I used to go out twice a week to beat people up

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Riaz Khan is a respected family man and teacher. He was quiet and unassuming and, raised in Leicester by his Pakistani father and Afghan mother, he stayed out of trouble. Until he was 17. 

Growing up as a minority in the eighties was tough and Riaz felt out of place. The National Front was stirring up trouble with its nationalist and anti-immigration stance and Enoch Powell's infamous 'rivers of blood' speech was being used to stir up hate.

So when Riaz, now 58, saw the notorious hooligan firm ‘The Baby Squad' confidently stroll past him one day, he was transfixed.

Desperately wanting to be part of their gang, he started to mimic their look, dressing in Fila, Pumas and bleached jeans, finished off with a perm. His plan worked and Riaz was quickly recruited into the Squad, a firm inadvertently named by a police officer who was struck by its teenage members' youthful appearances, and affiliated with Leicester City FC. 

Remembering his first away trip with the Baby Squad, Riaz tells Metro: ‘Getting the train to Birmingham with 70 yound lads, I can remember everyone looking at us – it was a defining moment for me.

‘We were always divided on issues of race and social status in those days, but in the casuals culture [the term for fans who rejected the traditional football supporter look of team coloursand opted instead for designer brands] everyone was the same.

'People were noticing me now, not because I was Asian, but because I looked like part of this group of people I was with. So I had this sense of pride and belonging. As soon as we got to the train station, it just kicked off.' 

Riaz was arrested before he could even throw a punch, but the police involvement had the opposite effect, further galvanising his involvement with the group. He was bundled into a riot van and put in a cell for a cooling off period where he had plenty of time to bond with other members of the firm who'd been nicked. 

Although released without charge, Riaz had got a taste of violence – and he liked it.

Being part of the squad was like a drug and he was soon following the team every match day, spending his Saturdays and Wednesdays getting into fights. 

'It was just about being a bunch of lads and kicking off with another bunch of other lads that wanted to fight you,’ Riaz explains. ‘It was like having a scrap in the playground, on a bigger scale. Sometimes it was scary, sometimes there were a couple of bruises her and there, but it was nothing major. There was no killings or murders.’ 

It was also about toppling the status quo, he insists. The multicultural Baby Squad was about squaring up to the hatred of the National Front. ‘The leader was a Black lad, who was leading a bunch of white lads into the battlefield.' 

The roots of modern-day football hooliganism go back to the 1970s, when groups known as 'firms', would organise aggressive confrontations with rival supporters. The violence came to a head at the 1985 European Cup Final in Brussels between Liverpool and Juventus, when 39 people died.

Crackdowns came with increased policing, the introduction of football banning orders and more emphasis on crowd management. 

By the 1990s the tide of violence started to recede, but hooliganism remains to this day, bubbling beneath the surface. In the 2022 to 2023 football season – the latest figures available – there were 2,264 football-related arrests under Schedule 1 of the Football Spectators Act 1989; a significant decrease from more than 6,000 in 1988/89.

The history and context of football violence, alongside Riaz' and other hooligans' experience is being explored in podcast The English Disease, put together by West Ham fan and writer Sam Diss. He tells Metro he wanted to go beyond nostalgia to address the nuance and complexities of football-related violence. 

'For a long time, people had this idea of it being this subculture that just kind of came and went, but without really ever looking at what its cultural importance was,' Sam explains. 'It was just a weird aberration that happened where tens of thousands of men every weekend were dressing up in all their best gear and going out and beating each other up.

'I didn’t fully recognise how important a story it was, until after lockdown, where we started seeing a resurgence in football violence.' 

For Sam, the subculture is misunderstood and oversimplified, dismissed by society and politicians as 'mindless violence and thuggery', which fails to take into account the experience of a whole class of society that feels disenfranchised and forgotten about. 

For six years Riaz lived for match days and the fighting, taking on infamous Millwall supporters. The Baby Squad, like all firms, stuck to strict rules of engagement, which meant you could go for the face, back or body, but never the neck. 

'Some idiots obviously got carried away, but were frowned upon a lot,’ explains. ‘If they are lying on the floor, you don't beat the crap out of them. You just leave them and head to your next opponent. 

'There was excitement, adrenaline, fear. You knew who your opponent was. They know who you were. That’s all it was.' 

Then, in 1985, Riaz landed time inside after a fight, which saw a young woman glassed in the face.

'Prison wasn't very nice. In those days of life, you went to the toilet in a little bucket and then slopped it out every morning,’ he remembers. ‘It was degrading and tough, but it was prison. That was how it was. These days you get television and access to training course. I wasn't rehabilitated at all.' 

When Riaz was released, he went straight back into the violence until the day of the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989, where 97 people were crushed to death in the stands.

Although the tragedy wasn’t related to hooliganism, on that day something clicked, and Riaz asked himself how much longer could he sustain his violent lifestyle.

At first, he turned to party drugs in a bid to get the buzz he missed from fighting. But as the years passed, life calmed down for Riaz. Today, he is a teacher, writer, family man and practicing Muslim. His life is a lot calmer, he says.

However, he does believe that disenfranchised young men are still looking for the answer in violence today, but on a very different scale. 

‘To gain status and reputation, we wanted to be the best dressed, or the best at standing our ground. These youth now, their reputation is to stab someone or be the biggest drug dealer,’ he explains.

'I see it now in the roadmen [someone who spends a lot of time on the streets and may use or sell drugs] hanging out in gangs with big knives. No one gives them the opportunities. Kids see excitement in that lifestyle now. That brotherhood and camaraderie that I saw as a kid, they see in a different context.’

Despite all that he’s been trhough, Riaz insists he has no regrets. 

‘Maybe if I didn't go down that path I could have been a doctor or an engineer like my dad wanted me to be,’he says. ‘Maybe I could have had a different life. But it made me who I am now.’

Riaz Kahn appears on Sam Diss' podcast The English Disease, available to listen to on all podcast platforms now.

Do you have a story you'd like to share? Get in touch by emailing Claie.Wilson@metro.co.uk 

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