Yet as it happened, fears about an orgy of racist violence proved unfounded. It may even be, as a couple of official bodies acknowledged privately, that the return of football helped mitigate the threat of further discord.

It might seem flippant to suggest that there’s no time to riot when you’ve got Coventry away, but the links between football and the far-Right can’t be denied. The English Defence League (EDL) emerged in March 2008 when a group calling itself the United People of Luton organised against local Muslims protesting the return of troops from Afghanistan. Common cause was found with various hooligan firms associated with football clubs, and by the summer there were EDL branches run by firms across the country.

This sporting symbiosis is not unusual, and certainly not unique to Britain. For those seeking to deploy bodies on the streets, hooligan groups are enormously useful: they are organised, have a clear leadership structure and are used to fighting the police. In 1997, for instance, when the mayor of Cacak, Velja Iljic, led the march on Belgrade that culminated in the toppling of Slobodan Milosevic, he was joined by the Delije, the hardcore fans of Crvena Zvezda who had formed the core of Arkan’s troops during the civil war. In Argentina, meanwhile, the barras bravas football gangs have essentially become muscle for hire.

Even so, it would be wrong to see Britain’s recent riots as eruptions of football hooliganism — or at least to see them purely as such. As Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said last week, while some of those who have been convicted have football banning orders, around 70% “have previous convictions for weapon possession, violence, drugs and other serious offences”.

Rowley spoke of “thugs and criminals”, but there is a sense of groups intersecting. The riot in Sunderland came the night before three skinhead bands were scheduled to play in the city at a “Blood and Honour” gig which, according to Hope Not Hate, drew neo-Nazis from as far away as Stoke-on-Trent. A sense of being left behind seems to play a part: according to the Government’s Indices of Deprivation, seven of the 10 most deprived towns in the UK have witnessed riots, although it may be that Right-wing groups have targeted those areas rather than the violence being a spontaneous outbreak of despair or nihilism. Covid vaccine-scepticism seems to have radicalised another tranche of society, sending them into the orbit of the far-Right.

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But it’s also the case that some find rioting intoxicating. Talking to hooligans in Eastern Europe for my book Behind the Curtain, a recurring theme was how many just enjoyed fighting: it wasn’t a by-product or a means to an end; the fighting was the point. In a Czech bar near Moscow Zoo, I met Oleg, a heavyset member of a Spartak firm in his forties. “The best thing,” he explained, “is fighting with police in other countries. You throw things at them and then they run at you and you fight.” This is also one of the key insights of the US academic Bill Buford’s 1991 book Among the Thugs: for some, violence is fun.

The easy mistake is to see far-Right attitudes as characteristic of football. Given how violence has largely been eliminated from stadiums, it’s debatable to what extent the remaining hooligan groups can even be considered a football problem. The yob fan was always a lazy and misleading stereotype, even in the days when stands were urine-stained theatres of violence, neo-Nazis a visible presence at games and racist chanting commonplace. Leeds United fans, for instance, ran a successful campaign against the National Front in the late Eighties, based around the fanzine Marching on Together. Today, Britain’s most influential national football campaign is arguably Kick It Out.

In reality, football has always been too big to be defined by one outlook alone. Rather, particularly in post-industrial provincial cities, it has become a signifier of a place’s identity. If, say, Sunderland or Leicester are thought of at all by the wider population these days, it tends to be in the context of football. Even large British cities are now best-known globally for football: ask a taxi driver in Beirut or Bangalore what he knows of Liverpool, and he’ll probably be aware of the Beatles but will almost certainly have heard of Mohamed Salah.

That gives football a curiously powerful role that still hasn’t been fully appreciated. Take the Indices of Deprivation: of the 12 most deprived towns in its list that have suffered riots — Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Liverpool, Hartlepool, Hull, Manchester, Blackburn, Nottingham, Sunderland, Stoke, Bolton — only Hartlepool has not had a Premier League club in the past two decades.

And perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. For all that it’s gentrified over the past 30 years, for all the glamour at the elite level of the game, for all the domination by overseas investment, football remains the great sport of the industrial heartlands. When there is nothing else, with churches, trade unions, even political parties in retreat, football becomes pretty much the only marker of identity. If you were an agitator wishing to gain ready acceptance in one of those towns, the easiest way would be to pull on the shirt of the local team.

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That has led to a curious subtext over the past fortnight: the attempts to control the message of the shirt. While a handful of the rioters in Sunderland were wearing SAFC shirts, the following day a far greater proportion of those who volunteered for the clean-up were wearing them. It’s an issue of which the MP for Sunderland Central, Lewis Atkinson, who turned up for the clean-up in an away shirt from the Seventies, is acutely aware. “When I got dressed that morning,” he said, “I just knew I wanted to wear that shirt. To me it stemmed from a determination to not allow a minority of thugs to own the most precious identity in Sunderland, to show that it was those of us sweeping away the shards of hate who were the true Sunderland.”

The point here is that while there is a relationship between football and the far-Right, there is a stronger relationship between football clubs and their local communities — even as top-level clubs increasingly come to feel like quasi-global franchises. And those communities, as the clean-up operations and the anti-racism demonstrations have shown, are opposed to the riots.

At 11.19pm on the night of the riots in Sunderland, Sunderland AFC posted a message on X condemning the violence, saying it did not “represent our culture, our history, or our people. Our great city is built on togetherness and acceptance, and Sunderland will forever be for all.” This was a club not as an inadvertent projection of regional identity, but one embracing its role as a community leader. And in doing so, it confirmed something important: the rioting is not a football problem, but football has a role to play in the aftermath.

Given its distinctiveness, it’s hardly surprising that the region has a long history of being run as a separate political unit. By holding out against Viking invasion, the Northern Anglo-Saxons established an Earldom of Northumbria that reached from the Forth to the Tees (before pressure from the Scots pushed its northern boundary south to the Tweed). Not only was this territory topographically encapsulated — “between the brine and the high ground and the fresh stream water” — but it was also defined by its sheer distance from London and the centres of royal power. The armigerous families who then controlled the medieval North East, such as the Percys and the Nevilles, had an unusual degree of independence within an English polity that had centralised much earlier than its European neighbours.

To a historian, therefore, there is something very satisfying about the recent news that the Government has approved a “devolution deal” to create a new “North East Mayoral Combined Authority” with an elected Mayor. This is an important milestone in the evolution of what is arguably England’s most well-defined region, as the new entity will cover the historic counties of Northumberland and Durham — the land from the Tweed to the Tees — and the cities, within them, of Durham, Sunderland and Newcastle upon Tyne.

The hope is that the North East will thrive under a unified political leadership; and the region’s history suggests this optimism is not unfounded. In the Early Medieval period, the Prince Bishop of Durham presided over his Palatinate from his palace at Bishop Auckland like a Rhineland Fürstbischof. He had the powers of a king to hold courts, raise armies (to defend the border against the Scots) and even mint his own coinage — with silver Durham pennies issuing from Silver Street by the River Wear. This quasi-independence created a cadre of educated clerks to manage the county palatine’s legal, financial and administrative affairs. The presence of this proto-civil service contributed to both local economic development — the Prince Bishops were enthusiastic participants in the coal trade — and perhaps even the unusually high levels of literacy in the far North of England.

This was a sort of English devolution, avant la lettre, and meant that by the 17th century, County Durham was the only part of England which returned no members of parliament. The first MPs for Durham were elected in 1675, a full 410 years after a comparable cathedral city such as Lincoln; the Prince Bishop only returned his powers to the crown in 1836. So there is a sense that the governance of the North East was only settled around the same time as the United Kingdom itself was forming. Some excitable Northumbrian patriots (probably including me) might even consider us to be the fifth nation in the union.

But if the region’s political independence was dwindling, its economic independence was growing. The early modern period saw the temporal power of the Prince Bishops eclipsed by that of the coal barons who grew fantastically rich from the collieries of Northumberland and Durham. By the 18th century, control of the northern coal trade had fallen into the hands of a cartel of wealthy families known as the “Grand Allies”, whose price-setting so irritated the City of London that they nicknamed them “the Newcastle Parliament”.

This oligarchic and proto-corporatist approach to conducting business was typical of the North East, and would recur in the 19th century, when a handful of plutocratic industrialists dominated the civic life of the region, and wielded almost feudal power: men such as the armaments tycoon Lord Armstrong, the shipbuilder Sir Mark Palmer, or the great ironmaster Sir Lowthian Bell. Studying the region for his report on “Industrial Tyneside” in 1928, the sociologist Henry Mess observed that “the feudal tradition is strong in Northumberland”, “and there is not the sharp divorce between it and the new industrialism which is found in most areas”.

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In many respects the Trade Union barons who emerged in the 20th century to challenge the oligarchs could be similarly feudal — especially Durham miners’ leaders such as John Wilson, Peter Lee and Sam Watson. And yet the Trade Unions in the North East achieved much for their members — not just better pay and conditions, but in their pioneering work on housing, schools, sanitation and care for the elderly. Organisations such as the Durham Miners Association achieved something approaching a welfare state while William Beveridge was still in short trousers. For as John Tomaney has argued so cogently, “County Durham thrived when it had the power collectively to help itself”. History offers something of a blueprint to a region thinking anew about how to exercise local power to improve the lives of its people.

A word that was often depicted on miners’ banners in shimmering gold like the Name of God was “nationalisation”, and yet nationalisation turned out to be a mixed blessing. For as much as it delivered gains in living standards — which my grandparents from the Northumberland coalfield spoke about with wonder for the rest of their lives — it inevitably led to centralisation. It left the North East vulnerable to capricious and parsimonious Westminster governments. Not only that, it disempowered the civic and associational institutions that had once had the confidence to tackle the scourge of poverty in old age, or build something as beautiful as South Shields Town Hall, where the debates “had the importance of those in Cicero’s Senate or Pitt’s House of Commons“.

The North East has been hammered by austerity, with funding cuts to councils of 79% since 2010. These have come close to undermining the functioning of local government altogether. But municipal leaders themselves have come to recognise that the principle of devolving power matters almost as much as the funds that come with devolution.

Reading about the latest development, I was particularly delighted (and not a little surprised) that the seven North East councils have managed to overcome the parochialism and local rivalries that have stymied municipal coordination in the region. “They have a beef that goes back centuries”: what Tony Soprano once said of the Balkans could be said of Newcastle and Sunderland. From the English Civil War, during which they took different sides, to the previous attempt at regional governance — the short-lived Tyne and Wear County Council, which was perceived to favour Tyneside excessively — mistrust and bad feeling have for too long percolated from the football terrace and message board to the political sphere. Despite evidence that shows that people in the North East have the greatest sense of belonging to their region than anywhere else in England, we’ve memed ourselves into thinking that Tyneside and Wearside are so totally incompatible that we can’t present a united front — even as the North of England’s other great conurbations have surged ahead with their own elected mayors.

That’s not what the North East wants anyway, some would argue. The shadow of a 2004 referendum hangs over any debate over devolution in the region. Rejected by almost 78% of voters, it’s often held up as evidence that there is no appetite for devolved power. But it took place in a different time, when there was a Labour government in office that was spending big in the region. The cabinet was stuffed full of North Eastern MPs, including the PM himself. And the Yes campaign was vague and complacent, while the No campaign tapped into a burgeoning anti-politician rhetoric, as well as the fears in the south of the region that this would be an assembly run from, and in the interests of, Tyneside (fears exploited skilfully by a trainee political Svengali from County Durham called Dominic Cummings, a key figure in the No campaign).

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The question remains, then, as to whether this new mayoral authority will receive a public mandate. But the North East only ever thrived under local political leadership. As a distant outpost of the over-centralised British state — still reeling from the effects of the First World War, let alone the Second — it has been declining for over a century. For all the boosterism about being the only region with a positive balance of trade, the North East is now the poorest, unhealthiest and unhappiest region of England. It regularly tops the charts for “deaths of despair”, with a suicide rate twice that of London; 38% of local children live in poverty; and GDP per capita has plummeted in the North East from 93% of the national average in 1981 to 73% by 2017. No other English region has suffered such decay.

But something is stirring in the North. A phalanx of City Region “Metro Mayors” are establishing new centres of independent power and influence, while attempting to move beyond the belief that Westminster is both the cause of — and the solution to — all our problems. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that whatever the problem, it is always someone else’s fault. Especially in politics,” wrote Jamie Driscoll, one of the likely contenders for the North East mayoralty, recently. “What, though, if there are some genuinely difficult problems to solve?”

There certainly are. Labour Together’s recent “Plan for National Infrastructure” argued that Britain’s “urban hinterlands, small cities, towns, coastal and rural areas… are experiencing forms of economic ‘undevelopment’”. This would present a daunting prospect to any government, but could an elected mayor for the lands between the Tweed and the Tees catalyse a Northumbrian renaissance?

Maybe. Certainly, the nationalising and centralising tendencies of the British state over the past century have disenfranchised the regions of England that might look enviously at the thriving German Länder — with their networks of regional banks and vocational training centres — and wonder what went wrong. For there’s a prize to be seized in the North East. The region that arguably did more than most to carbonise the planet might lead the way in decarbonisation, and create meaningful work. It might even rediscover the traditions of bottom-up social and economic development, and become one of the great heartlands of technical innovation, associationism, self-help and co-operation. Never again, we must hope, will talented locals like Dr Fiona Hill — recently installed as Chancellor of Durham University — be told that “There’s Nothing for You Here”.

Yet it’s seldom explained why the Durham miners should have been so hostile to the idea of European integration; or, indeed, why the opinion of such a body was seen to be decisive in matters of state. Even though the Labour Government was to fall in October of 1951, the six years of Attleeism had represented the triumph of a distinctively conservative socialism that prevailed in the North East coalfields, and did much to shape Labour’s agenda in the 1940s.

Clement Attlee’s 1945 cabinet included several prominent North East MPs, including the Chancellor, Hugh Dalton (who sat for Bishop Auckland), the martinet Home Secretary James Chuter Ede (MP for South Shields), and Jack Lawson of Chester-le-Street as Secretary of State for War. In fact, Lawson, a former miner, was described by John Bew in his biography of Attlee as the Labour leader’s “personal mentor” and “closest friend in politics”, who gave him invaluable insight into the trade union movement and its northern heartlands.

What made the unions of the Great Northern Coalfield so distinctive was how cautious and non-confrontational they were – in sharp contrast to other areas, notably South Wales and Yorkshire. Much of this was shaped by a history of crushing industrial defeats going back as far as the 1830s – when the army had been deployed in support of strike-breakers – and then by a generation of sober, respectable Methodists who ran the Northumbrian miners’ unions and preferred conciliation and the pursuit of incremental progress, to what they saw as futile clashes between labour and capital. With nationalisation of their industry in 1947 the miners of Durham and Northumberland thought that their patience had been justified, and the grim industrial struggles of the last 100 years had been won.

Full-employment, decent housing and free healthcare created a sort of paradise in the coalfields – what Nye Bevan called working class “serenity”. The miners had the added satisfaction that their jobs were seen as fundamental to Britain’s greatness — as Ernest Bevin said to them at the time: “give me a million tons of coal and I’ll give you a foreign policy”. For even in the depths of austerity, Labour squeezed welfare and NHS budgets to spend 10% of GDP on defence – a huge boon to the shipbuilders and coal-miners.

All this made the North East a stronghold of the pro-NATO “Old Labour Right”, embodied by men like Sam Watson, the all-powerful and fiercely anti-Communist Durham Miners’ Leader in the 1950s, who even invited the American ambassador to the Durham Miners’ Gala (allegedly at the instruction of his CIA handlers). There was simply no way that the miners’ unions would risk jeopardising their hard-won influence over the economic and political direction of the country – and the improved living standards that this had brought – by submitting to the control of a supranational body in Strasbourg.

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Indeed, the Attlee government’s socialist agenda has obscured its old-fashioned patriotism, even its nationalism. As David Edgerton has written, after 1945 Labour built “not only a new Jerusalem, but a new Sparta” and British society in the era of the hydrogen bomb, National Service and relentless war movies was militarised to an almost unprecedented degree, and this contributed to a definite “masculinisation of the public sphere”.

This suited the North East of England perfectly, where a deeply patriarchal and macho culture was expressed through heavy industries – chiefly coal, shipbuilding and armaments – and a well-paid Northumbrian Stakhanovism was celebrated in local culture and rewarded with beer in the pubs and working men’s clubs; the ubiquity of these water holes did much to shape the enduring perceptions of places like Newcastle as one of the world’s great party cities.

But the “arsenal economy” of Tyne and Wear was merely the latest manifestation of a centuries-long militarism that had long defined this frontier region; it had found its most recent expression in the record-breaking response of North East England to Kitchener’s call for volunteers in 1914, and by the fact that the formidable 50th (Northumbrian) Division were the most experienced combat unit in the British Army in the Second World War.

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Now if the North East’s Brexit vote was as much an expression of discontent with the status quo as it was about attitudes to the EU (although we shouldn’t assume that C2DEs can’t understand complex political questions just as well – or as badly – as the ABC1s), then the changing nature of work itself, especially male work, might be at the heart of it. For despite the death and danger of coal-mining and shipbuilding these were highly skilled professions, and some of the most romantic and rewarding ever undertaken by British working classes.

My grandfather was a miner, and although he’d seen men die underground, and was present when his marra lost an arm, he adored the mental stimulation and the sheer thrill of mining for coal under the North Sea. This was not like making hats, or lace, or jute-sacks or any of the other myriad trades that British towns once specialised in. Nothing could compare to the excitement and satisfaction of winning a new coal-seam or launching a battleship.

But not only that, these trades provided a real sense of masculine purpose, of camaraderie, and even a sense of playing one’s part in a heroic national narrative. As much as the economic decline that followed the decline and death of the pits and shipyards, the North East still hasn’t got over the psychic loss of these industries.

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For all that the traditions of Northumbrian Stakhanovism might live on at the production lines at Nissan – where union officials describe the work as “very hard and physically demanding,” for the men (and it is largely men) who spend eight hours on their feet at an unrelenting assembly line – there is a sense that many find this work as alienating as Charlie Chaplin did in Modern Times. As one Sunderland Remain voter pointed out (to those who think the North East should have been more grateful for the status quo): “the truth is that people in Sunderland need more from life than hard-to-come-by work in car plants. [Nissan is] a hard way to earn a living and it leaves many men bitter and disillusioned.”

As true as this is, political solutions seem as elusive as ever. Community life in the pit villages might’ve been incredibly strong – even claustrophobically so – but that world’s reliance on a single male breadwinner and rigidly enforced gender roles was undone by the pincer of economic and social liberalism.

It’s interesting that female perspectives might not be as nostalgic for this lost world as men seem to be, and one of the most clear-eyed takes on all this has come from Bridget Philipson, Labour MP for Houghton and Sunderland, who expressed a certain impatience with “various manifestations of communitarian reinvention, from ‘community organising’ to ‘Blue Labour’ — all variations on the premise ‘that it is possible to deal with cultural and industrial change by wishing it hadn’t happened.'” Well it has happened, and the North East still hasn’t got over it.

Dan Jackson is the author of The Northumbrians: The North East of England and its People. A New History, published by Hurst (2019)

This is the opening to the Netflix series Sunderland ‘Til I Die. It charts Sunderland’s disastrous 2017-18 season in the Championship, English football’s second tier, as they suffer another relegation and drop down to League One. The series’ message in these opening moments is clear. In Sunderland, football is a religion.

Released in December, Sunderland ‘Til I Die garnered critical acclaim. Many saw it as a more authentic portrayal of life at a football club than All or Nothing, the fly-on-the-wall series about Manchester City released by rival streaming service Amazon Prime a few months earlier. The contrast between the two is striking, not just artistically, but politically.

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Central to the Sunderland series’ success was the decision to profile lifelong supporters of the club alongside its players and managers. We see fans from all walks of life, united in the passion that they feel towards their football club. Sometimes, this goes beyond what casual observers would recognize as normal football fandom. During one particularly poor performance, a frustrated fan attacks the camera. Meanwhile, in the opening to another episode, we see an undertaker discuss the ways in which fans have incorporated Sunderland Football Club into their funerals. The show’s title, lifted from one of the supporters’ signature chants, is to be taken literally.

One fan, taxi driver Peter Farrer, becomes as much a protagonist as the players. Driving through the city, he reflects on Sunderland’s once dominant shipbuilding industry – everyone, he claims, has a relation who’s either worked in the shipyards or the pits. It’s no coincidence that the show’s theme tune is a melancholic ode to these hardworking ancestors (‘Shipyards’ by the Lake Poets). Those jobs are gone.

Which is in part why Sunderland AFC is about more than football for its fans. If it were to go under, Farrer says, “it would be another nail in the coffin, just like the shipyards and the pits.”

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In focusing on the city as much as its football club, the documentary frames the struggles of the latter amid the backdrop of the former’s post-industrial decline. And in doing so, it becomes clearer why football holds such a special place in the hearts of the people of Sunderland. Simply put, while manufacturing remains central to the city, football is one of the few markers of their identity that has stood the test of time.

In Sunderland, like many other old industrial towns and cities across Britain, the alienating impact of the loss of key industries is keenly felt. 40% of the city’s residents are not working due to sickness – which is more than 60% higher than the rate nationally. It’s easy to see how the hope and pride gained from Sunderland AFC is so vital, and why the failings of the club are all the more galling. In a BBC radio phone-in featured in the series, one fan says that he’s “absolutely fed up” with the club’s form. “Fed up, like we all are in the North East.”

In good times, football clubs have the ability to fill that void, literally giving a city’s inhabitants something to shout about, and offering one of the few remaining public arenas in which people can come together and enjoy a shared experience. Father Lyden-Smith’s sermon recognises the sense of belonging that a football club can bring to a community. Scenes of his parishioners at church are intercut with shots of thousands of supporters at the Stadium of the Light. While the two can go hand-in-hand, the club also offers a more secularised form of communion.

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There is also a more literal dependency. It’s no coincidence Farrer ranks it alongside the shipyards and the pits, nor that Father Lyden-Smith draws such a direct link between its success and that of the city. When their relegation to League One is confirmed, and talks of restructuring begin, there is a palpable sense of anxiety – the many local people who make up the club’s backroom staff fear they’ll be out of a job. The club is one of the city’s biggest employers.

That helps explain why much of the fans’ anger throughout the show is directed towards Ellis Short, then club owner, for his mismanagement and seeming abandonment of the place. The last episode details a takeover by new owners, with its bittersweet conclusion suggesting that increased investment will lead to an uptick in fortunes on the pitch.

That could turn out to be the case, with Sunderland currently pushing for promotion from League One and enjoying record attendances. However, in documenting this transition, what the show inadvertently makes the argument for is greater fan involvement in the running and ownership of football clubs.

In Germany, the 50+1 rule means that private investors cannot own more than 49% of a club in the Bundesliga, thereby maintaining the tradition of German clubs being non-profit members associations. The result is football clubs that are much more accommodating to fans’ interests, particularly when it comes to ticket prices.

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While a direct application of that rule in the UK may prove impossible, or even unwanted, it is a model that marries the social and economic value of these clubs as vital local institutions – institutions that, in struggling communities, provide so much more than entertainment.

In contrast to Sunderland ‘Til I Die, Manchester City’s documentary has very little to say about the city and its fans, focusing instead on the club’s star players and legendary Spanish manager. Yet while fans may be delighted with the club’s success on the pitch, that doesn’t mean all Mancunians are happy off of it. Local action groups have protested what they see as suspect property development deals between the council and Manchester City’s owners, and meetings organised by Greater Manchester Housing Action and Amnesty International Manchester, have drawn a connection between such deals and the city’s wider housing crisis.

And the club is rumoured to be one of many flirting with the idea of a European Super League. If realised, this could result in Manchester City leaving the Premier League in order to play matches across Europe. Even in success, the corporatisation of football can distance clubs from the localities that they were designed to represent.

Where Sunderland’s club was threatened with obsolescence, Manchester’s is flirting with relocation. Given the significance of football clubs to a place’s identity – to the fabric of local communities – we should be wary of letting them suffer the same fate as previously pivotal industries. Regardless of the success new ownership can bring, football clubs are too important to our social fabric to be left entirely to the benevolence of billionaires.