Hooliganism Never Went Away Denying Publicity To Incidents Tends To Mask Ongoing Problem

The English soccer hooligan is often described as arrogant, intimidating, proud and unashamed. He’s male, usually working class and poorly educated - and extremely right-wing.

He was the scourge of English soccer in the 1970s and 1980s, but disappeared from the headlines in the ‘90s. It would be easy to say he’s back, but he never really left.

“The belief in recent years that the problem has gone away or had even been cured, partly as a result of all-seater stadiums, is simply not true,” said Eric Dunning of the Center for Football Research at Leicester University.

The problem resurfaced Wednesday night when hooligans forced a friendly match between Ireland and England in Dublin to be abandoned in the first half.

They had been acting up all evening, taunting the Irish fans with the chant “No surrender to the IRA,” giving Nazi salutes and howling during the Irish national anthem.

And when Ireland scored a goal to take the lead, that was the last straw. The hooligans began ripping up the very stands they were sitting on and throwing wooden and metal railings and other projectiles onto the fans in the deck below. Some 40 people were hospitalized.

It was a first even for England’s notorious followers: Never before had the national team been forced to abandon a match because of crowd trouble.

The offenders reacted not with remorse, but with pride, waving and cheering to TV cameras. It was the same kind of defiance that had been seen time and again from England supporters across the continent.

It appeared, on the surface at least, that the problem was on the wane after clubs and police tightened security in response to the fan violence of the 1980s, which climaxed when 39 Italians were killed in a riot involving English spectators at the European Champions Cup final in Brussels in May 1985.

Surveillance cameras were installed at most grounds. All-seater stadiums were mandated for top clubs. Lists of known hooligans were compiled in an effort to keep them from getting tickets to away matches.

But that didn’t eradicate the problem, says Patrick Murphy, also of the Leicester research center. He says the government and the media, to try to “deny the hooligans the oxygen of publicity,” had stopped reporting all but the most obvious incidents.

“There has been an attempt to minimize the level at which the hooliganism continues, and to maximize the success of the policies,” Murphy said. “The grounds are well-policed, but the success within the grounds has led to displacement and a level of disorder outside the grounds, and these incidents have gone unreported.

“The British transport police listed over 600 fan-related incidents from 1990-94, the vast majority unreported,” Murphy said. “What was previously a very sexy subject which led to sensational headlines has been downgraded or ignored.”

On the international level, it helped that England’s national team hadn’t played a road game more than a year before Wednesday’s trip to Dublin. At its last match of any significance, a World Cup qualifier in the Netherlands in October 1993, the English fans rioted in the streets of Rotterdam.

But the ugliness in Ireland once again put soccer on the front page. British newspapers called the hooligans everything from “scum” to “lepers of the world.”

“There actually as human as we are, but they adhere to different values,” Murphy said. “They predominantly come from working class backgrounds and have an aggressive masculinity, seen in the street culture, that manifests itself in many facets of society.

“Being brought up in their kind

of background, fighting becomes a source of status to them, part and parcel of this is gang formation and the willingness to hunt in packs.”