The UK used to have a big problem with football hooliganism. One thing I’m unclear about though, did this ever involve targetting people who weren’t looking for a fight, or was it pretty much always belligerent fans v other belligent fans? I know sometimes people got extremely badly hurt, but were those cases where they were expecting smaller scale fighting and just got hit much harder than expected?
Over the decades there has been a touch of everything.
There was a basic concept that hard core fans who claimed some form of attachment to specific clubs would arrange to meet at or around football grounds for a decent fight. Strictly between similar minded crews who were all actively looking for a ‘ruck.’
However fights near a football ground would inevitably involve real fans who were only there for the football. Sometimes an innocent punter would turn a corner and come face to face with a gang looking for a fight. It could get nasty. Genuine fans had to hide their team scarves until inside the supposedly segregated grounds.
Plus the hardcore ‘firms’ would inevitably get themselves ‘in the mood’ while travelling on trains or whatever and the general public would get abuse and threats at the very least and quite possibly a slap or a toeing if they were unlucky.
While in the grounds while the match was on, light hearted warm up activities such as bottle throwing or spitting would hit innocent fans as often as genuine rival fans.
So there is the myth it was all about consenting ‘professionals’ and certainly there was some violence of that sort. But at the height of the violence it was about mob rule on a Saturday afternoon, causing a mini riot and taking on the police, the public and just about achieving maximum mayhem and maximum notoriety in the papers.
It blighted the sport for a long time. It stopped being something you could take the kids to.
TCMF-2L
A lot of the time it was like-minded people fighting each other, however the idea that innocent people weren’t hurt both through carelessness and intent is a pure fiction put about by those seeking to romanticize the phenomenon.
Again, a lot of the time it was merely posturing and much of the actual violence was limited to skirmishing where the participants might be unlucky to come away with a thick ear or a black eye, however there are plenty of instances where it is clear there was intention to cause serious harm to each other including the use of weapons such as knives.
There were career criminals, neo-Nazis and psychopaths (there was a particular individual from my home town who achieved national notoriety who was all 3 of these things) involved in hooliganism and they were hardly a rarity among hooligans either. Some people would like to paint a sanitized picture of what happened, but take it with a massive pinch of salt.
I can’t speak for the UK, but I can confirm that soccer violence in Germany isn’t confined to those practising it. I have no interest in the sport whatsoever, and while minding my own business in a town’s market square on a Sunday morning I was nearly hit by a full bottle of beer lobbed from a crowd of soccer fans twenty metres away. If it had hit my head it might have killed me. Fortunately there were a lot of police in the area, and a few seconds after the bottle hit the ground they moved in to disperse the crowd.
A friend of mine claims these incidents aren’t unusual. He’s a soccer fan himself, though not the violent type, and says that he would never wear his team’s colours while in another team’s city for fear of being beaten.
When was the height of the violence, and what caused it to decline?
The nadir was probably 1985 with the Heysel Stadium disaster in Belgium (caused by Liverpool fans at the European Cup final) and the Kenilworth Road riot.
Very strong government intervention and from the footballing authorities from the late eighties onwards is probably the main cause of its decline.
There was also a move to ‘gentrify’ football-spectating with a membership scheme and identity cards to get in and all-seated stadia replacing the old standing terraces. This was given some force by some crush-injury deaths at one particular game caused by poor stadium design and poor crowd control by the police which resulted in many stadia being converted to all-seat configuration or just demolished and replaced on another site. Much of this resented by the old working-class followers of the game who didn’t like the idea of middle-class wankers colonising ‘their’ game.
For football salvation came in the form of the digital revolution, the multiplying of TV channels, and new ways of persuading viewers to pay-per-view. Huge rights offers, beyond what the publicly-funded BBC could afford or even the advertising-funded ITV network, poured money into football to modernise the infrastructure surrounding it and enrich the club owners and also the players. Ticket prices rose substantially, and with technical improvements in TV coverage many fans realised they could as good or better a view of the game on TV. Intense camera surveillance at stadia, itself a product of improved technology, identified troublemakers and new laws could target them with harsh restrictions on their freedom to travel to games, at home and abroad.
And many have pointed towards increased use of ecstasy, due to the acid house/rave scene in the late eighties. Hooligans were getting pilled up and loved up rather than beered up and looking for a fight.