The extraordinary lengths Fulham went to kick a Newcastle fan out of the home end

Charlie thought little of it when he received an email from Fulham 14 hours after buying a general sale ticket for the visit of Newcastle United in September.

It was probably confirmation of his purchase, or a marketing email. But then he read the short message.

Following a recent post on social media and a review of your purchase history with the club, we have reason to believe that you are a visiting supporter.

Tickets purchased through Fulham FC are strictly for home supporters and your ticket purchase has been cancelled and refunded in full.

Charlie isn’t his real name – when speaking to The i Paper about the story he is about to tell, he does not want his identity revealed or he will no longer be able to do what he has been doing for more than three decades.

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For Charlie has a secret: he regularly attends Newcastle away games in the home seats. Look around you the next time your team hosts Newcastle United and Charlie might be there, keeping his head down and his eyes on the action, but not celebrating when your club scores, and stifling a cheer when his does.

He isn’t breaking the law, but it is a breach of the Premier League’s rules for away fans to buy home tickets, and after being banned by Fulham he does not wish other clubs to know his identity.

Charlie had bought tickets for himself and his daughter in the home seats to watch Newcastle travel to Craven Cottage in January for an FA Cup tie as well as other times before, and it had not ever been a problem.

Nor has it been an issue attending Newcastle games at Crystal Palace, Southampton, Aston Villa, Leicester City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham. “Probably a dozen clubs,” he says after reeling them off. “But there will be Newcastle fans who have been to more, and more frequently than me.

“You just have to be respectful of people, you don’t have to rub someone’s nose in it when you’re standing in their section,” he adds. “It’s not an altogether enjoyable experience, to be in the home section.

“You can’t be ridiculously jubilant and jump up and down and cheer. But if that’s the only chance you have to watch your team live you have to pay it.

“I’m careful, behave myself, until I work out what the people around me are like and usually by half-time I’m chatting away to them, as I was at Fulham.”

He had to remind his daughter to calm down when she celebrated the first of Newcastle’s two goals in the FA Cup game. The only time he can recall himself facing even a smouldering of resentment was watching Newcastle at Selhurst Park in the 1994-95 season with a group of mates in the home stands. Palace supporters were anxious about the prospect of relegation (they went down that season) and when Peter Beardsley scored a “blinding” late winner he got a little over-excited.

“No one threatened me but one of my mates said ‘for god’s sake shut up’,” he recalls. “That was 30 years ago. I’m now 65.”

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Charlie points out that it is now almost impossible to buy Newcastle away tickets – and even home ones are hard to come by. In October, he went to St James’ Park for a Carabao Cup game but had to sit in the away end with Wimbledon supporters – “I never thought I’d have to be in the away end at my own ground but that’s a consequence of the demand.”

After season-ticket holders are catered for, the club run a ballot for remaining tickets, available only to members who must pay £37 per season to be considered.

“The club refuse to say how many tickets are available in the ballot, how many members there are, how many have been successful,” he says. “You’re asked to pay a fee to enter a competition where you don’t know any of the odds.

“I get that demand massively outstrips supply at St James’ Park. But we just want some transparency.

“The club say it’s commercially sensitive. Which it is: if as a fan you knew your chances of getting a ticket were probably worse than one in 100 you probably wouldn’t give the club £37 for the season.”

Charlie isn’t the only one to be caught out.

An 11-year-old Liverpool fan, his dad and two friends were turned away from Brighton & Hove Albion’s Amex Stadium when Liverpool visited for a Carabao Cup tie at the end of October because the boy was wearing a Liverpool shirt and they had home tickets.

It was the boy’s birthday and the ticket had been bought as a present. “It would’ve been his first live game,” Adam, one of the group, told BBC 5Live’s 606 show. “We got to the entrance and the steward looked at him and said, There’s no way he can go in. Me and my mate thought he was joking.

“He was wearing a Liverpool shirt – I totally get that, I really do.

“We put a jumper and a coat on him. The steward said: I know he’s a Liverpool fan now. I said ‘mate he’s 11, he’s with three adults’. Where’s the common sense?”

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They called the head steward and asked to change tickets for away seats but it was fully booked. As things got heated the boy became increasingly upset.

“He had to go home, crying,” Adam said. “There just needs to be common sense with this rule. It’s got to be an age thing, post-16 or something. I was so disgusted with them.”

Should a retired man in his sixties who is always respectful and understands the necessity not to antagonise be banned from buying tickets to support an away club in the home stands?

Should a young boy not be able to wear an away shirt sitting among home supporters? Surely nobody is going to attack a child at a football game, even if they do support the other team, are they?

That said, a cautionary note should be taken from when crowd trouble ignited in an FA Cup match in January between West Brom and Wolves – during which some Wolves fans were spotted in the home stands – and one mother later recalled how rival supporters charged towards her and her children.

It is a unique set of circumstances in men’s football. Rugby union doesn’t segregate fans. In American sports, where the distances are so great between cities that there isn’t the same away-day culture, fans mix. When fans asked on Reddit whether an away supporter could buy tickets for the home seats for a Women’s Super League game, the resounding responses were that it’s absolutely fine.

In men’s football it’s a grey area where confused logic meets legitimate safety concerns. There is a tangible edge and excitement created in English football stadiums by the them-and-us separation of two sets of supporters that would be lost if fans mixed freely.

Fulham accessing a ticket buyer’s social media and tracing their purchase history to discover, in a Sherlock Holmes-esque process of logic and deduction, that they are, in fact, a Newcastle fan, shows the lengths clubs are going to prevent it.

“There’s an increasing problem of away fans finding their way into home areas,” says Simon Duke, chair of the Fulham Supporters’ Trust. “Speaking to people at trusts at other clubs, this isn’t just a Fulham problem.

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“It can get unpleasant. If they behave, it’s more acceptable. But when they are vocal, as some have been, and at times outright abusive, it’s a powder keg waiting to ignite.

“The Fulham Supporters’ Trust concern is if the club can’t get a grip on this there’s going to be an incident one day, a bit like at West Brom v Wolves, there’s a big safety issue.”

The FST raised the issue with club officials during a meeting in October after receiving a series of emails on the subject – an increasing number following the Newcastle match.

John D’Arcy, Fulham’s head of safety, said that some Newcastle fans in home seats had been ejected and that there were also issues when West Ham visited, according to the meeting notes.

Officials in the ticket office were able to find the seats in which offenders were sitting, but found many had moved to unsold seats. In other cases where they found Newcastle fans sitting in seats belonging to season-ticket holders, when the club contacted the season-ticket holder, they found that the tickets hadn’t been sold on, they were simply empty as they could not attend.

Fulham are looking at a more effective system for fans to report instances but “a balance has always to be struck between creating an even greater incident and the need to take action”, the notes state.

It feels a touch sad that football is no longer a place where it is safe for children to wear opposition shirts sitting with home fans. But perhaps while it may appear to lack common sense it is a necessity.

“All it will take is one major incident and everyone will be saying we wish we did something about it sooner,” Duke says.

Meanwhile innocent bystanders will be collateral damage.

“I’ve got almost no chance of getting a ticket at St James’ Park,” Charlie says. “Since the new owners came in and started spending money and got people excited, away grounds are my best hope. If they’re going to check ID and go through security measures that will extinguish it. I’ll just be an armchair fan.”