After England's World Cup Defeat, I Couldn't Stop Thinking About One Statistic: Domestic Abuse Rises by 38% When England Lose

Two years ago, during Euro 2024, I wrote about the rise in domestic abuse around England football matches. Violence against women and girls had just been declared a national emergency and, while the statistics were already well known to campaigners, seeing them enter the mainstream conversation felt like progress.

Last night, after England’s latest defeat, a friend turned to me and said, matter-of-factly: “I keep thinking about how many women are going to bear the brunt of this loss.” But the statistic I remembered was bleaker still: domestic abuse incidents rise by 38% when England lose—and by 26% even when they win or draw.

Given how much attention those figures have received, I had hoped things might be different. But when I reopened my 2024 article today, expecting to update it, I realised I was about to write almost exactly the same story.

I'd be reiterating, the same 2014 Lancaster University study, with those figures showing domestic abuse incidents rising by 26% when England play and by 38% when they lose. The same warnings from charities. The same insistence that football does not cause abuse, but that the heightened emotions, alcohol consumption and volatility surrounding major tournaments can exacerbate violence where it already exists. Something I always feel at pains to reiterate after facing a swathe of online abuse whenever I post about the correlation between football and domestic violence.

What Has Changed in Football Then?

What has changed since 2024, then, is not the underlying pattern; it is how prepared we have become for it.

Before this World Cup had even begun, Women’s Aid launched The Other Kick Off, a campaign built around 11.37pm: the estimated time abusive partners might return home after England’s opening match. Digital billboards appeared near fan zones and football hotspots, hijacking one of the tournament’s most searched questions—“What time is kick-off?”—and replacing it with the time many victims and survivors dread.

The Crown Prosecution Service also issued a warning that domestic abuse was expected to rise during the tournament, while police and prosecutors said they were working together to identify offenders and bring cases forward.

According to National Police Chiefs’ Council data, more than 300 domestic abuse offences were reported during Euro 2024 in cases where victims believed the perpetrator’s behaviour was linked to football. The CPS now says that four in five domestic abuse-flagged cases referred to prosecutors, where a charging decision is made, result in charges.

In one sense, this is progress. Institutions are talking openly about what happens around major tournaments. Police forces are preparing; so too are prosecutors and charities. Campaigns are more visible and better targeted.

But there is something deeply bleak about this level of preparedness. Have we really reached a point where a rise in domestic abuse is treated as another predictable feature of tournament football? As expected as crowded pubs, delayed trains and arguments over referee Ismail Elfath.

Before a ball is even kicked, helplines brace themselves. Charities like Women’s Aid and Refuge prepare campaign materials, police issue warnings, and journalists like me pull from the same decade-old statistics. Everyone knows what is coming—it’s right there in the campaign material: He’s Coming Home. That should shock us more than it does.

The 26% and 38% figures come from research published in 2014, based on reported incidents in Lancashire during the 2002, 2006 and 2010 World Cups. The study was limited in scale and researchers called for its findings to be replicated. Yet, more than a decade later, it remains the evidence base almost everyone reaches for. Why then has such an urgent, repeatedly cited finding not led to a larger national body of research?

Perhaps because awareness has become easier than action. Of course, awareness campaigns matter: they direct women towards support, help friends and relatives recognise signs of abuse, and remind people that coercive control, emotional abuse and financial abuse can be as devastating as physical violence.

But how many more awareness campaigns do we need before the emphasis shifts decisively towards prevention, perpetrator accountability and long-term cultural change?

Women’s Aid describes this summer as “another World Cup, but the same problem”. That’s difficult to argue with. Its latest campaign follows its 2022 He’s Coming Home campaign. Every tournament brings a new creative treatment of a reality that remains stubbornly familiar.

There Are Positive Signs Football Is Changing

There are signs that parts of football culture are beginning to grapple with masculinity more seriously.

UN Women UK’s Same Side campaign, in partnership with Vodafone Foundation, called on athletes to speak to boys and young men about empathy, vulnerability, relationships and respect. Its latest phase includes toolkits for teachers and sports coaches, recognising that sport is one of the places where boys learn what leadership, courage and strength are supposed to look like.

Other green shoots have come in the form of my social feed, which has been filled with clips of Jude Bellingham and Norway’s Erling Haaland embracing, supporting and defending one another, even when playing on opposing sides. And, of course, Haaland’s enviable Birkin collection. These are small moments: two footballers showing affection won’t dismantle misogyny, but still, it matters.

Young male fans are watching and absorbing what strength looks like, how men relate to one another, and whether intimacy, tenderness and emotional openness are compatible with elite masculinity.

But for real change to happen, we have to move the burden away from women and towards the men who abuse, as well as the institutions that respond to them and the cultures that excuse them. It would also mean refusing to treat this pattern as inevitable.

By Euro 2028, football will return home to England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. The celebrations will be enormous. The campaigns about connection, identity and national pride have already begun. One of the first, from BT, sees Frank Skinner and football legends from across the Home Nations celebrate the game's power to unite us. Football can be a great force for connection. But if we're willing to celebrate that power, we also have to confront what it reveals when some women still dread the final whistle.

As England looks to lick the wounds of last night’s loss, those campaigns will start gaining momentum, but I wonder whether the parallel campaign—the one warning women about what may happen after the final whistle—will still be necessary in two years' time. I hope not.