I was at a Chicago Bears game at Soldier Field in the 1990s (before it was “renovated”), and watched a fight between three fans, a section over from us. It was a couple (a man and a woman), fighting against another guy; we guessed that the guy said something offensive to the woman, and the couple went after him. It was the woman who was clearly getting in the good punches and kicks, until security finally showed up, broke up the fight, and hauled all three of them off.
@chela same experience. What football or basketball game didn’t have a fist fight or three between the fans, and more than occasionally by the players?
Had a few heated words thrown my way at away games, nothing more. My rule is simple: cheer for your team, don’t be a dick, and 99% of the time you’ll be alright.
I lived in San Diego in the 80s and went to a handful of Charger games. At the time the Raiders were in LA and were very good and the Chargers were terrible. It’s a big rivalry (at least as far as the Chargers are concerned). When the Raiders came to play in San Diego, it was practically an extra home game for them as far at the crowd was concerned. Mostly Raider fans and Raider fans were notorious for being violent back them. Fights were pretty much constantly breaking out from the beginning to the parking lot on the way out.
I went to a college football game as a kid, and a brawl broke out near me. Just a couple of fans, and i have no idea what it was about. That’s about as close as I’ve come.
The club with the unofficial motto and regular chant of of ‘No one likes us, we don’t care’? They don’t have the best reputation, no.
I actually had a job as a football steward for a while, working at two different clubs. Mostly I did the VIP suite, which was pretty much trouble free, but I was present at one riot, where Bristol Rovers lost a match meaning they got kicked out down to the Conference league. I was in the safest seat in the venue though, the bar. They’d locked the doors as soon as they heard the whistle blow, so I was locked in with the bar staff and one perfectly pleasant fan who’d popped in to get a coke a few minutes before the end of the match, who was also quite happy to stay put.
You could see the riot on the pitch- including police horses, it was expected and planned for- through the window (which was a small slit and recessed to make it hard to spot or break). We even got a few seconds of it on the TV, though it wasn’t an officially televised match. They didn’t open the door until the grounds had been cleared. I was lucky. One of my colleagues had their jaw broken, there were a few more minor injuries among the staff.
I actually found it fascinating; as well as the football, there was rugby played at the same venue, and I also worked for their matches, which were often the following day (rugby tends to trash the pitch). For the football, the crowd was fully segregated, fan buses were escorted if they were expecting trouble, no alcohol within sight of the pitch or at all during play, multiple police spotters at every match, even the local pubs would be policed to assure that the fans didn’t go in the wrong one, and fights were a regular occurrence. And then you had the rugby; everyone mixed, alcohol in the stands, no worries, and I never saw a single fight. You’d even see guys wearing different team shirts, pint in hand, arms round each others shoulders, singing. OK, the songs were often obscene, but apart from that…
The really weird thing was that a big chunk of the local fans were the same people for both matches. Same guy that would be hurling abuse at the rival team for the football would be cheerfully chatting to a rival fan about finer points of a try at the rugby the next day.
I’ve heard a (probably quite classist) truism that’s believed in England: Football is a game played by gentlemen and supported by hooligans. Rugby is a game played by hooligans and supported by gentlemen.
It’s a cliche I’m familiar with, though as I said, a lot of people follow both and just change their behaviour. Regarding the players I don’t think there’s truth it it at all at the pro level; I generally worked in the VIP suite, I met rather a lot of players, current and retired, at various matches. The rugby players were generally noticeably nicer, to me at least, than the footballers.
Rugby is known for having a dirty, laddish sense of humour, but the issues with rugby-associated drunken bad behaviour are for things like the university clubs and societies, which can be admittedly awful (my own former university team is still, I think, banned from competing after a ‘hazing’ incident several years back), but those are often a mix of players and supporters and it tends to be more alcohol-and-testosterone-fuelled stupidity than simple aggression. There’s the odd violent incident reported from pro players, but not any more than the footballers. They do injure each other a lot while playing though.
The version I prefer is ‘football the violence stays off the pitch, rugby the violence stays on the pitch’.
UK university level sports can surprisingly be worse for violence than the pro levels; when I did the football stewarding/security, the only job that was presented as optional for staff due to the high risk was a football match between two local university teams (Bristol University and UWE). I declined, but from what I heard later, everyone showed up drunk and ready for a fight and it basically turned into a riot as soon as the match started. Apparently some seats were ripped off the stadium floor and thrown at rival fans, the staff got charged at and knocked down by the fans and several local buses had to be taken out of service to repair the damage caused by them heading back home. Unlike the pro matches though, there were no police and very limited reporting, which was confined to what happened outside after the match.