The Premier League, EFL and FA are losing the battle on English football’s worsening pitch invader problem

When a supporter hurtles towards a player on a football pitch during or shortly after a game, the player has little time to react. The footballer doesn’t know which team the person supports; if they are celebrating or raging; if they are coming at them with hugs or haymakers; if they have a weapon.

The player will tend to have only a few seconds to work any of this out by the time they realise the supporter is heading in their direction, not long enough to deduce if they have a smile or a frown, or what colours if any, they are wearing.

Pitch invading has happened so much at Arsenal recently the club had to announce they will cancel the membership of anyone who tries it in future. One supporter sprinted towards manager Mikel Arteta after Arsenal beat West Ham at home. Presumably, it was to celebrate – but who knows? Arteta jumped out the way. He didn’t want to find out. And who can blame him?

One supporter ran onto the Emirates pitch and tried to shake goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale’s hand during Arsenal’s defeat to Liverpool in the Carabao Cup semi-final. In the same game, two other supporters managed to make it through the barrier of stewards and police, while a third supporter was apprehended while giving it a go.

During Arsenal’s win against Southampton in December, another supporter managed to grab the shirt of defender Takehiro Tomiyasu.

You hear that word a lot in football: supporter. A person attending a football match is almost always referred to as a supporter or a fan. But when they start invading the field of play, that term begins to crack under closer scrutiny. The man who entered the field and attacked Nottingham Forest’s players while they celebrated a goal as they knocked out FA Cup holders Leicester City out of the tournament was not a Forest supporter.

It’s hard to call him a fan of Leicester, either, because he was only ever going to pour shame on one of English football’s nicer stories.

When Arsenal announced tougher measures, a statement said the club “strongly remind everyone it is a criminal offence under the Football (Offences) Act 1991 to enter the pitch without prior permission”.

So you could argue the issue is covered by the law and, as such, is not football’s problem, but a problem for the police. But throwing punches is also against the law, and that didn’t stop the fan on Sunday, who was later arrested and charged with three counts of common assault and going onto a playing area at a football match.

It’s somewhat surprising that pitch invading doesn’t already come with a lifetime ban issued by the Football Association; that it’s left up to clubs to decide on the sanctions themselves.

It’s almost three years since Jack Grealish was punched – from behind – in the face by a Birmingham City fan during a game in which he was captain of rivals Aston Villa. “I cannot help but feel how lucky I was in this incident,” Grealish said. “It could have been so much worse had the supporter had some sort of weapon.”

An FA spokesperson said at the time “a line had been crossed”, that the governing body was making enquiries. So why was that line able to be crossed three years later? The fan was jailed for 14 weeks, banned from attending football matches for 10 years and ordered to pay a £350 fine after admitting assault and encroachment onto the pitch. His defence asked for him to avoid a prison sentence, but magistrates said the sentence “should be a deterrent” and that a “message had to be sent out to fans”.

It’s time somebody – anybody – within the organisations that oversee English football properly investigate this worsening current trend and gets a grip on the situation before something worse happens. Nobody can say they haven’t been warned.

Finally, somebody working in football has had the stomach to be honest about what’s happening to the teenagers and young men discarded by the academy system, sometimes after a decade or more commitment to a club.

Upon launching a three-year aftercare program to support young players who do not make it, Crystal Palace academy director Gary Issott described the “trauma” young players experience after being dropped. He went through it himself.

And that’s exactly how the many other former academy players I’ve spoken to recall the experience of being let go.

“One thing we’re going to promote and promote early in the academy system is ‘my second career visions’ for everybody because at one stage your footballing career will finish, this is the one certainty all footballers face,” Issott told The Football Family, a group helping young adults transition out of professional football.

After i revealed 97 per cent of former elite academy players failed to make even a single Premier League appearance, that 70 per cent did not received a professional deal and only one in 10 has gone on to make 20 league appearances, clubs must be honest about the odds of succeeding of the youngsters whose lives they consume.