Flares in Football: Forty Years of Sanctions and an Unfilled Governance Gap

On the night of 12 April 2026, from the Curva Nord at San Siro, a flare left a supporter's hand and arced across half the pitch. It landed near the AC Milan goal, close to goalkeeper Dida. Referee Markus Merk sent both teams down the tunnel in the 74th minute. The Champions League quarter-final between Inter Milan and AC Milan ended there, between the whistle and what remained of a broken Milan night.

UEFA subsequently awarded AC Milan a 3-0 win, fined Inter Milan around 200,000 euros, and ordered the club to play a number of European home matches behind closed doors. That ruling became a template. Nearly two decades later, the stands are still lit, and disciplinary committees still write near-identical verdicts, with only the figure on the last line changed.

CONTEXT: FROM A NON-FOOTBALL INCIDENT TO FOOTBALL'S SANCTION ARCHITECTURE

This article has an unusual starting point. It began with an internal analysis of a firework explosion at a procession in Cuautitlán Izcalli, State of Mexico, which killed a 15-year-old and left 11 people requiring treatment. That is a public-safety incident. It contains no club, no player, no coach, no competition. The original analysis even concluded that the source text had been mislabelled by domain, and that forcing it into a football framework could only produce fabrication.

I keep the incident for one reason, and it is the most honest reason available: it exposes the governance logic that sits beneath every pyrotechnics accident at a mass gathering. A group stages an event using combustible material. The event falls outside the authorised programme. Harm follows. An authority then issues a statement explaining that the matter was not within its remit. That structure repeats almost intact in football, with a different legal system and a different signature on the permit.

Football has its own sanction regime for flares, and that regime has run long enough to be judged on outcomes. Article 16 of the UEFA Disciplinary Regulations addresses the cluster of conduct around crowd disturbances, with flares and pyrotechnics listed as a distinct item. The sanction toolkit includes fines, partial or full stadium closures, matches at neutral venues, and supporter bans. National associations copy the structure almost wholesale. The VFF and VPF in Vietnam carry similar provisions, with fines levied on the host club whenever flares appear in their stand.

Across more than fifty years on the terraces — old English grounds in the 1980s, Guangzhou, Hàng Đẫy — I have never seen a season in which flares disappeared. I have seen fewer of them. I have seen them better controlled in some places, and erupting more violently in others. But disappear, they have not.

CORE: FOUR WORKING MECHANISMS AND FOUR BREAKING POINTS

1. A fine is a cost transfer, not a deterrent.

Start here. A top-tier European club carries broadcasting and commercial revenue in the hundreds of millions of euros per season. A fifty-thousand-euro penalty sits in the same accounting bucket as bus hire for the youth team. It is booked as a cost, not learned as a lesson. More importantly, the payer and the offender are different people. The money moves from club to federation, passes the supporters on the way, and never touches the individual who pulled the flare out of a backpack.

The root issue is attribution. In a standing section of five thousand people wearing the same colours and singing the same rhythm, identifying who lit the flame is practically impossible with ordinary cameras. No identification evidence means no individual sanction. No individual sanction forces the system into collective punishment. This is the hinge: every modern flare sanction in football is a collective sanction, designed as a substitute for a failure of identification.

1. The collective-punishment paradox: those who pay are not those who caused it.

When UEFA or a national federation orders a stand closed, the cost lands on three groups. The first is sixty thousand supporters who did not light a flare, some of whom bought season tickets in July. The second is the club, which loses matchday revenue and issues refunds. The third is the broadcast partner, whose product loses most of its visual value. The person who lit the flare is in none of those three groups.

I sat in an empty stadium in Guangzhou in 2026. Fifty-eight thousand vacant seats. The sound of the ball on grass was uncomfortably loud. The applause in an empty ground is the most humane lie football has ever produced. But the lesson from those nights belongs to a different field: it proved that football can still operate, and operate worse, once the crowd is removed from the equation. A sanction that takes the crowd hostage does not correct the behaviour of the person with the lighter; it only demonstrates that the organiser has no other instrument left.

1. The material is the centre of the problem, not the light.

This is the least-discussed part of the flare debate and the part with the most technical data behind it. The word "flare" in disciplinary documents lumps together materials with fundamentally different properties.

At one end sits the marine distress flare, designed for ships to signal rescue. These burn at very high temperatures, radiate intense heat, and are engineered to keep burning in seawater. They cause severe burns, set clothing alight, and inflict serious injury when they land in a crowd. They are also the hardest to extinguish.

At the other end sits stage pyrotechnics, used in concerts and theatres, designed to burn at far lower temperatures, for short durations, at distances that have been calculated. They remain dangerous in a packed crowd, but the danger is different in kind.

Actual harm is a function of three variables: material temperature, trajectory, and crowd density at the landing point. A governance framework that compresses those three variables into one word is disabling itself. When every pyrotechnic is called the same thing, there is no way to distinguish recklessness from ignorance, and no way to construct a controlled safe zone.

Some Nordic countries have tried the opposite direction. From the early 2020s, Danish football and several Nordic leagues have run licensed flare zones, where organised supporter groups may use a specified material, in specified quantities, in a specified area, under joint responsibility held by the club and the supporter group. I do not have enough data to declare the model an outright success — reporting from the region remains contested, and incidents still occur outside licensed areas. But one structural change is notable.

When a legal channel exists, everything outside it becomes unambiguously illegal. Previously, a group lighting a flare was a violation punished collectively alongside thousands of bystanders. Once a legal channel exists, a group lighting outside the zone has broken an agreement with its own supporter community. Enforcement shifts from vertical to horizontal, and horizontal enforcement is the only kind that can work inside a five-thousand-person standing section.

1. The stadium is already a permitting system. The problem is that it permits everything except the most harmful item.

Look at a modern stadium through a safety inspector's eyes and it is one of the most tightly governed public spaces in any city. There is a capacity certificate. There is a fire-safety certificate, renewed on a fixed cycle. There is a stewarding ratio per head of attendance, set to a specific number. There are bag checks at the turnstiles. There is CCTV. There are alcohol controls. In many places, there is identity verification at the point of sale.

In other words, the question of whether to permit or ban flares was mis-framed from the start. The stadium is already a permitting system operating weekly. The correct question is what the permit covers. Today, it covers the entire operation of the ground except one line item: combustible material carried in by the spectators themselves.

That explains a paradox I have observed repeatedly. The same turnstile can confiscate a bottle of water on safety grounds while possessing no means whatsoever of detecting a marine distress flare inside a backpack. The inspection protocol was designed for a category of objects that excludes combustibles. This is the most concrete governance gap in the whole story: football regulates the consequence and does not regulate the cause.

The flare that landed on the pitch passed through at least five intervention points. It was manufactured in a factory. It was sold through a distribution channel. It was transported into a city. It was carried through a stadium gate. It was ignited in a stand. At the first four points, the power to intervene sits outside the federation's hands but not outside the state's. At the fifth, the power sits with the club, which has no identification capability. The current system acts only at the fifth point, and acts by collectively punishing the people standing around it.

1. The final layer: how we narrate the event.

One small detail in the source analysis held me longer than any of the data. The original headline began with the word "VIDEO". The product being marketed was footage, not information. In the same analysis, 11 of 14 information points carried no attribution, the year of the event was not stated, and the cause was described as a preliminary hypothesis — yet the public read a settled cause.

Football runs the same mechanism, only faster. A clip of flares in a stand travels in minutes. The disciplinary verdict takes six weeks. By the time the verdict arrives, the clip has been watched millions of times and nobody returns to correct it. The first version is always the version that is remembered. That is why I write bulletins but tell destinies — and also why I always reread my own headline before rereading my own body copy.

I have to admit this as a working journalist: we routinely convert a safety incident into a visual product and call it coverage. The ball does not remember who shot it, only the emotions around it. But the person reporting has to remember. That is the one part of this trade that cannot be handed to an algorithm.

CONTRARIAN ANGLE: THREE THINGS COLLECTIVE MEMORY KEEPS SKIPPING

The first — and I know it runs against the reflex of most people in the industry — is that the largest disasters in football history are not remembered as flare disasters. On 11 May 2026, a fire at Bradford City's Valley Parade killed 56 people. On 29 May 2026, the Heysel disaster killed 39. On 15 April 2026, the Hillsborough disaster killed 97. On 1 October 2026, the Kanjuruhan Stadium disaster in Indonesia killed more than 130. Only a minority on that list involves combustible material carried in by spectators at all.

We remember the fires. We do not remember the permit documents. An event licence produces no imagery, has no climax, offers no moment to build a documentary around. So every generation of stadium-safety professionals relearns from scratch what the previous generation wrote into regulation, and the lesson is always handed down as emotion rather than as procedure.

The second: the assumption that a stricter ban produces greater safety is not supported by observed outcomes. The tightest jurisdictions tend to push material underground. Material that goes underground is uninspected, ships without safety instructions, and tends to be the hottest-burning product available on the market — usually a marine distress flare. A policy that creates no legal channel is inadvertently selecting the most dangerous material available for the people who break it.

The third: the strongest argument for licensed flare zones is not aesthetic. I do not care whether a stand looks better, and I do not believe a pretty stand is sufficient reason to change a safety rule. The strongest argument is attribution. When a legal channel exists, everything outside it becomes legally unambiguous, and the supporter community acquires a direct interest in keeping that channel clean. Football does not lack rules on flares. Football lacks an attribution mechanism that functions inside a crowd.

TAKEAWAY

The next time a flare lands on the grass, the useful question will not be the size of the club's fine. The useful question is: who permitted that material, what category of material it was, and who checked the backpack at gate 14. If football can answer those three, every debate about banning or not banning will find its own place.

If it cannot, we will keep writing the same verdicts, once a year, and calling it governance.