The Good Old Days

Our friend Andrew Nixon, on his excellent blog "Think of England", writes a fascinating account about the growth and demise of English hooligan culture. Please read it in full. The story of tribal affiliation among young males is an age-old story, but what is interesting in this case are the reasons for its demise:

Anyway, that all stopped in the early 1990s, and it’s no longer a problem in Britain.What killed it? Partly better police intelligence, but the main reason was a cultural shift.

The old days of the terraces – firm breeding grounds where you could stand where you liked and get yourself into little gangs to sing abusive songs, have gone. Big grounds are required to be all-seating. Football is now, in very sense, ‘multicultural’. Sky television bought the rights to football coverage in 1992, called Division 1 “The Premiership” and glammed it up like the NFL. There are more women, children, middle-classes and ethnic minorities going than ever before – a football match is basically much more like an American sporting occasion.

Chelsea FC – once home of the Headhunters – are now owned by a Russian billionaire, managed by a Portugese coach and have only two or three English players, and their fans are the richest and poshest in the country.

And the few remaining pockets of hooligan culture in England are now in the backwaters and the lower divisions, where the glamour and gentrification has yet to penetrate (Cardiff, Millwall and Stoke are the worst).

So a crucial factor for the success of tribal male gang culture, exclusivity, was removed when English football fanship became, as we say here in the States, a "family" activity. Andrew makes a comparison between hooligan culture and the saga of organized crime in America, especially in respect to the nostalgia being expressed for it:

In much the same way that America’s Italian hoodlums have become lionised in celluloid, time seems to have diminished the genuine feelings of fear and loathing the football ‘firms’ of the 1980s inspired, and replaced them with a romantic notion that these were merely loyal gangs of Merrie Men expressing their masculinity. And a key myth is that hooligans only ever hurt each other, leaving innocent bystanders alone.

The main difference, of course, between English hooligan gangs and the Mafia is that the former was purely a "non-profit", or recreational affilitation. The firms were in it for the excitement, the thrills that the peak experience of group violence bring to the young male psyche. A better analogy from an American standpoint would be the growth of motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels in the 1950s and 1960s, or Gangsta Culture, a movement originating with black drug gangs in major American inner city neighborhoods such as Los Angeles or Chicago and spread by the popularity of Gangsta Rap, and resulting in local wannabe copycat gangs in smaller cities, among blacks and even middle class or affluent white males with no connection to the drug trade.

One nit to pick with Andrew's account:

In the late 1970 and throughout the 1980s, football crowds were almost exclusively white, working-class men.Within those crowds were pockets of bored, disaffected youths who gradually got themselves in gangs ('firms') with the intention of engaging in tribal warfare with firms from other teams.

It is pretty standard to see such men as being disaffected from society. From Merriam Webster Online, disaffect is defined as "to alienate the affection or loyalty of", suggesting that, through neglect or active discrimination, society has failed to earn the loyalty of these young men. I think that, contrary to this widely held assumption, such behaviors are more akin to the default social behaviors that young men will engage in if not actively coerced out of by the process described as "socialization". Call it the "Lord of the Flies" hypothesis. The kind of pro-social behaviors that we deem normal need to be driven into young men through an active conditioning process, much as a wild horse is "broken" into obedience to human masters. These young men, rather than acting out of some rage brough about by a feeling of being excluded from society, were instead acting from a sense of total freedom, of feeling that they have "the run of the place".

We'd all like to believe that the natural instinct of people, especially males, is to be good and to get along with others in society. It is amazing to ponder the extent to which we all promote this faith, in contradiction to actual experience.