Doesn't seem to piss people off at the rugby. It's just weird to be treated this way. Especially when letting us drink at our seats would dramatically reduce covid spread risk.

Watching football in Japan you can sit in your seat and drink beer all afternoon. Every so often a young person with a large backpack will come by and offer to top up your glass (plastic) via a hose. If you are feeling hungry you can easily obtain a very good bento box (packed meal). All this with constant singing and very strong support.

When was the last major aggro in a ground? It is just not justifiable to treat football fans differently to fans of other sports anymore.

To my mind, the only real risk these days is fans lobbing plastic pints of beer. Just stick some nets up.

Reasons to treat football fans differently:

1) It is the only sport where celebrations have people bouncing up and down/falling into different rows/surging to the front. At best, you'd have kids covered in alcohol. Cricket, rugby etc. tend to be a bit of a cheer, stand up and applause because each 'score' doesn't mean anywhere near as much to the outcome of the game.

2) There are still a bunch of tits in football who see themselves as a firm and pop along for a scrap, and it only takes 30 idiots in a crowd of 40,000 to actually cause a fairly decent sized issue. No other sport has 'firms', however pathetic they may be these days. There was a fight in the stands at the Leicester Napoli game just last night.

3) The arrest record is, albeit decreasing, still too high comparatively and that's without alcohol during games. As another poster mentioned above - away fans in the home end is still likely to result in a punch up which isn't the case in other sports.

4) Football has the worst health & safety record for spectators of any mainstream sport in the UK by an absolute mile. That's now mostly historical, but that shadow is going to hold for a long time - just look at the challenges at bringing back safe standing. The Euro final doesn't help.

1. [Link] - no-one in a policy position wants kids covered in beer and it's guaranteed to happen up and down the country every week due to the way football fans celebrate vs rugby, cricket, tennis, athletics etc. fans.

2. [Link] fans throwing advertising hoardings last month - [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link] that's without drinking in the stands and with crowd segregation, and that's ignoring the clear risk of rival fans who have taken on loads of alcohol during the game meeting outside at full time. Plenty of examples of out of ground disorder.

3/4 - It's low on a per fan basis, of course it is, and there are government statistics available with a quick google search if you'd like to spend your evening on it. Problem is, it needs to be essentially zero for the desire to have a beer to outweigh any politician prioritising it over any possible risk to public safety. That's where the Euro final doesn't help, and with Hillsborough and safe standing showing that the shadows last a lot, lot longer than 10 years. For policy makers, Heysel is still relevant, will be for years to come, and it isn't going to change.

I'm not the culture MP, write them an email if you feel that strongly because complaining on here won't do anything, but objectively everything I have written in the original reasons is going to go against football fans drinking in view of the pitch and it being busy at half-time isn't going to be a good enough reason to reverse it - the answer will be if you're that worried about Covid, don't have a beer.