Sports

3 Pages 650 Words

“Spectator violence at football matches: towards a sociological explanation”

Although many fans are drawn into hooligan incidents- fans who did not set out for the match with disruptive intent are usually the ones that get arrested and charged with minor misdemeanors. But the hard core fans, those who engage most persistently in hooligan behavior in a football context, view fighting and aggressive behavior as an integral part of going to the match. These fans are frequently skilled at evading detection and arrest.
The two main official explanations of football hooliganism are caused by drinking and/or violence on the field. Both of these explanations have severe limitations. Drinking, for example, cannot be said to be a significant or deep cause of football hooliganism for the simple reason that not every fan that drinks takes part in hooligan acts. In fact, most fans that are involved are sober, but very aggressive. Similarly, violence on the field is not always preceded by hooligan incidents. Nor are all hooligan incidents always followed by violence on the field. This is not to say that drinking and violence on the field are causally not implicated by football hooligan fighting, but they are a series of conditions that can facilitate football hooligan violence.
According to Clarke, football hooligans come from disintegrated working class communities against commercialized football and the increasing packaging of the game as spectacle and entertainment. Most of these hooligans attended football matches free from the control of older relatives and neighbors who used to keep them in check. These people are almost always, young adult males that use football as a context for fighting. Most of these young adult males are manual workers or unemployed.










“How Conflict Escalates: the inter-group dynamics of collective football crowd violence”

There are individuals who attend footb...