Drawing on research from Britain, Europe, Argentina and the USA this volume examines the culture and loyalties of soccer players and crowds and their relationships to social order, disorder and violence. This informative and accessible book will be of interest to students of Sport Science and to all of those who love the game of soccer.

Drawing on research from Britain, Europe, Argentina and the USA this volume examines the culture and loyalties of soccer players and crowds and their relationships to social order, disorder and violence. This informative and accessible book will be of interest to students of Sport Science and to all of those who love the game of soccer.

Football hooliganism periodically generates widespread political and public anxiety. In spite of the efforts made and resources invested over the past decades, football hooliganism is still perceived by politicians, policymakers and media as a disturbing social problem. This highly readable book provides the first systematic and empirically grounded comparison of football hooliganism in different national and local contexts. Focused around the six Western European football clubs on which the author did his research, the book shows how different clubs experience and understand football hooliganism in different ways. The development and effects of anti-hooligan policies are also assessed. The emphasis throughout is on the importance of context, social interaction and collective identity for understanding football hooliganism. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in football culture, hooliganism and collective violence.

This book examines how groups of young male fans come to be defined and identified as football `hooligans and challenges the assumption that violence is wholly central to the match-day experience for these supporters. Rather, the creation of identity is at the root of hooliganism, with all the cultural values and rituals, codes of honour and shame, and communal patterns of behaviour and consumption that accompany it. The author locates hooliganism historically within the milieu of an industrial working class culture and examines ideas of performance and ritual encompassed in idealized masculinity. The book is based on a decades in-depth study of the `Blades, a group of football fans supporting Sheffield United, who are notorious for their hooliganism. It contributes to the debate on football hooliganism by challenging many traditionally-held notions of hooliganism and by providing the first anthropological study of football violence. The book also debunks the myth that violence between football fans is organized by `generals operating within hierarchically structured groups. Falsehoods such as this, it is argued, are advanced to augment the powers of the police and media in redefining and controlling particular groups of individuals whose behaviour does not fit easily within increasingly constrictive codes of social conduct. This book represents essential reading not only for undergraduates of social anthropology, sociology and criminology but also for the general reader with an interest in football culture.

Focusing on a number of contemporary research themes and placing them within the context of palpable changes that have occurred within football in recent years, this timely collection brings together essays about football, crime and fan behaviour from leading experts in the fields of criminology, law, sociology, psychology and cultural studies.

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Cultural Studies - Miscellaneous, grade: A-, , language: English, abstract: Wandering the ground outside Old Trafford Buford tried to find some hooligans that he could interview. However, he could not find any because initially he could not tell the hooligans apart from the average fans. Instead, Buford saw thousands of fans all behaving in the same manner; singing, dancing, shouting, drinking and celebrating, and he realised that the hooligan fan in many ways behaved exactly like the average fan. Buford finally found one of "them", a fella named Mick, who belonged to the Manchester United firm known as ICJ, the Inter-City Jibbers (named after the British Rail commuter service). Through Mick Buford was introduced into the subculture of hooligans, and through Buford and many others, certain conclusions have been drawn about the hooligans and the hooligan phenomenon. Most sociologist, anthropologists, and psychologists thus agree that roughly six primary features underpin the construction of the hooligan identities; 1) excitement and pleasurable emotional arousal of violence, 2) hard masculinity, 3) territorial identifications, 4) representations of sovereignty and autonomy, 5) individual and collective management of reputation, and finally, 6) a sense of solidarity and belonging. These shared features or commonalities allow us to begin the analysis of football hooliganism as a subcultural activity which will be the focus of the following sections.