Day: October 28, 2025

UK FOOTBALL’S ‘DARK AGES’

Maccabi Tel Aviv’s sorrowful ban from Aston Villa plunges football into darkness.

By Jonny Gould

A chunk of my background, both personal and professional, has been washed away.

I didn’t think football was supposed to hurt like this.

Banning a mere thousand or less Israeli football fans from Villa Park for a Europa League tie is a cause for deep sorrow.

Emily Damari, who was held hostage by Hamas for more than a year before being released in January, and who supports football teams Maccabi Tel Aviv and Tottenham Hotspur, said “I am shocked to my core with this outrageous decision to ban me, my family and my friends from attending an Aston Villa game in the UK…..Football is a way of bringing people together irrespective of their faith, colour or religion, and this disgusting decision does the exact opposite.”

But not just for me, an Aston Villa fan through my Holocaust-surviving grandfather who setup his typewriter shop bang next to Aston Station on the Lichfield Road, but for this generation of Villa fans and those to come.

Why?

Because football is supposed to be a thrilling, entertaining source of pride; not a dispensary for anger and shame, of imported hate and community breakdown.

Is the Beautiful Game still beautiful?

My generation and those that came before had the best of it. We enjoyed league title wins, European glory and trips to Wembley.

Birmingham Ban. This is a photo Europeans would prefer NOT to see in their media hence the ban on Israeli supporters to the upcoming match in Birmingham between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv. The ban has reignited concerns about ethnic tensions and antisemitism in Britain.

But it would have meant nothing without the communal joy and camaraderie it spawned.

And for this Jewish kid, it was a high voltage plug-in to the prevailing, sometimes overwhelming culture of my city beyond my upbringing.

So, accepting they were of me, that by the age of 21, I was reporting my beloved team from the press box for the radio station covering the West Midlands and Shropshire.

When I returned as a national reporter to the old Trinity Road box years later, the stewards, dear old men, bowled me over with their effusive welcome back. Like that beautiful Archibald Leitch-designed stand, their unvarnished spirit is gone.

Taking a Stand. An age gone by with fans walking towards the old Trinity Road Stand. Now the ‘stand’ is against supporters from Israel, for “security concerns.”

So, this is my own very personal sadness about what football and the city that helped shape me has become.

The English game shunned politics, now it’s buried by it.

Snarling Islamist boycotters – an elected MP is trashing what was good here. For what?

They think it’s all over. It is now.


Imans Message – Show NO Mercy.  More than half the population of Aston, one of Birmingham’s most ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. In a shocking video, a Birmingham Muslim Imam, Asrar Rashid, expressed what would befall any fans coming from Israel: “We will show no mercy toward Maccabi Tel Aviv fans who will arrive in several weeks for the match against Aston Villa.”




About the writer:

Jonny Gould is a television and radio presenter on Talk and host and producer of Jonny Gould’s Jewish State podcast.
At the end of 2018, he launched a podcast in response to the unchecked and sudden rise of UK antisemitism. In a short time, “Jonny Gould’s Jewish State” (on Apple, Spotify and elsewhere) has grown into both a snapshot and library of the changing temperature for one of the west’s oldest and continuous Jewish communities.
As a board member of the Israel Diaspora Trust, Jonny’s also regularly briefed off-the-record by influencers and decision-makers across the US, Israel and the UK.





While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).