Football Banning Orders: How Newcastle Fans End Up With One

For most people who follow Newcastle United, the football banning order is something that happens to other people. It belongs to a category of things read about rather than experienced, filed alongside pitch invasions and pyrotechnics as the behaviour of a small and unrepresentative minority. That perception is broadly accurate, but it obscures how wide the net has become and how straightforwardly an otherwise law-abiding supporter can find themselves on the wrong side of it. A banning order is not reserved for organised violence. It can follow from a single bad decision on a single afternoon, and its consequences run for years.

The orders exist under legislation dating from the late 1980s, tightened repeatedly since, and they are among the more unusual tools in English law. They restrict where a person may go and what they may do, often for years, and in a significant proportion of cases they are imposed without the person having been convicted of anything at all.

There are two routes to an order, and only one involves a conviction.

The first and most common route follows a conviction for a football-related offence. If a court convicts someone of an offence connected with a regulated football match, it is required to consider making a banning order and must make one if it is satisfied that doing so would help prevent violence or disorder at or in connection with football matches. In practice this means that a conviction arising from a match day very frequently comes with an order attached, and defendants who assume the fine is the end of the matter are often surprised.

The second route is a civil application, usually made by the police, without any conviction. A magistrates' court can impose an order on complaint if it is satisfied that the person has at any time caused or contributed to violence or disorder in the United Kingdom or elsewhere, and that an order would help prevent trouble at regulated matches. The standard of proof and the evidence involved differ from a criminal trial, and material such as police intelligence, body-worn footage, social media activity and previous incidents can all form part of the picture. This is the route that catches people who assumed that because they were never charged, nothing further could happen.

The behaviour that qualifies is broader than fighting.

The stereotype is of organised disorder between rival groups, and that certainly qualifies. But the range of conduct that can be treated as football-related is considerably wider, and includes things that a supporter might not think of as serious at the time. Throwing objects onto the pitch, entering the playing area, possessing pyrotechnics or smoke devices inside a stadium, drunk and disorderly behaviour on a match day, ticket touting outside the ground, and racist or indecent chanting can all lead to prosecution and to an order.

The scope has been extended in recent years to reflect how football-related trouble has changed. Online racial abuse directed at players can now form the basis of an order, which was a deliberate response to the volume of abuse footballers receive after matches. Possession of class A drugs in connection with a match has also been brought within scope. Both changes mean that conduct taking place away from the stadium, and in the case of online abuse potentially from a sofa hundreds of miles away, can result in the same restrictions as a fight outside a turnstile.

What an order actually does to your life.

The core restriction is a ban on attending regulated football matches in England and Wales, which covers Premier League, EFL, national league and international fixtures. Orders commonly also prohibit the person from being within a defined distance of a stadium during a specified window either side of kick-off, which in Newcastle's case affects a substantial area of the city centre on match days given where St James' Park sits.

The requirement that causes the most practical disruption is the surrender of a passport. When England or a British club is playing abroad in a designated match, order holders must hand their passport to a police station for the duration of the control period. This applies regardless of whether the person had any intention of travelling, and it has caught out people with unrelated holidays or work trips booked in the same window. There is a process for applying for an exemption, but it is not automatic and it needs to be started early.

Orders also usually require the person to report to a police station at specified times, to notify the police of changes of address, and to comply with any additional conditions the court considers necessary. Breaching any of these is a criminal offence in its own right, punishable by imprisonment, which means a civil order obtained without a conviction can very quickly produce one.

The length is fixed by law, not by discretion alone.

Where an order follows a conviction that results in an immediate custodial sentence, it must run for between six and ten years from the date of release. Where the conviction does not result in custody, the range is three to five years. Orders made on complaint without a conviction run for between three and five years. There is a mechanism to apply for termination after two thirds of the period has elapsed, but the court is not obliged to grant it and will look at conduct during the order.

Clubs enforce separately.

A banning order is a court matter, but clubs also operate their own sanctions, and the two are independent. Newcastle United, like every club, can withdraw membership, cancel season tickets and issue its own stadium ban following an incident, and it can do so on the basis of its own investigation without waiting for a court. Someone acquitted at court may still find the club has taken action, and someone who was never arrested may still lose their season ticket.

What to do if you are facing one.

Get legal advice immediately, and do not assume that pleading guilty to a minor matter to get it over with is the cheap option. The order is frequently far more disruptive than the fine, and the point at which to argue about whether one should be made is at the hearing rather than afterwards. Legal aid may be available depending on circumstances, and solicitors who deal regularly with football cases understand the arguments that carry weight, particularly around whether an order would genuinely help prevent disorder.

If an order is made, read it carefully and diarise every date it contains. The overwhelming majority of breach prosecutions involve people who forgot to surrender a passport, misjudged an exclusion zone or missed a reporting requirement rather than people who deliberately turned up at a match.

Share your thoughts.

Are football banning orders a proportionate way to keep grounds safe?