When it all kicks off before kickoff

At the World Cup in June, lecturer Geoff Pearson is bound to be caught up in any unrest. Huw Richards explains

Geoff Pearson already knows exactly what he'll be doing on his 32nd birthday on June 20. He'll be with the England fans in Cologne for the World Cup match against Sweden, and he'll be looking for trouble.

Not perhaps the behaviour you would expect from a lecturer in law who directs an MBA programme. But Pearson's trip to Germany is the continuation of a decade of participant observation of fans and policing that has underpinned his academic work on football and the law.

It should be emphasised - in particular since the overlap in their interests makes the confusion a natural and frequent one - that he is not the Geoffrey Pearson who wrote H ooligan: A History of Respectable Fears , an enjoyably acute analysis of the phenomenon. "People are always asking me at conferences how old I was when I wrote it," says this Geoff Pearson, who was nine when his namesake published in 1983.

The participant observation of football fans isn't a new phenomenon. At the same time as the other Geoffrey Pearson was putting pen to paper, John Williams, who is now director of Leicester University's Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research, was mixing with Leicester City's disruptive element and taking trips abroad with England fans.

Pearson says: "The important difference is that where he (Williams) was interested in what made people become hooligans, my work is concerned with legal and policing issues - how you control crowds and whether legal responses are working in terms of public order and civil liberties."

He practises covert observation but with no deception involved in one respect at least - he is a genuine lifelong football fan. Piquantly for someone who earns his living at Liverpool University, he is a Manchester United fan. "I wasn't given any option in the matter. I started being taken when I was about three by my father, who had been a season-ticket holder for years. My office is a bit of a shrine and I didn't go in for a week last year when Liverpool won the European Cup."

Pearson read law at Lancaster University, then went on to complete a doctorate on the legal responses to hooliganism. "I started in 1995, when hooliganism was beginning to make news again - the Ireland-England match in Dublin was abandoned, there was serious trouble involving Millwall and there was fear that there would be serious trouble at Euro '96 in England the following year."

He started participant observation with Blackpool fans while doing his PhD and has carried on through a decade of major tournaments - going to the 1998 World Cup and the European championships in 2000 and 2004 to watch England. Between 2000 and 2004, he worked on a Home Office-funded project on the policing of England fans in the run-up to Euro 2004. A post at Liverpool to lecture on football law could have been designed with him in mind, and he also directs their football industries MBA.

He will be following familiar routines in Germany. "I'll be wherever things are likeliest to kick off - looking for the noisiest bars in town and getting as close as I can to the demarcation lines between groups of fans in the grounds."

Pearson believes covert methods produce the most authentic evidence. "You want to know what people do as well as what they say." But he acknowledges that this creates ethical issues: "Do you have a duty to protect the people you are observing, or should you be reporting their activities? There are times when I could have prevented an incident by picking up a telephone."

Without being specific, he admits that he has been "more or less forced to commit offences - although none of them has been serious". Williams found on one occasion that in picking up hooligan contacts in his car he was providing a getaway service after a robbery. Pearson has so far avoided the participant observer's occupational hazards of arrest and being caught up in violence more serious than a scuffle. He does admit to occasionally being scared: "Being on the receiving end of a baton charge is never pleasant."

But he is looking forward to Germany and he emphasises one essential point:

"The people who will be following England are not the same people who are involved with the main 'firms' of hooligans at home. The firms, which are organised groups with links to organised crime, are not interested in fighting abroad, and you see the same pattern in other countries. The Dutch club firms don't travel and nor do the French or Spanish 'ultras'. It isn't their scene."

There is, he says "no England firm as such". Those who will travel are a much looser group with a range of club affiliations, and few have police records for hooliganism. As Pearson points out, this means that the much talked-about banning orders, which will stop about 3,000 fans with convictions for football violence from travelling, are irrelevant. "They can be effective as a means of controlling trouble at home, but those people would not travel anyway."

The England fans who will be found in cities on match days do, however, have certain shared characteristics. "There is a strong element of xenophobia and racism, although I've seen no evidence of British National Party or Combat 18 involvement," he says. But Pearson does have some sympathy for the classic England fans' plea that they don't go looking for trouble. "Where you do get trouble is if they are attacked by local fans, or if there is some perceived injustice."

They can, he argues, be controlled by sensitive and proportionate policing.

"What you do is treat it (the incident) like other examples of public disorder. So if an individual is drunk and violent - and you will get that - you focus on controlling him. You don't get the riot gear out at the first sign of trouble and arrest everybody in sight."

Charleroi in 2000, when England came close to expulsion from the European Football Championship, exemplified bad policing. "There were people behaving unacceptably who needed controlling. But as far as most of the England fans were concerned, they were having a drink before the match and suddenly they had a water cannon turned on them." This, for Pearson, is as good an example of perceived injustice as one could imagine.

Portugal in 2004, rather against Pearson's expectation, showed how it could be done. "From my experience there with United, I was apprehensive - we had 12 fans shot by the police in 1997. There was cheap beer, sunshine, town squares and police with a bad reputation. But the police had learnt. The policing was sensitive and low-key. They were there early on in the town squares in small groups, so the England fans knew they were there. But the police were treating them as individuals and, where possible, talking to them."

If bad policing is the likeliest cause of trouble, there are other imponderables. "We don't know much about other groups of fans, particularly the Poles. And there are German cities where the local crews might be a worry - Cologne could be problematic, and I'll be concerned if England have to play in Stuttgart."

This will be Pearson's last outing as a participant observer. "I've had a good run and should stop before I run out of luck," he says. He suspects it may, however, take a little longer to break his habit of losing concentration on the game at Old Trafford as soon as he sees a policeman on the move.

Geoff Pearson will be filing dispatches to The Times Higher from the World Cup in June.

• Next week: World Cup jingoism and Germany - academics speak out