Among the Thugs Quotes

“The crowd is not us. It never is.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“This was a mouth that had suffered many slings and arrows along with the occasional thrashing and several hundredweight of tobacco and Cadbury's milk chocolate. This was a mouth through which a great deal of life had passed at, it would appear, an uncompromising speed.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“He is merely the first to cross an important boundary of behavior, a tactic boundary that, recognized by everyone there, separates one kind of conduct from another. He is prepared to commit this ‘threshold’ act – an act which, created by the crowd, would have been impossible without the crowd, even though the crowd itself is not prepared to follow: yet.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“I was surprised by what I found; moreover, because I came away with a knowledge that I had not possessed before, I was also grateful, and surprised by that as well. I had not expected the violence to be so pleasurable....This is, if you like, the answer to the hundred-dollar question: why do young males riot every Saturday? They do it for the same reason that another generation drank too much, or smoked dope, or took hallucinogenic drugs, or behaved badly or rebelliously. Violence is their antisocial kick, their mind-altering experience, an adrenaline-induced euphoria that might be all the more powerful because it is generated by the body itself, with, I was convinced, many of the same addictive qualities that characterize synthetically-produced drugs”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“All this intelligent and careful work revealed a man of great forethought. Yet you could see in Mr. Wicks's eyes--as he stood in the shade of the terminal awning, all that tweed and education waving to us, as one by one each bus pulled out for the noisy drive into the city--that he had failed.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“Violence is one of the most intensely lived experiences and”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“You see”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“He is prepared to commit this “threshold” act—an act which, created by the crowd, would have been impossible without the crowd, even though the crowd itself is not prepared to follow: yet.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“Clayton had a number of troubles but his greatest one was his trousers.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“Basle in Switzerland. The next season, Juventus was in the European Cup. In the first round, it played the Finnish team Ilves-Kissat and won six-nil. It won the second round, and in the quarterfinals played Sparta Prague: again a victory for Juventus. The semifinal was against Bordeaux. It wasn’t until the final that Juventus played an English team again, the first time since Manchester United visited Turin. The team was Liverpool; the stadium was Heysel in Brussels. Juventus won one-nil; the goal was a penalty kick. Before the match began, thirty-nine people died; six hundred were injured.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“In my eyes, Bobby Boss was nothing less than evil, a wide-boy of working-class sport, a cowboy on the make, one of the little men who sells you more seats than he has to offer, wants more cash than there are receipts to show for it, an expert in securing a bit of this, a bit of that. Why had he told people there would be seats when there weren’t even tickets?”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“I was disappointed. I had got used to the idea that Bobby Boss didn’t exist, that he had been invented by the supporters, an elaborate laundering operation that allowed them to buy tickets, book hotels, even hire guides like Jackie so that they could then go about the business of doing what they had been banned from doing.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“, stripped to the waist; their two fingers jabbing the air; the vicious expressions on their faces as they hurled back the objects that had been thrown at them. Italians behaving like hooligans?”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“Could you imagine a busload from Milan parading around Trafalgar Square showing off their tattoos? “Why do you English behave like this?” one Italian asked me, believing that I was of the same nationality. “Is it something to do with being an island race? Is it because you don’t feel European?”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“Mussolini was a wanker.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“Our ‘Hooligans’ go from bad to worse. They are an ugly growth on the body politic, and the worse circumstance is that they multiply, and that School Boards and prisons, police magistrates and philanthropists, do not seem to ameliorate them. Other great cities may throw off elements more perilous to the State. Nevertheless the ‘Hooligan’ is a hideous excrescence on our civilization. The Times [London], October 30, 1890”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“What principle governed the British sporting event? It appeared that, in exchange for a few pounds, you received one hour and forty-five minutes characterized by the greatest possible exposure to the worst possible weather, the greatest number of people in the smallest possible space, and the greatest number of obstacles—unreliable transportation, no parking, an intensely dangerous crush at the only exit, a repellent polio pond to pee into, last minute changes of the starting time—to keep you from ever attending a match again.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“Mark was still explaining. “You see, what it does is this: it gives violence a purpose. It makes us somebody. Because we’re not doing it for ourselves. We’re doing it for something greater—for us. The violence is for the lads.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“It was obvious that the violence was a protest. It made sense that it would be: that football matches were providing an outlet for frustrations of a powerful nature. So many young people were out of work or had never been able to find any. The violence, it followed, was a rebellion of some kind—social rebellion, class rebellion, something. I wanted to know more. I had read about the violence and, to the extent that I thought about it, had assumed that it was an isolated thing or mysterious in the way that crowd violence is meant to be mysterious: unpredictable, spontaneous, the mob. My journey from Wales suggested that it might be more intended, more willed. It offered up a vision of the English Saturday, the shopping day, that was different from the one I had known: that in the towns and cities, you might find hundreds of police, military in their comprehensiveness, out to contain young, male sports fans who, after attending an athletic contest, were determined to break or destroy the things that were in their way. It was hard to believe.

I repeated the story of my journey to friends, but I was surprised by how unsurprised they were. Some acted as if they were disgusted; others were amused; no one thought it was anything extraordinary. It was one of the things you put up with: that every Saturday young males trashed your trains, broke the windows of your pubs, destroyed your cars, wreaked havoc on your town centres. I didn’t buy it, but it seemed to be so. In fact the only time I felt that I had said something surprising was when I revealed that, although I had now seen a football crowd, I had never been to an English football match. This, it seemed, was shocking.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“It was, I see now on reflection, not unlike alcohol or tobacco: disgusting, at first; pleasurable, with effort; addictive, over time. And perhaps, in the end, a little self-destroying.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“I felt weightless. I felt nothing would happen to me. I felt that anything might happen to me. I was looking straight ahead, running, trying to keep up, and things were occurring along the dark peripheries of my vision: there would be a bright light and then darkness again and the sound, constantly, of something else breaking, and of movement, of objects being thrown and of people falling.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs

“It was one of the things you put up with: that every Saturday young males trashed your trains, broke the windows of your pubs, destroyed your cars, wreaked havoc on your town centres. I didn't buy it, but it seemed to be so.”
― Bill Buford, Among the Thugs