ninth-tier Eastern Counties League urged parents to ensure their children make “sensible choices” ahead of a match against Mildenhall Town.
Hednesford have experienced consistent trouble for a number of seasons and in August their owner and chair, Craig Gwilt, attempted to face it down. A rising tide of disorder was harming the club, he said, behaviour that included “pitch invasions, fighting, abuse directed towards players, missiles being thrown at opposition goalkeepers, flares entering the field of play and even interference with players’ water bottles”. He called on fans to improve their behaviour or risk permanently damaging the club. The plea was not immediately heard. Three weeks after Gwilt’s statement the club banned 20 young supporters from attending matches after there was action away at Telford.
Hednesford is a town of 19,000 people on the edge of the protected landscape of Cannock Chase. The town centre is neat and tidy, a well-maintained monument to the Stafford regiment at its heart. On the way to the ground you can get a pint at the Cross Keys where Dick Turpin reputedly rested his head. It’s a town seemingly at peace with itself and the club is at the heart of the community. But both are struggling to get to grips with an issue that leaves people scratching their heads.
This season the club have introduced measures to prevent under-16s from entering without an accompanying adult. There is also extra security on matchdays, ostensibly to manage car parking. These interventions appear to have contained any trouble in and around the stadium, but now gangs of up to 50 youths will gather post-match at a safe remove to look for trouble or, more likely, save their energy for an away fixture. Like the one at Chester, for example, when the schooligans were removed from one train for antisocial behaviour and were drinking alcohol throughout their journey up. Encountering such groups on a Saturday will be familiar to many rail passengers.
The schooligans, whose nickname was coined by Hednesford’s security staff, “baffle” the club’s chief executive, Marvin Robinson, who would rather be spending his time modernising a club that have had back-to-back promotions. “I’m not really sure I understand why it seems to be a trend,” he says. “It’s a wider social issue but what is it and what will it become? Is it a social media thing? Is it about notoriety or becoming known for something? The adult response online has been almost to normalise it. I don’t agree with that.”
Go on TikTok and the picture does start to become a little clearer. From aggregator accounts to individual semi-anonymised accounts belonging to the teenagers, there is a wealth of posts celebrating the behaviour of “top lads” who “mooch” to the ground before “running” the opposition out of town. Often set to a backing of euphoric electronic dance music with a layer or two of visual effects and captions such as “this weekend’s got me feeling like a little kid at Christmas”, the posts are celebratory and almost nostalgic in tone. In recent weeks TikTok has begun appending disclaimers to them that read: “Participating in this activity could result in you or others getting hurt.” TikTok removed an account named “NLN [National League North] gimps and chants”, when alerted to it by the Guardian, for contravening guidelines that do not allow content that glorifies violence.
The mythology of old-school football hooliganism appears to be well‑known among these groups, with references to the 2005 film Green Street commonplace. But the schooligans of 2026 don’t behave like the firms of the past. For a start they rarely, if at all, arrange to fight their rivals. Instead they use the mapping feature on Snapchat to alert opposition to their presence on the day, and take it from there. The concept of rivalry itself is fluid. In the West Midlands, for example, teens from Hednesford will band together with those nominally affiliated with Redditch or Cannock Town. When there was trouble recently at Hednesford’s fixture at Hereford, local police said the majority of disorder had been caused by Redditch fans chasing supporters from Solihull Moors. It isn’t just local either. Children as young as 12 have been detained in the north-west having travelled from the south coast, a distance of more than 200 miles.
The chair of Redditch, David Faulkner, is still dealing with the fallout from the Gloucester tie two weeks ago. He says the fluid set of alliances between ultra groups has created a “travelling circus” and that no one knows where it will turn up next. Branding himself “the non-League chair”, Faulkner has started posting videos on YouTube drawing attention to the disorder and calling for collective action.
“People think of non-league football as one man and his dog, but we need to catch up with the fact that it’s massive now,” Faulkner says. “Some clubs have attendances bigger than in League One but the regulations were put in place decades ago. We need that extra regulation, that support, so we can get the funding to put things like CCTV and more stewarding in place. Because the other way this could go is that [change only happens] when someone gets seriously hurt. I haven’t got metal detectors on our gates to stop kids bringing knives in. None of that stuff. I’d rather take action before something happens.”
The Football Association says the behaviour of fans is primarily a matter for clubs and relevant authorities but that it is working to develop policies that welcome young fans safely to National League grounds. The UK Football Policing Unit, meanwhile, is working alongside leagues and the Crown Prosecution Service to develop new policies around “youth risk”, which are likely to include an extra focus on education via schools and community work.
“It’s probably the most important area of football policing that we’re focused on,” says Mike Ankers, the deputy director of the UKFPU. “We are seeing children as young as 12 or 13 engaged in antisocial behaviour at best, but also actual violence and that’s up and down the country, with some travelling hundreds of miles. There comes a great risk and a great safeguarding issue with regards to that. In terms of our focus, we are making sure that we bring the right people together to have a solution. It’s not just the policing, it requires a more holistic view.”
Ankers says he supports Faulkner in speaking up on the topic and believes many more adults need to take responsibility. “These children need a strong adult role model,” he says. “I would very much question that if your 12-year-old is going out to follow football and is being detained, perhaps 200 miles away, then you need to look at how they’ve been able to travel and have those conversations. I think there’s very much a role for parental responsibility.”
The Hednesford schooligans, having been deposited on the platform at Chester by police, made their way home by train, only to find themselves stuck in a combination of Halloween revellers and national signal failure. Constrained, they hunched over their phones viewing footage from different teenage firms and discussed the day’s events. In the end, they concurred they had got the best of it. After all, said one: “What experience do you get from chasing a taxi?”
