The roots of football hooliganism: An historical and sociological study

by Eric Dunning

This systematic long-term historical study examines the history of crowd disorderliness at association football matches in Britain, and assesses both popular and academic explanations of the problem.

Genres: Nonfiction

250 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Billy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The influence of the Leicester school on the study of football hooliganism is obviously huge, and this book is a fairly useful historical resource. But the authors take a rather blasé view on hooliganism, which I find uncomfortable. Moreover their definition of football hooliganism, being any form of crowd or fan disorderliness, is so broad as to render it virtually useless for any kind of focussed or substantive analysis. There has to be a clear difference drawn between, say, two fans spontaneously fighting because one knocked the other’s pint over, and two fans or groups of fans engaging in pre-organised violence based upon socially organised and deep-rooted divisions. Their actual explanation for football hooliganism falls victim to a class based social determinism which may be somewhat true, albeit a little lacking in depth, in Britain. But many studies have shown that in Europe football hooliganism is perpetrated by individuals from a broad range of class backgrounds. So the whole ‘lower working class people have never been civilised so love to fight at football games’ doesn’t really work.