Top 10 Most Arrested English Football Fans Revealed

The United Kingdom’s Home Office have revealed new damning statistics which show how many arrests have been made over the year, which accounts for the previous football season.

On Thursday morning, the Home Office released their latest and most up-to-date ‘football-related arrests and banning orders statistics’ for the 2022/23 season and a lot of English clubs have not come out of it looking great.

This time last year when the Home Office revealed similar statistics, it was claimed that 2,198 arrests took place at football games across England and Wales, which was by far the most since the 2013/14 season and also saw West Ham United come out on top with 95 fans being arrested.

Number Of Football-Related Arrests Is Down

12 months on and the Hammers, unfortunately, have once again topped this table, although there is an improvement on last season with 89 fans having been arrested last season, and they are closely followed by Manchester United.

The Red Devils saw 83 of their fans put in handcuffs by the police during the course of last season. After Man United, there is a significant drop off in the number of arrests with their arch-rivals Leeds United ranking third with 69.

A total of 2,037 arrests were made during the 2022/23 season, which is a good sign as it’s a slight dip from the previous campaign and a glimmer of hope that fans are beginning to calm down and think about their actions.

What makes it even better is that a record 45 million people attended men’s domestic and international football matches last season, which is a record, so to see arrests go down is very positive.

Chief Constable Mark Roberts, the head of UK football policing, has spoken to SkySports News about these statistics: “That 45 million is the highest attendance figure ever.

West Ham Fans Top The Arrests Table For A Second Year

“So that shows the vast majority of people going to football matches behave, and enjoy themselves. That’s important. We need to shake off this idea that this (football disorder) is an English problem.”

Gambling.com have taken this batch of data and dipped deeper into what it means by coming up with a top 10 list of the most ‘unruly’ football clubs and fans based on the number of arrests all the way back from the 2014/15 season up until the end of last campaign.

Birmingham City – 364 arrests

Man United – 301 arrests

Aston Villa – 286 arrests

Manchester City – 262 arrests

West Ham – 254 arrests

Millwall – 243 arrests

Leicester City – 231 arrests

Chelsea – 229 arrests

Arsenal – 224 arrests

Leeds United – 220 arrests

It’s interesting to see some Championship clubs make this list as they usually have a smaller following – excluding recently relegated sides – when it comes to matchdays, especially compared to the Premier League clubs, and Birmingham will be far from happy to be top of this table.