Avenues of contestation. Football hooligans running and ruling urban spaces

Mind your manors'. Football hooligans, space and the academic fieldIn the past thirty years, few issues have attracted the breadth of explanation and intensity of debate as that of football hooliganism. 2Those working from Marxist, 3 social psychological 4 and figurational perspectives 5 have constituted the main protagonists, though others within the overlapping fields of cultural studies, 6 anthropology, 7 and post-structuralist sociology 8 combine fresh ethnographies with critical commentaries upon the previously dominant paradigms.Although the manifestation and attempted social control of football hooliganism is directly concerned with the appropriation and exploitation of urban spaces, none of the recognised schools of thought have examined this issue with sufficient purpose.The trinity of major academic positions assessing the issue of fan violence have each tended to accord the question of 1 We thank Eduardo Archetti, Gerry Finn, Jock Young and two anonymous referees for their comments on a previous version of this paper.Professor Archetti's observation that our reading of young fan confrontations was highly applicable to Argentina was particularly encouraging.