The Roots of Football Hooliganism

by Eric Dunning, Patrick J. Murphy, John Williams

This systematic historical and sociological study of the phenomenon of football hooliganism examines the history of crowd disorderliness at association football matches in Britain and assesses both popular and academic explanations of the problem. The authors’ study starts in the 1880s, when professional football first emerged in its modern form, charting the pre and inter-war periods and revealing that England’s World Cup triumph formed a watershed. The changing social composition of football crowds and the changing class structure of British society is discussed and the genesis of modern football hooliganism is explained by tracing it to the cultural conditions and circumstances which reproduce in young working-class males an interest in a publicly expressed aggressive masculine style.

Genres: Nonfiction

286 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Billy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The influence of the Leicester school on the study of football hooliganism is obviously huge, and this book is a fairly useful historical resource. But the authors take a rather blasé view on hooliganism, which I find uncomfortable. Moreover their definition of football hooliganism, being any form of crowd or fan disorderliness, is so broad as to render it virtually useless for any kind of focussed or substantive analysis. There has to be a clear difference drawn between, say, two fans spontaneously fighting because one knocked the other’s pint over, and two fans or groups of fans engaging in pre-organised violence based upon socially organised and deep-rooted divisions. Their actual explanation for football hooliganism falls victim to a class based social determinism which may be somewhat true, albeit a little lacking in depth, in Britain. But many studies have shown that in Europe football hooliganism is perpetrated by individuals from a broad range of class backgrounds. So the whole ‘lower working class people have never been civilised so love to fight at football games’ doesn’t really work.