It’s utterly chilling.
Legally, it’s clearly a breach of the Equality Act and of GDPR. From a morality and common decency perspective, it’s appalling.
Presumably the monitoring of football fans started out because of football hooliganism, and was intended to prevent gangs of violent trouble makers who only come to matches as a pretext for a fight from disrupting games etc.
And now we have these commercial enterprises appointing themselves the moral arbiters of their paying customers’ political opinions or philosophical beliefs. What’s next, banning fans who are members of one religion or another?
This case tells us that there are commercial enterprises which make money from monitoring private citizens. In other words, there are companies out there offering their covert digital surveillance services to other organisations. I wonder how those organisations find out about these covert digital surveillance businesses? Is there a trade press they advertise in? Or is it some word of mouth, in the know thing, amongst security teams, IT teams or marketing teams?
From a wider perspective, if football clubs are buying their services, then the chances are that any entities with campaign goals / political goals will be doing so too.