Lokomotive Leipzig fans leave their seats before their team's encounter with Dynamo Schwerin in the East German FDGB-Pokal in 1990
Football hooliganism is unruly, violent, and destructive behaviour by overzealous supporters of association football clubs, including brawling, vandalism and intimidation.
Football hooliganism normally involves conflict between gangs, often known as football firms (the term derives from the British slang for a criminal gang), formed for the specific purpose of intimidating and physically attacking supporters of other teams. Other terms commonly used in connection with hooligan firms include "army", "boys", "casuals", and "crew". Certain clubs have long-standing rivalries with other clubs (usually, but not always, geographically close) and hooliganism associated with matches between them (sometimes called local derbies), is likely to be more severe.
Conflict may take place before, during or after matches. Participants often select locations away from stadia to avoid arrest by the police, but conflict can also erupt spontaneously inside the stadium or in the surrounding streets. In such cases, shop windows may be smashed, rubbish bins set on fire, and police cars may be overturned. In extreme cases, hooligans, police, and bystanders have been killed, and body-armoured riot police have intervened with tear gas, police dogs, armoured vehicles and water cannons. Hooligan-led violence has been called "aggro" (short for "aggravation") and "bovver" (the Cockney pronunciation of "bother", i.e. trouble). To "run" opposing hooligans is to make them flee.
Hooligans who can afford the time and money may follow the national team on its journeys to away matches and engage in hooligan behaviour against the hooligans of the home team. They may also become involved in disorder involving the general public. While national-level firms do not exist in the form of club-level firms, hooligans supporting the national team may use a collective name indicating their allegiance.
Anti-hooligan measures[]
Police and civil authorities in various countries with hooligan problems have taken a number of measures, including:
- banning items that could be used as weapons or missiles in stadia, and searching suspected hooligans
- banning identified hooligans from stadia, either formally via judicial orders, or informally by denying them admittance on the day
- moving to all-seated stadia, which reduces the risk of disorderly crowd movement
- segregating opposing fans, and fencing enclosures to keep fans away from each other and off the pitch
- banning opposing fans from matches and/or ordering specific matches to be played behind closed doors
- compiling registers of known hooligans
- restricting the ability of known hooligans to travel overseas.
United Kingdom[]
- Main article: Football hooliganism in the United Kingdom
There are records of football hooliganism in the UK from the 1880s, and from no later than the 1960s the UK had a worldwide reputation for it – the phenomenon was often dubbed the English Disease.
From the 1970s, many organised hooligan firms sprang up, with most Football League clubs having at least one known organised hooligan element. Hooliganism was often as its worst when local rivals played each other. Supporters of teams including Chelsea, Leeds United, Millwall, Tottenham Hotspur, Portsmouth F.C., West Ham United and Bristol City were among those most frequently linked to hooliganism.
Racism became a major factor in hooliganism around the same time, as black players became a regular feature in English league teams. Black players were frequently targeted with monkey chants, and had bananas thrown at them.
Sectarian violence has long been a regular factor of crowd violence, as well as offensive chanting, at matches in Scotland between Celtic and Rangers.
As a result of the Heysel Stadium disaster at Brussels, Belgium, in 1985, where rioting led to the death of 39 Juventus fans, English clubs were banned from all European competitions until 1990, with Liverpool (the English team present) banned for an additional year. According to Manchester United hooligan Colin Blaney in his autobiography 'The Undesirables', many of the football hooligan gangs in the UK used hooliganism as a cover for acquisitive forms of crime, specifically theft and burglary. This has also been confirmed in numerous other articles on the subject. In the 1980s and well into the 1990s the UK government led a major crackdown on football-related violence. While football hooliganism has been a growing concern in some other European countries in recent years, British football fans now tend to have a better reputation abroad. Although reports of British football hooliganism still surface, the instances now tend to occur at pre-arranged locations including pubs rather than at the matches themselves.
English clubs who have made the headlines for the worst and most frequent cases of hooliganism include Birmingham City (whose multi racial hooligan element gained the nickname "Zulus" from fans of rival teams in the 1970s when football hooligans were almost always white British), Chelsea (whose then chairman Ken Bates installed an electric fence at the club's stadium in the mid 1980s to combat hooligans, but was refused permission to switch it on during matches), Leeds United (who were banned from European competitions following a riot after the 1975 European Cup final against Bayern München), Liverpool (14 of whose fans were convicted after a riot at the 1985 European Cup final resulted in the deaths of 39 spectators at Heysel Stadium in Belgium when a stadium wall collapsed, leading to English clubs being banned from European competitions for 5 years), Manchester United (who were booted out of the European Cup Winner's Cup in 1977 after their fans rioted a game in France, although they were reinstated to the competition on appeal), Millwall (whose most notorious hooliganism incident was in 1985 when their fans rioted in an FA Cup tie at Luton), Tottenham Hotspur who gained notoriety for the 1974 Eufa Cup Final disturbances and game again in Rotterdam in 1983 (who had a section of fans banned from all football grounds in England in 2008 for their racial and homophobic abuse of former player Sol Campbell) and Wolves (who had dozens of fans convicted of incidents in the late 1980s involving the Subway Army hooligan firm at matches against teams including Cardiff City and Scarborough when they were in the Fourth Division).
External links[]
- Chinese Nation on Alert over Soccer Riots, People's Daily Online, 4 June 2001
- Chinese football fans riot over penalty, BBC, 25 March 2002
- Chinese riot after Japan victory, BBC, 7 August 2004
- Rockets, riots and rivalry, Observer Sport Monthly, 26 November 2006. Article about football hooliganism in Israel
- Don't be a hooligan
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