Banning Maccabi fans is not enough. Expel Israel from all sports
Maccabi Tel Aviv fans at Dam Square on the day of a match in Amsterdam, November 2024
Lewis Backon writes in The New Arab on 23 October 2025:
The messy politics of football have been on full display in Britain over the past weeks. Our campaign to have the Maccabi Tel Aviv vs. Aston Villa match cancelled is growing, even after the government has weighed in with lies and misinformation about why the fans were banned in the first place.
This controversy is not simply about this game, or the racist fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv team, but rather a picture into one of the ways in which Israeli football is implicated in apartheid and genocide, and the growing global movement to kick Israel out of international football.
As soon as we became aware of the fixture, PSC has been calling for the footballing authorities to stop it from going ahead, and to act to exclude Israel from international football. On 17 October, the Safety Advisory Group, backed by the West Midlands Police, banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from attending the match.
Leaks reported in the Guardian show that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans were banned because of police intelligence that recognised the threat of violence posed by the club’s fans. The grotesque narrative spun this past week by government ministers has fallen apart. The decision to ban the fans came not because, as Sports and Culture Minister Lisa Nandy said in Parliament, of a risk assessment “based in no small part on the risk posed to fans attending to support Maccabi Tel Aviv” but because of a recognition of the threat of violence posed by those fans.