After hearing about this weekend’s tragedy, I looked up the Wikipedia page on human stampedes/crushes and it confirmed my hunch: the overwhelming vast majority of sports events leading to deaths have happened at soccer games. The stats show of all sports related disasters, 2 US football games, 1 basketball game, and at least 26 soccer games had fatalities. (perhaps more, some of the descriptions were to vague to be sure).
Why, soccer though?
Is there something inherent to, and different from other sport stadiums, the design of soccer stadiums that leads to crushing fans to death?
Or is it the fans themselves that are the catalyst? They do have a violent reputation…
Soccer is vastly more popular around the world than (US) football or basketball (or baseball, or rugby, etc.). That likely explains the majority of the difference.
That’s why I said it likely explains the majority of the difference, not all of the difference.
Without evidence, I’d suspect the rest is explained just by virtue of soccer being popular in less-developed nations (like Indonesia). Developed places will have better-designed stadiums and security setups. The OP should compare stats like the US vs. Britain on a per capita basis if they want a useful comparison.
This was explained by the Simpsons. The crowd gets bored, someone says, “this is boring, I’m leaving” and someone else says “not before me you ain’t” and then there’s a concerns that there are not enough exits to escape the boredom and a riot ensues.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the violent soccer hooliganism thing largely a thing of the past (at least in the UK)? Pretty sure I read here on the Dope that England took a hard look at itself c. 1989 and decided to rebrand how it markets soccer. Or something. Like, market the whole experience as family-friendly (a la an American baseball game).
I would agree with this. A lot of stadiums in developing countries have lots of standing room only sections and/or haven’t been built with security in mind.
After some pretty big disasters, the English FA mandated all seater stadiums. That really did help quite a bit. Standing sections can become a place that folks can easily get crushed (these days stadiums are being built with “safe standing” sections - with rails between the terraces, etc).
Probably not crushing deaths specifically, but general spectator deaths at sporting events. I think if you got a list of all spectator deaths at sporting events, soccer would probably be the majority. The only other sport that you would probably find would be motor sports where the vehicles or vehicle parts go into the stands.
I would say it’s a combo if it’s popularity and internationality, which is certainly unique. Countries play against countries that don’t always have kind histories towards each other, and unlike the US with gridiron football, there is not the union of one nation behind interteam rivalry to moderate it.
I think the crush deaths are more of a stadium design and crowd control issue. They’ve just about vanished in Europe with better stadium design and crowd control, but you do still see them occasionally in parts of the world with standing seats and soccer culture that allows for that sort of behavior.
How does the mutual hatred between soccer fanbases compare to other sports? For contrast-comparison, Browns and Steelers fans hate each other, but I’ve never heard of a major riot between the two.
Is the hatred between, say, River Plate and Boca Juniors fans 10x as intense as Giants-Dodgers fans or Red Sox-Yankees fans?
I don’t know about Argentina, but in England and Scotland in the 1980s, something like Leeds-Millwall or Rangers-Celtic was orders of magnitude worse than Red Sox-Yankees has been for the last 20 years. Even in the 1980s in New York wearing a Red Sox jersey wasn’t going to get you serious abuse. Dunno about a Yankees jersey in Boston.
Though I understand that both the football rivalries are now much less intense. Celtic-Rangers by attempts to reduce the sectarian flavor of the clubs and Millwall-Leeds by them being in different tiers of the league most of the time.
Yeah, stadium design and crowd control techniques will lead to fewer issues and that’s going to favor nations that are economically better off, meaning it’s primarily soccer that’s affected.
Things can still happen, though perhaps not as directly or to the same scale. College (American) football games still have crush injuries sometimes when the crowd storms the field - which is why schools try to keep students from doing just that. And larger scale concerts (Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert comes to mind here) do still have crush deaths from time to time, particularly when there are inadequate safety measures. But by and large, stadium design and crowd control measures very successfully limit crush injuries and deaths.
