Reading about the news yesterday about 127 fans and police being killed in a soccer clash at a stadium in Indonesia, and thinking about the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster that killed 97 people, it got me to thinking that soccer (association football) seems to be the only sport in which fans are dangerous enough that they have to be segregated based off of their team fanhood in the stadium.
You don’t see NBA games, NFL, NHL, MLB, etc., segregated that way - Bears and Packers fans mingle together aplenty in the stands, Yankees and Red Sox fans intermingle. Violence is quite low. Sure, you have some college football games that are segregated neatly by fanhood (the Texas-Oklahoma college football game, where the stadium is exactly half red and half orange, comes to mind.)
Is it just that soccer fans are uniquely more violent than fans of most sports? What other sports need fans to put in separate sections based off of their fanhood?
How would that have come about evolutionarilly speaking? Or most likely what happened is that a small number of idjits got violent and when the police responded, that response caused a panic and, of courses, people got hurt and died in the stampede.
I should point out that the Hillsborough disaster was not a consequence of the violence of the fans, despite allegations in some newspapers at the time; this occurred simply because the crowd was funneled into a confined space, causing crush injuries and asphyxiation.
Philadelphia used to assign a municipal court judge to Veteran’s Stadium on Eagles game days to deal with rowdy fans on-site. It was known as “Eagles Court.”
To be fair, the judge that was assigned to the stadium has stated that the vast majority of the offenders were out-of-town fans.
Someone on reddit said they’d gone to a Packers game years ago wearing gear from the opposing team. Their team lost and they were a little astonished after the game when a couple of Packers fans apologized to them for beating the other team.
Speaking as a Packer fan, and season ticket holder, who’s gone to games since the 1970s, that has always been my experience. Fans wearing the opponents’ gear may get some good-natured ribbing, but I’ve never seen any fighting or even seriously harsh language between Packer fans and opposing fans.
I have a theory that football/soccer fans are more violent because it is by far the biggest sport in most places in the world. In places where it’s not as big, but still popular, the fans aren’t as crazy. A google search for “Japanese soccer violence” gets one article from 2002, but other than that a bunch of results about the latest in Indonesia, as well as a case of the Japanese cleaning up after themselves instead of being violent. Now perhaps that just says something about the Japanese, but soccer there is greatly eclipsed by baseball, and there’s also sumo, though that’s not particularly popular with the kind of people who would become violent. In the west indies, cricket is rather popular, and googling for west indies soccer violence gets again Indonesia reports as well as corruption in the administration, but nothing about hooliganism specific to those locales.
The idea being is that many young people have nothing better to do than follow sports, and there is no sport to follow other than soccer. This leads to them defining their whole life around soccer, rather than switching off to other sports during their season. While certainly there might be fans of one specific major North American sport, most people that are homers are homers with respect to all the team sports in their hometown, which is basically 5 if you think soccer warrants counting.
It was not a result of violence fans that day but the management of the crowds and the treatment of them in that way (plus the wire cages at the front of the terraces) were in no small amount as a result of the bad behaviour of other fans previously.
(Indeed, Liverpool fans themselves were at fault for the rioting at Heysel and the deaths of 39 Italian fans 5 years earlier)
My Dad was a University of Washington alumni, and when they played an away game down here in SoCal, I remember the fans being segregated by a chainlink fence, and things were thrown over it. I saw no actual violence, however.
Like I pointed out in another thread about soccer fan violence, a lot of the European teams’ fan bases mirror existing groups in society.
An example is that Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow have fan bases that correspond to Catholic and Protestants, respectively. Other teams in other countries may be supported by specific neighborhoods/ethnicities/socioeconomic groups. Another example is that Roma’s supporters have a left-wing political slant, while Lazio’s have a right-wing slant.
So a lot of clubs have a lot of pride/identity wound up in their fan bases that surpasses just following the team’s fortunes on the pitch, and a lot of that spills out into violence among the working-class young males.
In the US we don’t really see this much, because our sports teams tend to be some combination of larger scale (major leagues), not blue collar/culturally violent (college sports), or just not that avidly followed on the whole (minor league sports).
I used to live in Ohio, and before the Michigan vs. Ohio State there would be billboards up around Columbus begging the Ohio State fans to please not harass the Michigan fans. Don’t turn their cars over and set them on fire.
Some of the international cricket games have been known to get pretty rowdy, particularly India/Pakistan matches and recently during a Pakistan/Afghanistan match. I don’t believe the fans get segregated though. Generally for cricket there is not a need to. There have been a few crowd clearing fights break out in boxing matches between fans, but again nothing that rises to the level of needing to segregate the crowd on a regular basis like soccer.
I think it is just soccer (association football if you insist) and it’s not just Europe
Personally I wouldn’t wear opposing team gear in any stadium. Even in Philly I not afraid the crowd would rise up and murder me. But all it takes is one drunk to ruin your day. I’ve seen more Mets fans fighting each other than Yankee fans fighting Red Sox fans.