Football violence will never be a thing of a past – West Ham need to get a grip of their new stadium, and fast

Of the many concerns and apprehensions that were voiced over West Ham’s Great Leap Forward, no one foresaw that the move to the newest, most modern stadium in the country would land the club back in the 1980s.

The view from the pitch, the overpriced lager, the general sanitised feel of the place on the march from Westfield shopping centre – they were the things fans were worried about. Spacious seats, smart toilets, ice cream and popcorn for sale: these were not the signifiers that would suggest a return to fighting in the stands which have marred almost every match the club have played there.

But the truth is that the past never fully went away, and it never will. Not just for West Ham, but for most clubs, and all around the world.

There will, in all likelihood, always be young men for whom organised fighting is a form of recreation. For several decades it organised itself around football, and to a certain extent still does.

Removing it has never, and will never, involve removing that primeval instinct, which is beyond the wit of any police force. It is a process of restriction. Almost every football ground in the country, however large or small, however rundown, has cultivated large amounts of knowledge and experience in segregating supporters, in channelling some this way, some the other way.

There is also some luck involved. The behaviour of some England fans in Marseille over the summer looked like a return to a half-forgotten past. In fact, that it had been absent for so long owes much (but not all) to the fact that England had not qualified for Euro 2008; the 2010 and 2014 World Cups were in far away countries and greatly spread out across South Africa and Brazil; and Euro 2012 was also hosted across two large countries, with England fixtures in Poland and Ukraine separated in some cases by four- or five-hour flights.

Now, West Ham find themselves playing in a stadium designed for athletics not for football. It is also a stadium that is extremely hard to police for football. It is a wide open bowl in a wide open park. To properly secure it would require 1,000 stewards or more. And who would pay for it? West Ham does not own the stadium, the taxpayer does (West Ham, in its defence, won a tender process to buy the stadium outright, which was subsequently thrown out in a legal challenge that benefited no one).

Competitive sport, and football more than most, does bring out base instincts in those that have them. Who can forget the Chelsea fan, a middle-aged, middle-class insurance executive, who lost his job last year for screaming outrageous comments about “Scouse scum” in a filmed interview he knew would be posted online?

This is not to excuse the people throwing chairs, and coins, and punches. They are, of course, the masters of their own destiny. Their actions are illegal, and they deserve the punishment that will hopefully come their way.

But West Ham United must find a way, and quickly, to steward these primeval urges, or the consequences will be extremely serious.