Football, Class & Hooliganism

[soxfan121]

In other words, soccer hooliganism becomes kind of an object lesson in how certain forms of cultural stupidity can persist across generations. Like so many highly visible social problems, the question of "Why can't society fix this?" is answered with another question: Are you sure it wants to?
 

 
Interesting piece by Cracked.com's personal experience team, this time talking to soccer fans in England about hooliganism and fan behavior. 
 
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1716-drugs-violence-soccer-6-realities-hooliganism.html
 

"British police are some of the best in the world at dealing with riot situations [and] all of their training, all of their expertise, was developed through football. Football allows them to monitor groups of people through CCTVs; it allows them to track them through the country, to listen to them, to identity them, [and] convict them. And it happens at the same time every week: Saturday afternoon. Why would they want to solve that? It's the perfect training regimen."
 

 

 

[Morgan's Magic Snowplow]

At least in the English context, I would take issue with two of the premises of that article: That society hasn't been "fixing" the hooligan problem and that the phenomenon is distinctively tied to social class. Perhaps I'm wrong but my understanding is that football hooliganism has declined massively since its heyday in the 1980s.  I don't have anything remotely resembling first hand experience but the best book I've ever read about hooliganism was also pretty skeptical of the notion that football hooliganism was inherently a working class phenomenon.  His experience was that hooligans came from all walks of life - probably not from the very upper crust but from everywhere else in the class structure - and mainly consisted of young people who were just drawn to the transgressive experience of subsuming themselves into a violent mob.

 

[Mighty Joe Young]

It's been awhile since I read this book but it had some pretty good insights ..

http://www.amazon.ca/How-Soccer-Explains-World-Globalization/dp/0061978051

Many of the Eastern European soccer hooligans are part of neo-fascist political organizations.