Why millwall fans have such bad reputation?
The reputation comes from many, many years of crowd trouble….not just from the seventies and eighties when lots of clubs had crowd trouble, but dating way back to the twenties, when the old ground at the Den was closed by the FA for three matches when fans attacked the ref. In the fifties, police even found a bullet on the pitch. The club has been fined countless times by the FA for crowd behaviour, and the old ground was shut as punishment on at least 6 seperate occasions. The club always used to draw its fans from the workers at the now defunct London Docks, who were a rough, intimidating bunch even when sober. The old ground in New Cross, accessed only through narrow alleyways and dark underpasses, was easily the most intimidating stadium in the League, both for away players and their supporters. The area of South London that Millwall fans come from, Bermondsey, has always been deprived and life there is hard…which breeds hard men who like to fight, and who enjoy their reputatio
