Football (soccer) and hooliganism

Cafe Society
1

I brought up the topic of the Rangers/Celtic rivalry and sectarian violence in this thread.

I find that in the United States, if you mention that you follow soccer, people immediately ask about crazy fans rioting in the streets.

I’ve also talked to British friends who tell me they despise football because of the people who follow it.

I’ve started this new thread to discuss why football still carries this association of violence and hooliganism. Why do certain clubs have a worse reputation than others in attracting violent and intolerant fans? These would include, for example, Chelsea and Leeds United in England, the aforementioned Celtic/Rangers rivalry in Scotland, and many other clubs in Europe (Lazio and Verona, for instance, in Italy).

Does the association of football culture in general with hooliganism (especially as depicted in the media) serve as a way to dismiss or downplay more complex social discourses?–for instance, when a Catholic is shot dead in Belfast while wearing a Celtic shirt, is it easier to chalk it up to hooliganism instead of examining the social and cultural circumstances in Northern Ireland?

In other words, is it possible to disassociate the sport of football from these more complex social issues? Or is football so much imbedded in culture (especially in Europe, or really anywhere outside of the U.S.) that you’re always going to come up against these problems?

Or should we be asking a different set of questions altogether?

2

Oy!

I’m not sure how much “complex social discourse” is relevant, since it only takes a few dozen or so rowdies to tar an entire city with a bad reputation.

3

If an American visited the average English football stadium today (especially in the top professional league), they might be pleasantly surprised to discover that there is no violence among the fans. Unfortunately that was not always so, and there are several reasons for this change, not least improvements in policing.

There are whole sociology courses studied at university here on this very subject, so I doubt we’ll be able to do it full justice here. But the single chief reason why football should be a focus for civil unrest is because it’s the mass sport. Large crowds of people with a grievance tend to behave in a disorderly way.

To cut a very long story short, the growth of misbehaviour in crowds in the UK occurred during the 1970s when a lot of people felt pissed off about a failing economy, a lack of direction in their lives and a shortage of recognisable opportunites to change that for the better. They could have rioted outside the Town Hall or marched on Parliament, but they were not sufficiently coordinated in a political sense to do that. They found themselves gathered in large groups in stadiums every Saturday and took out their frustration in that comparatively trivial and irrelevant setting – spontaneously and without deliberate political intent. But then having started on a small scale, it grew because it attracted a certain sort of person who enjoyed the excitement they associated with it. Fighting can be fun as a diversion from life’s frustrations as the film Fight Club suggested.

Government authorities claimed that the problem should be solved by the football clubs themselves. The clubs claimed that they were not qualified to solve the problem and that the sources of it were outside of the sport anyway. This buck-passing amongst officials about what was causing the problem, who was to blame, and how to deal with it allowed it to continue unchecked until the consequences had become very serious.

The example of Celtic/Rangers is rather different, in that nobody is fooled that attacks on fans of either club have anything whatsoever to do with football. The problems of violence in Northern Ireland are social and political, and are only coincidentally associated with religion. There are historical reasons why fans of those two Scottish football clubs tend to be segregated on religious grounds and therefore the connection to the politics of NI is just a further coincidence. So if a person is killed in Belfast (or attacked in Glasgow as one player was yesterday) then it is clear to everyone that it had nothing to do with the sport itself.

Politics is a key link to football-related violence:
[ul][li]There is animosity between the fans of Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain that has its roots in the politics of that country under the dictatorship of Franco. It has little to do with the football directly, but more to do with affiliation to a football club being a sign of regional pride.[/li]
[li]There is an association between certain clubs and certain political profiling in Italy too. Fans of Lazio and Verona tend to be right-wing, for instance, those of Bologna left-wing. The reasons are nothing to do with the sport, but arise from the politics of the cities themselves. The English clubs with the worst reputations also have fans that can be linked to far-right politics.[/li]
[li]In Argentina, the chief rivalry is between River Plate and Boca Juniors. Those clubs are associated with different localities of Buenos Aires and therefore are emblematic of social and economic division between those localities. In Argentina and Brazil, governments have manipulated peoples’ affection for certain clubs for political reasons in a way reminiscent of the panem et circenses of the Roman Empire.[/li]
[li]In certain former communist countries of Eastern Europe, there was an association between certain teams and the government because the players of those teams were recruited from the army or police organisations. Understandable tensions arose from that.[/li]
[li]In many countries with dictatorial governments the football stadium has often been the only place where people could gather in any numbers legally, and if those people wanted to protest about anything, the stadium was the place to do it.[/ul][/li]There are serious problems of violence and public unrest in the USA of course, and I’m not qualified to say why those problems are less associated with a certain sport than they appear to be in other countries. But where you have Crips and Bloods, other countries’ societies have gangs that identify with rival football teams. Partly this might have to do with the long-standing association between a football club and a city or community, which I don’t percieve to be as strong in the USA. But if you switched football globally for any sport commonly played in the USA and kept all other factors unchanged, you would have got the same results.

There is still violence associated with club rivaly in England, btw, but it tends to occur far from the well-policed stadiums and it’s easy enough to avoid if you want to.

4

Hey! Wots with you blokes? Ya get a few pints down yer neck, go to the match and the next thing ya know, yer kickin’ a copper in the bollocks!

Cor!

Never kiss an animal that can lick its own butt.

5

I know my post was a long one, but if you couldn’t be bothered to read it why reply at all?

6

I read it **everton ** and found it quite informative. I’ve only been to one soccer match in Europe. It was a World Cup qualifier between Belgium and the Faeroe Islands. Regardless of that contest, I was pretty apprehensive about going.

Then as I rode the Brussels metro the match and saw that were lots of families I didn’t feel too bad. And I doubt there were many fans for the opponents either!

But when I bought the ticket, it was at the Belgian Football Federation headquarters, which is right next to Heysel.

I don’t think any sports rivalry (on the pro level) has any of the ethnic or socioeconomic underpinnings as British football. Crowd violence in the U.S. is usually just a case of jerks drinking too much. Rarely do fans of opposing sides fight with each other.

Then again, most fans don’t travel to go see their teams play because of the vast size of the U.S.

I’ve been told that if you go to a US-Mexico soccer match in the US that is played in Southern California and you root for the US, you should expect some abuse, but you are still unlikely to get hurt.

7

Take a chill-pill, Daddy-O. I read your entire post and it’s not completely incompatable with my own: that a relatively small number of determined violent individuals are enough to set off larger riots and give the impression that the entire city turns into a war-zone as soon as the match starts.

The Crips and Bloods, though, are no longer front-page news in the U.S., a benefit of the falling crime rate.

8

Err, that was unclearly written. I meant to say “not incompatable with my own statement or with gatopescado’s similarly-themed irreverence.”

9

Besides, any hard-core football fan knows you kick coppers in the cobbles, not the bollocks.

10

I didn’t feel the need to criticise your own post, Bryan, but I don’t think gatopescado’s suggested that he had understood mine at all. Perhaps he’ll offer a follow up that sets me straight? It’s good to hear that gang violence has disappeared from the US papers, but does that mean people don’t kill each other for sport or profit over there any more?

I’m certain that there are more people than me with informed views about this subject and I’ll try to avoid hogging the thread, but another couple of other points worth considering are these:
[list=1][li]As the authorities dithered about how to cope with the growing problem during the ’70s, a parallel “sport” grew from scratch – football hooliganism for its own sake.[/li]
Some groups of individuals decided that they enjoyed the fighting separately from the football and developed teams of their own (called “firms”), whose entertainment came from attacking one another with a quasi-military strategy. They were in no way affiliated to the football clubs; in fact the clubs have always been ashamed and disgusted by the taint of these people claiming to be associated with the game.

They still exist unfortunately, and stage their own “contests” in the UK and abroad. Their activity is more likely to occur far from any stadium and when there isn’t a game being played because that makes it harder for the police to predict trouble. Part of the entertainment comes from the fact that they are breaking the law and they see the authorities as just another opponent in their game. People who are involved in this are often not part of any underclass – they are typically middle-class professionals with plenty of money to spend, they organise “meets” by mobile phone and pride themselves on the amount of effort involved.

Personally I don’t have a problem with sick individuals kicking the shit out of one another for their own entertainment provided they do it in private. But if I am forced to be involved in any way (and that includes the consequences of violence leaking into public places), then I want them punished very severely.

[li]There is an international dimension to the politics of hooliganism. Fights are sometimes staged against fans from foreign countries as a perverted act of “patriotism”. Again it’s clear to see how this is connected to far-right political thinking.[/list=1][/li]People make their own rules about how much violence they want in their entertainment. Some people think killing animals is fun, some think “hazing” is harmless even if it involves schoolgirls hitting each other with baseball bats, and then there’s the matter of drive-by shootings (which apparently don’t happen any more?). None of these things appeal to me but then not everybody is like me.

I resent the inconvenience that extra security at football often involves, but am grateful that these days I can go to the game without worrying how some idiot might react to the colour of my shirt, which I couldn’t do so easily in my teens. All stadiums are segregated during the game these days (i.e. fans of opposing teams are kept separate) but the atmosphere is generally non-threatening. BobT makes a good point about fewer opposing fans travelling to games in the USA, the fact that the distances are less here means that people take it for granted there might be thousands of “away” fans at a match here and that creates its own challenge.

Finally, the connection I’ve made between political unrest and football works in many cases, but not all. For instance, my home town of Liverpool has a strong association with political radicalism and militancy, but there is no representation of that in our football. Despite the strong rivalry between the two teams in the city, when they play each other there is no crowd segregation whatsoever and only normal levels of security appropriate to the size of crowd. Unfortunately that is unique in England today.

It’s important to note that the common perception in the USA of football as described in the OP is not at all an accurate representation of the experience I have at matches today.

11

Well here in the United States fans seem to have developed the delightful and charming habit of rioting after their team wins the championship.

As far as being able to wear an opposing teams colors in a stadium, there are a number of places where people have been assaulted in the most violent and vile ways for doing just that.

The worst of these places is Network Associates Coliseum, home of the Oakland Raiders of the NFL. It’s also known as The Black Hole.

Then you have the charming fans of the Philadelphia Eagles, also of the NFL, who got so violent that a court and jail were installed in the stadium so AssHats could be dealt with swiftly.

12

Very nicely summed up, everton.

I’d also add the fact that all football stadia–at least in England–are all-seater, which was not the case during the heyday of violence. The potential for violence is much higher when you’re standing cheek-to-jowl with thousands of rowdy/drunk/Scottish fans in a space designed to hold perhaps half the number of people.

13

:rolleyes:

Following the events during the 80s in the English leagues (hooliganism, rotten stadiums, riots while playing in Europe) and the Taylor Report, all top league stadiums in the UK were made all-seater. That included Scotland, despite the afore-mentioned disasters all being English.

Still, don’t let that stop you casting cliches and stereotypes in the wrong direction.

14

One point to consider also, it is a very high profile game in the UK. Intensively reported in the media. If out of all the many games being played on a particular day, one had some crowd trouble, which game would lead in the headlines?
I think the players can be faulted too in one respect. The spectators of each team are generally segregated from each other. The players will on occasion (usually after scoring) run to the group of opposing spectators and flaunt their shirt/ or make gestures, or in a case recently spit at them.

V

15

That’s another good point. A new law was introduced in 1989 to introduce new methods of crowd control and safety provisions. Under this law, the Football Licensing Authority was introduced with powers to close stadiums that don’t pass stringent safety tests. This law followed a few particularly nasty incidents of rioting (including the infamous Heysel Stadium incident in Brussels, Belgium), but were also partly inspired by a fire at Valley Parade stadium Bradford, in which 56 people died.

The obligation for all stadia to be seating-only was not introduced until 1990 following a serious instance of crowd congestion at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield when 95 Liverpool fans were crushed to death. No rioting was involved.

I miss some of the camaraderie of the old terracing, but there’s no doubt that the changes helped to solve past problems. In some stadia there was unrestricted access to all areas. This allowed such idiosyncracies as spectators changing ends at half time, but it also allowed troublemakers to charge at one another, and that’s not possible any more.

I ought to add something in defence of Scottish fans though. They had a very bad reputation (at least among the English) for a brief period during the '70s, almost entirely due to rowdiness under the influence of alcohol. But those problems have been completely erased these days, and Scottish fans pride themselves on their excellent reputation in Europe. That involves a fair amount of sardonic delight in the fact that they are often welcomed with open arms abroad while the English are still viewed as a threat.

Personally I would love to see English fans learn the Scottish lesson. That has happened on occasions (the Japan/Korea World Cup was an unalloyed success for instance), but there’s plenty of room for improvement.

16

Following on from Vetch’s comments above it’s worth adding that on this side of the water we get very little media coverage of misbehaviour at American sports (although there was extensive coverage of bottle-throwing at the Cleveland Browns’ game against the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2001).

In my opinion, press coverage of football violence has made the problem worse rather than better. Certain tabloid papers have an approach to all social problems that makes the perpetrators feel like celebrities, and the nationalistic aspect of the violence is actively encouraged by the xenophobia that is routine for those papers.

If these problems at American sports are a new thing I recommend you to learn from the British (especially English) experience. Our police have had to become experts at dealing with these problems and know the value of a subtle and proportionate response. But I hope you do solve the problems as soon as possible, because I know how they can ruin the enjoyment of following your team in a healthy, harmless way.

This article discusses some of the issue involved in greater depth than I have been able to in this thread. It’s well worth a look:

Tackling football violence from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford.

17

I think more could be done to teach players what is acceptable and what isn’t. It must be very hard for a player to resist the opportunity to respond to opposing fans when they’ve been barracking him for an hour, but they need to understand the risks of incitement more than they seem to.

I presume the spitting you mention was the El-Hadji Diouf incident last month? It was certainly fortunate that no serious trouble occurred as a result of that and imposing a fine because of the fans’ own behaviour made no sense to me.

18

I think people overestimate the relative amount of violence that takes (or took) place at games involving Celtic or Rangers (what happens involving people not actually attending the matches is a different matter).

The nastiest atmospheres I experienced were at East Coast games in the 1980s, especially between Aberdeen and the Edinburgh teams. There were only 3 grounds in Scotland that had fences between the fans and the pitch then; Hampden, Tynecastle and Easter Road; the first is the national stadium and the other 2 are the Edinburgh grounds. Even Parkhead (the Celtic ground), which had 60000 standing spaces well into the 80s, did not have a fence.

And eutactic carrying alcohol or any liquid container at a match in Scotland has been an arrestable offence since 1980. So has even trying to get into a ground when drunk. And why do you imply that Scots are more likely to be violent? The evidence of the last 15 years would suggest otherwise. (I admit that there’s a lot of BS spoken about “friendly Scotland fans” and I’m not looking to get into that debate here. It also should be pointed out that the reason for the fence at Hampden and the alcohol ban was a pitch invasion after an Old Firm cup final).

19

Civilization has either failed or succeeded far too well when people feel like they need to fight.

Payton’s Servant has a point about rioting, although I would say these problems have never been as widespread in the U.S. as they appeared to be in Great Britain at one time. As others have mentioned, the sheer size of the U.S. tends to marshal against any sort of “culture of violence” forming on anything but the local level.

But that can still be a pain. My alma mater, Ohio State U., is famous for having a student riot almost every quarter serious enough to require tear-gassing of entire neighborhoods. Usually, these are associated with football (the American kind) games, but not always. There was a riot serious enough to draw national attention after we defeated arch-rival Michigan just last year.
After that, the school made much noise about “cracking down on the students responsible,” completely ignoring the fact that of the 50 or so people the city police arested that night, only about a quarter were OSU students.
To me, that incident only provided more proof of what I witnessed when I was a student living near campus: the worst trouble is caused by outsiders who cruise the neighborhood just looking for chaos. The worst of those offenders are not students.

20

That might be an appropriate reply to the explanation I gave for the problems of social unrest in the 1970s, but not to the part of my post you quoted. Those people don’t feel the need to fight, they just enjoy it.

That sort of depends on how widespread you think they were in Great Britain, but you may be right. Perhaps the current problems in the USA are the beginning of something bigger to come though? That’s why I suggest that the best time to deal with the situation is now before it’s got out of hand. There’s an old expression “nip it in the bud”.

I find that easy to believe. Again as I explained previously, part of the reason why these problems grew over here was because of misdiagnosis and buck-passing. It doesn’t matter whether you have an algebra problem, a medical problem or a societal problem, the first step in finding its solution is to understand the problem. Government suggesteds here typically seemed to favour punishing football clubs and their fans in general, oblivious to the fact that many of the people causing the trouble (especially now) have no connection with the game at all.

However much effort authorities spend in “cracking down on those responsible”, they’re wasting their time if they’ve got the wrong suspects.