THE public purse has footed a bill for more than £101,000 to safely police just nine football matches in the region, according to figures revealed in a report published today.

Thousands of pounds worth of overtime payments were made to police officers marshalling home games for both Middlesbrough FC and Sunderland AFC last season.

Cleveland Police and Northumbria Police both sought to recoup some costs from the two clubs then playing in the championship, as well as from Premier League side Newcastle United.

Data collected from the respective clubs and police forces show that the Black Cats were handed the most expensive invoice of the 2017/18 season, charging £55,413 to marshal the Tees-Wear derby.

Sunderland hosted thousands of Teessiders at the Stadium of Light for the February fixture that ended in a 3-3 draw and three arrests.

The match was the most heavily-policed game of all Championship fixtures last season, with one officer for every 50 spectators – a total of 587 officers were called in on the day.

Northumbria Police’s steep bill for the North-East clash is five times more than the average cost to police most games, and double the amount of the next most expensive game for the Black Cats against Birmingham City, costing the club £26,611.

However, Newcastle paid just an average of £8,065 by the same force, with around 40 officers attending each home game during their most recent Premier League campaign.

The Magpies pulled in the highest match attendance across the season, with 52,000 supporters going to each game – double the number of spectators drawn by Boro and Sunderland.

However, the biggest club of the three provided the least amount of police officers per spectator, with Newcastle v Stoke City seeing one officer per 1,918 fans.

Cleveland Police refused to provide figures in response to a Freedom of Information request, stating too much information about how large-scale gatherings are policed would be in the public domain.

Some costs to the public purse were published by the force however, with eight fixtures raking up £82,542 in overtime costs, added to £18,626 overtime accrued by Northumbria Police during Sunderland’s derby match against Boro.

Amanda Jacks, a caseworker at the Football Supporters’ Federation, said that some games are “over-policed”, with too much public money spent unnecessarily on supplying extra officers.

She added: “Within crowds of thousands of people, there will only be a few individuals who pose a risk to safety, but as soon as a police force puts a high-risk category on a match, then lots of officers will be there.

“A lot of football policing is done that way simply because it’s always been done that way.

“The public perception may easily be, ‘look at all those violent yobs and all the police needed’, or, ‘I don’t see police any other time but look how many there are at football’.

“There’s very little external scrutiny around the policing of football, except the incentive to look at it that is financially-driven.”