It happens often enough in European football. Search "away fans ban uefa -maccabi" online. You can also look at official UEFA sites, but they often list partial bans (e.g., ban from a particular section of the stadium) in a way that I can't distinguish from complete bans.
According to the UEFA website you linked it looks like BSC Young Boys were the only other club to face a ban on Europa League away fans in 2025. Maccabi Tel Aviv doesn't appear there, of course, since despite UEFA having rules and punishments against fan violence, they didn't consider it appropriate to punish Maccabi. So I wonder how frequently a team is forbidden from taking away fans by the local police, despite not being sanctioned by UEFA.
The Tel Aviv police did see fit to call off a Maccabi game about 2 weeks after this furore. Admittedly, because of violence on the morning of the game, not because of concerns well in advance, but I think it's quite reasonable to say that such a prohibition is not some kind of outrageous outlier.
My general point is, if you think the surface level details of this case are indication of some outrageous singling out of Maccabi fans, then I think that's mostly due to ignorance (in the non-derogatory sense of lack of familiarity).
If you want to debate the details, that's a fine thing to do, and I'm aware of lots of those details too and would still generally find it quite plausible to desire an away fans ban for Maccabi in that case, but that's not the point I'm trying to make on HN right now.
> The Tel Aviv police did see fit to call off a Maccabi game about 2 weeks after this furore
I think you mean the match against Hapoel Tel Aviv, which happened before this furore. The Tel Aviv police naturally know and expect that there is often unrest at a derby match, let alone a derby match between teams who share a stadium. But why would there be particular reason to assume that there would be unrest at a match between fans from Tel Aviv and Birmingham who have no particular relation to each other? And even if there was, why not cancel the match or play it behind closed doors? Why punish Maccabi specifically?
My recollection is the Tel Aviv derby took place after this Aston Villa ban was announced or raised publicly as a possibility (my meaning of "the furore"), but before the eventual match (another valid definition). Regardless, the sequence of these events is immaterial.
As for a "particular reason"... the Amsterdam match! The report is a poor document, but it contains some valid reasoning, despite the outrageous AI hallucination and some legal linguistics errors (mistakenly saying "communities" themselves were targeted, instead of individuals from said communities).
Subsequently, after a Maccabi game in Stuttgart, UEFA gave Maccabi a (suspended) away fans ban. Is it really still in question whether it's plausible for a police force to say there are security concerns? https://archive.is/20251218110350/https://www.nytimes.com/at...
> As for a "particular reason"... the Amsterdam match!
A match that happened 12 months prior? Maccabi had played several away matches around Europe in that intervening period. Why should it have been a Birmingham team that saw fit to ban them?
> Subsequently, after a Maccabi game in Stuttgart, UEFA gave Maccabi a (suspended) away fans ban. Is it really still in question whether it's plausible for a police force to say there are security concerns?
It's not implausible! But bans of all away fans happens rarely.
> But why would there be particular reason to assume that there would be unrest at a match between fans from Tel Aviv and Birmingham who have no particular relation to each other?
Emphasis mine, but you said both in a connected statement, so I don't see the point in disputing anything about my quotation.
Edit: I see now have you've removed the dispute of my quotation as being inaccurate where you argued you said "particular relation" and not "particular reason" -- no worries, I've made similar mistakes before, so while I'll leave my above words, they don't matter anymore.
As for why Birmingham in particular, I don't see it as some kind of gotcha to say because there is a resident population in Birmingham that would be a likely target of racial/religious abuse by Maccabi fans, i.e., Muslim people, or even just "Arab" appearing people, or people showing Palestine solidarity. Amsterdam and Birmingham are similar in this regard (I lived in Amsterdam for years), in ways other cities may not be. I'm not clued into Stuttgart or the cities hosting other games, so I can't say if populations there are similar or not. Expecting a uniform approach from all cities would be ludicrous -- why mandate ignoring particularities?
I don't think this is a form of intolerance towards Maccabi fans, because the logic is identical to that of the Tel Aviv derby prohibition -- it's about preventing reasonably predictable confrontations that exceed some tolerance level.