ANDY BURNHAM wants to give football fans their beer back.
His argument is that if you can sit in a rugby stadium, at the cricket or at a concert with a pint in your hand, why shouldn’t you be able to do the same at a football match?
Because football isn’t rugby. It isn’t cricket. And it certainly isn’t an Oasis concert.
Football brings out the very best in people. It can bring strangers together, create friendships that last a lifetime and turn 50,000 people into one enormous choir.
However, it also can bring out the worst in people.
The chanting can be disgusting. The racism can be vile. The sexism can be ugly.
The tribalism that makes football so intoxicating when it is positive can become something altogether less attractive when it turns nasty.
Now add alcohol. What could possibly go wrong?
I know, I know. Most football supporters can drink a pint without suddenly becoming a hooligan.
Most people can consume alcohol responsibly.
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Most supporters are also perfectly capable of celebrating a goal without climbing on the roof of the stadium and setting fire to a corner flag.
But laws are not usually written around what most people do.
They are written around what happens when things go wrong.
The ban on drinking alcohol in sight of the pitch was introduced back in 1985, when football violence was a very real and very serious problem that needed tackling.
The legislation was part of a wider attempt to deal with the culture of hooliganism that had blighted the game.
Football has changed enormously since then.
Stadiums are safer. Crowds are different. And families are more prominent.
The game is now a global entertainment business, rather than the preserve of a particular sort of supporter.
And there have already been trials allowing alcohol in the stands in the women’s game.
While the Football Supporters’ Association and many clubs support looking again at the rules.
So perhaps the Prime Minister has a point.
There is also something rather appealing about his instinct to challenge old rules simply because they are old.
But football is still football.
The UK Football Policing Unit have warned that it would be “incredibly rash” to change the rules without proper examination and consultation.
They also point out that alcohol can play a significant role in violent and disorderly behaviour among a minority of football supporters.
The question should be whether the ban still works.
And if the answer is that it doesn’t, then prove it. Trial it.
Do it in selected stadiums. Do it at selected matches. Have proper monitoring.
Look at arrests, disorder, assaults, stewarding incidents and complaints.
See whether supporters actually drink more or whether they simply stop disappearing to the pub before kick-off and consume their beer more slowly.
Then we will have evidence, rather than ideology.
Because there is another problem with the idea — when someone scores a goal, what happens?
We already have fans jumping up, hugging strangers and losing whatever remains of their common sense.
Give every one of them a pint in their hand and, suddenly, the goal celebration risks becoming a beer shower.
Which, in England, would at least have the advantage of being warm.
Nobody should pretend football has exactly the same relationship with alcohol as a day at the cricket. It doesn’t.
Perhaps the blanket ban is no longer necessary.
Football has changed enormously since 1985 and the behaviour of the vast majority of supporters has changed with it.
But if we are going to change the rules, let’s not do it because a politician wants to be seen as the man who gave football its pint back.
Do it because the evidence says it is safe.
Trial it. Monitor it. Measure what happens when the beer is in the stands, rather than in the concourse.
Because if it works, everyone gets what they want.
And if it doesn’t, we may discover that the one thing football supporters really didn’t need was something else to throw when their team concedes.