When Aston Villa were drawn to play Maccabi Tel Aviv last August, tensions around the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza were running high nationally.
There were demands from some in the Birmingham community that the Israeli team should be banned from playing or their fans barred from attending.
In October 2025, a group made up of local officials, including the police and council, and tasked with making decisions about security at public events, decided the game was high-risk and banned away fans.
It was a decision Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and others condemned, saying the role of the police was to ensure all football fans could enjoy the game without fear of violence. “We will not tolerate antisemitism,” he said.
If it was not for some dogged reporting by journalists, including at the Sunday Times, and hard questioning from MPs the truth would never have come to light.
There had been problems with Maccabi Tel Aviv before, including clashes between the club’s fans and Dutch supporters at a match in Amsterdam in 2024.
As reported by the Guardian, West Midlands Police said intelligence gathered from a Dutch police report showed Maccabi fans had thrown Muslims into a river, that 5,000 Dutch officers were needed to police the game, and Israeli fans had intentionally targeted Muslim communities.
In fact, Dutch police told the Sunday Times it was not all true.
Wednesday’s report confirms inaccuracies and exaggerations despite being there “a significant level of disorder” around the fixture. It was, in fact, a Maccabi fan who was found in the river and 1,200 officers were deployed. It also found that Israeli fans did not intentionally target Muslim communities, though some individual Muslims and pro-Palestinians were.
There were reports of hundreds of Israeli fans pulling down Palestinian flags and chanting against Arabs – but Dutch police evidence recorded just three incidents involving flags, and also instances of Dutch locals ambushing and attacking Israeli fans.
Earlier this month, West Midlands Police Chief Constable Craig Guildford was called to give evidence to the home affairs select committee for a second time. MPs had been less than impressed with his first appearance.
Guildford denied there was any conspiracy to ban Maccabi fans.
But MPs were astonished to discover that information gathered before the scheduled match in Birmingham contained “high confidence intelligence” about “elements of the community in [the] West Midlands wanting to ‘arm’ themselves'” and target Maccabi fans.
Asked why this information had not been made public, the chief constable said to the consternation of MPs that it was because “he wasn’t asked about it” before.