Manchester police chief criticises decision to ban Maccabi fans

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Asked by presenter Nick Ferrari what would have happened had Maccabi fans been due to come to Manchester rather than Birmingham, Watson said: “As with, you know, clubs from all over the world all the time, I think banning generally is problematic, both practically and tactically.”

He appeared to criticise the operational decisions taken by West Midlands Police, who claimed that the decision to back a ban on fans of the Israeli team was taken “based primarily on information and intelligence and had public safety at its heart”.

Watson continued: “For the most part, we would simply police the match in accordance with the intelligence picture. That is to say, if there was good intelligence, as there frequently is, that there was a problematic crowd, we would scale up our resourcing and we would police it accordingly.”

Pressed on whether that meant that away fans would be able to attend the game, he responded: “That would be our default position”.

His comments come as the leadership of West Midlands Police are coming under mounting scrutiny over the decision to ban the Israeli fans.

Though they cited the behaviour of Maccabi fans in Amsterdam last year as being a key reason for their backing of a ban, both the JC and Sunday Times have cited official Dutch accounts of the disruption at the Ajax game which undermine their assessment.

Yesterday, Conservative MP Nick Timothy and Labour MP Joani Reid criticised West Midlands Police for repeating strongly disputed figures about the threat posed by Maccabi fans in a letter to the Home Affairs Select Committee.

On Monday, during an urgent question on the topic in Parliament, shadow home secretary Chris Philp said that Israeli fans were banned “under the threat of antisemitic mob violence and a highly politicised anti-Israel campaign.

“West Midlands police cited concerns about the Tel Aviv fans based on a previous game in Amsterdam, but the Dutch police have now shown that those concerns were completely false.

“There was no mob of 500 fans targeting the Muslim community in Amsterdam. In fact, many Maccabi fans were themselves attacked. Nobody was thrown in a river, apart from one Maccabi fan. The Maccabi fans were not skilled and organised fighters; that was just made up.”

The Conservative frontbencher said that the force’s chief constable should resign “unless they have a good explanation” for the apparent discrepancies.