Spectator Violence at Football Matches: Towards a Sociological Explanation

The subject of this paper is 'football hooliganism'. We shall focus centrally in this connection on the pattern of fighting between rival groups that has come to be regularly associated with soccer, not only in this country but in a number of others besides. In fact, although this rarely surfaces in the press, there is scarcely a country where Association football is played where eruptions of crowd violence have not occurred, though English fans are currently the most feared in Europe and the only ones who regularly cause trouble when they are travelling abroad in support of their clubs or the national side.l The research on which the paper is based was funded by the Social Science Research Council (now the ESRC) and the Football Trust. Before we set forth some of our results, we shall sketch in some of the main parameters of football hooliganism as a social phenomenon.