British government urges police to stop over ban on Maccabi Tel Aviv football fans

Britain’s Home Secretary on Wednesday called for the head of one of the country’s main police forces to resign following a report into how fans of Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv were excluded from a match against Premier League side Aston Villa in Birmingham last year.

Shabana Mahmood told lawmakers that the findings of the independent report into West Midlands Police’s decision for the November 6 match were «devastating», not least because it exaggerated the threat to Maccabi fans while underestimating the risk to them of traveling to the match.

“The ultimate responsibility for the failure of the force to carry out its duties on an issue of such national importance rests with the Chief Constable, and it is for that reason that I must today declare that the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police no longer has my confidence,” she said.

The decision to ban Maccabi fans was widely criticized at the time, including by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

West Midlands Police said at the time that it considered the match to be high risk «based on current intelligence and previous incidents», including violence and hate crime that took place when Maccabi played Ajax in Amsterdam last season.

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The ban came at a time of heightened concern about anti-Semitism in Britain following a deadly attack on a synagogue in Manchester and calls from Palestinians and their supporters for a sports boycott of Israel over its war with Hamas in Gaza.

Mahmood said the report by Chief Inspector Andy Cooke found that West Midlands Police had “little contact with the Jewish community and none with the Jewish community in Birmingham before a decision was made.”

She said the report characterized the police approach as “confirmation bias” and “rather than following the evidence, the force merely looked for evidence to support their desired position to ban the fans.” The report did not show that the police were anti-Semitic.

Mahmood said she did not have the power to dismiss Chief Constable Craig Guildford himself due to his “failure of leadership” following a policy change by the previous Conservative government in 2011, but she wanted to hand that power back to home secretaries. Currently, locally elected police and crime commissioners have that power.

Guildford did not immediately comment on the report on Wednesday.

Published on January 14, 2026