Or George Orwell, the famous 20th century novelist and
social critic, once talked about soccer as war without shooting.
And soccer games and the contest between rival fans can sometimes
turn into if not shooting matches, matches where people are throwing rocks and
trying to wreak havoc on the opposing side.
And I think for example of 1985 in Belgium where some 70 fans
are trampled to death in a big game between Liverpool and Juventas.
Or more recently, in Port Sayid in Egypt,
dozens of people are killed in these riots around soccer games there.
Now, the question around soccer hooliganism is why.
And there's a big sociological and
historical literature dedicated to figuring all of this out.
There's some great books by journalists too about soccer hooliganism.
I recommend to you, a kind of hilarious, horrifying read,
Bill Buford's Among the Thugs as a classic of this genre.
Now clearly one of the reasons that soccer hooliganism happens is because
you have fierce rivalries, longstanding rivalries between teams
that incite these passions that can sometimes boil over in ugly ways.
But I think more deeply soccer hooliganism often, not always, but
often also has to do with the way that soccer is hitched up to ethnic and
religious and nationalist passions.
So soccer hooliganism is about the game and about the team, but
it's this contest or this confrontation where bigger,
more divisive issues, social issues, are also at stake.
So for example, we talked about Red Star and Dinamo Zagreb, and
the way that that competition and hooliganism there is linked up,
hitched up, to conflict between Croats and Serbs.
Or one could think about the famous rivalry of Celtic and
Ranger, which are two Scottish teams, but
whose allegiances are very tied to religious conflict.
Sometimes hatreds in Ireland, in Northern Ireland in particular,
where Catholics support Celtic, and Protestants support Ranger.
And if you wear that blue Ranger shirt in a Catholic neighborhood in Belfast,
it's gonna get you into trouble and vice versa.
Or one thinks of the soccer war of a few decades ago in Central America between
Honduras and El Salvador, where the tension between these two
countries at that time was melded into the World Cup qualifying match.
And led not just to hooliganism but all the way into a war,
a brief war, but a war nonetheless, between these two countries.
So hooliganism has to do with the way that soccer gets tied up to these
bigger social cleavages.
And also, soccer hooliganism has to do with the fact of crowd psychology,
the twisted, weird, unfathomable question of how we behave.
Maybe not so unfathomable, but big question of how we behave in crowds.
Here an important thinker is a man, a French intellectual,
an activist, politician of the 19th century named Gustave Le Bon,
who wrote a lot about crowds and crowd psychology.
And Le Bon coins the idea of
what he calls submergence to make sense of how crowds behave.
And his idea was that when we're in crowds our individual will and
desires and moral sense are submerged, melded into the larger will of the crowd.
And it's the will of the crowd that takes precedence over everything else.
Everything else is submerged and Hitler and
Mussolini were actually very interested in Le Bon's work.
Because they understood how you could use mass rallies and
create these giant crowd atmospheres to get
everyone to support their fascist projects, and their personal leadership.
And crowds are what we have in sports and in soccer games as well.
And when crowds get into big numbers and the will of the crowd becomes to attack,
whether inside the stadium or out, members of the fans of the opposite team.
We tend to where people can lose their own sense of individual right and wrong.
So, if the crowd is saying,
let's go after them, using an example, the Beshiktash team.
The individual will often not stop to think, hey maybe it's not a great idea for
me to be going around and hitting other people on the head with a beer bottle.
You lose that sense of individual judgement within the great dynamic,
the swelling dynamic of the crowd.
So, these are some of the reasons and the forces at work in soccer hooliganism.
But soccer hooliganism isn't the only dark side of fandom.