As soon as images emerged of the England fan with the flare up his bum in Leicester Square, the race was on to track him down. Inevitably, it was the Sun wot won it. The culprit was unrepentant. Charlie Perry, a 25-year-old roofer, told the paper he regretted nothing, having drunk at least 20 cans of Strongbow and “banged a load of powder” – three grams of cocaine – before sneaking into Wembley to watch the final.
Perry’s relaxed tone reveals a lot about the mindset of the modern football fan, in a world where drugs are as everyday as booze. Cocaine is football’s fandom secret fuel, the only viable way for thousands of men to drink for 12 hours and still have enough energy to organise a mass break-in. As well as the flare incident, Perry appeared in another viral video that day, tapping powder out on to his hand and hoofing it up his schnozz, to adoration from the crowd around him. He wasn’t alone. Friends who were at the game say Wembley was awash in the stuff. Everywhere you looked, England fans were dipping keys into little white bags and applying them to their snouts. Sky Sports caught one enthusiast live on Wembley Way.
It was the same last time round, during the World Cup in 2018. As well as the endless videos of Three Lions edited into scenes from film and TV, there were dozens of clips of England fans doing drugs in imaginative situations: on top of lamp-posts, at the end of slip and slides, on public transport, with the same regard for consequences as if they were drinking an Evian. It’s not just England fans. The landlord of a pub near my home in north London tells me that on match days, he reckons that 30% of his customers are on coke. “In seven years of operation I must have wiped away £5,000 worth,” he says, adding that the figure is higher among 25- to 40-year-olds. In the post-Covid UK, cocaine has become another way to put two fingers up to the ever-more controlling government.
Cocaine’s prevalence among football fans means it comes naturally to the surface during a major tournament, but it’s not unique to the sport. The drug’s use in Britain is at epidemic levels. On social media, accounts with tens of thousands of followers openly celebrate drug culture, with endless references to being “on the packet” or “getting a bag in”, and a supply of drug-related puns about “stripes” and “bumps” and “beak”. The drug’s days as an expensive treat for people in the media or the City are long gone. Prices have been falling for decades, the result of Albanian gangs consolidating supply lines, like a kind of murderous drug Amazon. When Met commissioner Cressida Dick announces a crackdown on “middle-class drug users”, the implication is chic dinner parties in Notting Hill or Canonbury. The reality is that it’s the whole middle-class, broadly defined as huge swathes of the British population.
I doubt anyone knows the true scale of the problem. For obvious reasons, drugs statistics are unreliable. The punters don’t want to admit to breaking the law, the police don’t want to reveal the meagreness of their enforcement, if they even know it themselves. If the government were confronted with the size of the situation, there might be pressure to do something about it. Wherever you stand on the issue, all this brazen cocaine use is more evidence of the insanity of UK drugs law. Billions of pounds of taxpayer money is spent failing to stop taxpayers giving billions of pounds to organised crime. Legalisation might not be the answer – Perry might not have been so blase if he had been partying in Singapore or Saudi Arabia – but the current system is unsustainable.
The Sun gave Perry the full sanctimonious treatment. The Telegraph and the Mail ran disparaging columns. There’s no excusing the worst excesses of last Sunday, the violence and abuse that saw Harry Maguire’s father getting hurt, Italian fans beaten up – and thousands of England fans had what ought to have been a memorable evening ruined by thugs. All the same, there’s a whiff of hypocrisy about the priggishness from publications that otherwise claim to be the champions of liberty. There’s no evidence Perry hurt anyone on his bender. The sesh is a noble tradition in British history, running from Hal and Falstaff through to Freddie Flintoff on his pedalo. I can’t be alone when I admit that my first reaction, on seeing the flare photograph, was to laugh. When hippies hop the fence at Glastonbury in the hope of communal and chemical euphoria, they’re thought of as loveable rogues. When England fans do it, they are derided as hooligans.
There has been talk of a new roaring 20s, as the country lets off the steam, not to mention furlough savings, built up over 18 long months. Not everyone wants to slump in front of Only Connect with a glass of malbec. Perry conceded that the flare incident might have been “reckless”, but also pointed out he was too pissed to feel anything.
“It was the biggest day of my life,” he said. “There were no rules that day. All I know is that I loved it all. I was off my face and I loved every minute.”
You can appreciate the sentiment, even if you disagree with his methods.