"Judge us on our behaviour, not on out-of-date perceptions." That's the message Chief Constable Mark Roberts is carrying to police forces in Canada, the United States and Mexico ahead of this summer's World Cup — and he's got the arrest numbers to back it up.
Roberts heads the UK Football Policing Unit, and he's spent recent months trying to separate the reality of modern England supporters from decades of television-fuelled mythology. The task, apparently, is harder than it sounds.
The numbers don't lie
Zero England fans arrested in Qatar. Fewer than 10 in both Russia and South Africa. Twenty-four in Brazil — and most of those were caught scalping tickets. This across four consecutive tournaments where up to 14,000 England supporters made the trip to each one.
That is not the profile of a fanbase that needs its own containment strategy. Yet Roberts has found himself repeatedly explaining to North American law enforcement that English fans singing loudly and drinking heavily is not, in fact, a threat assessment situation. "This isn't the Super Bowl or baseball," he told officers. "When England fans are singing, drinking and boisterous — this is normal. It's not in any way a precursor to disorder."
Around 15,000 England fans and 10,000 Scotland supporters are expected to follow their teams to group stage games in the United States. England could advance to Toronto for the knockout rounds, which is where Canada comes into the picture.
Budget cuts and a skeleton crew
The UKFPU would normally send a dozen or more officers to a tournament of this scale. They deployed 40 to Euro 2024 in Germany. For this World Cup, they're sending three — because the US refused to fund the officers' expenses, and the Home Office has cut the unit's budget by 10 per cent. The Boston Police Department has offered to house the British officers in their police academy, which is a generous gesture but also a telling illustration of how stretched the operation is.
Whether officers travel to Canada at all depends on results. "If we end up playing in Toronto, then we'll have the detailed conversation," Roberts said.
The 2,471 people currently subject to football banning orders in the UK — court-imposed penalties that require passport surrender when England plays abroad — remain the other side of this picture. Roberts said nearly all of those with passports have complied. That compliance matters: it's the mechanism that actually keeps the small minority of genuine troublemakers at home.
The Football Supporters' Association has set up an England Fans' Embassy to help travelling supporters with logistics and local laws, with leader Thomas Concannon noting that fans' main concerns have been ticket prices and travel costs — not ICE agents at stadiums, despite warnings from some civil liberties groups in Britain.
The bigger policing headache, as it has been for years, remains domestic. Late kickoff times in the UK mean pubs staying open longer, and the UKFPU has historically logged several hundred arrests across Britain during World Cup tournaments. The 2026 time zones will make that problem worse before it gets better.
