Entre los vándalos

by Bill Buford, Miguel Martínez Lage (Translator)

En 1982, Bill Buford subió a un tren en una estación rural, en Gales. El tren estaba en manos de un nutrido grupo de aficionados al fútbol que habían comenzado su metódica destrucción; las fuerzas policiales fueron incapaces de impedirlo. Antes de llegar a Londres, el tren quedó fuera de servicio. Bill Buford, norteamericano residente en Gran Bretaña, jamás había presenciado una conducta parecida entre los aficionados al fú nunca había visto a un «hooligan» inglés, a un «vándalo». ¿Había alguien que realmente tuviese conciencia de lo que sucedía todos los sábados en todos los rincones del país? ¿Por qué no se había parado nadie a escribir en serio acerca de ellos? Durante los ocho años que siguieron -los años de las revueltas en los ferries que cruzaban el Canal de la Mancha, de las reyertas en la calle, en los alrededores de los campos de fútbol, de las tragedias de Heysel y de Hillsborough, de la violencia desatada en el Mundial de 1990-. Buford se aprestó a viajar con los hinchas. Viajó con ellos por Gran Bretaña, Italia, Turquía, Grecia y Alemania. Asistió a reuniones del National Front y fue testigo del saqueo de un pub. Vio apuñalamientos, escenas de violencia extrema -en uno de los casos, la violencia sólo pudo detenerse con la llegada de un tanque del ejército-. Conoció a personas con apodos tales como Pete Parafina, Sammy el Caliente, Cabeza de Piedra... Se hizo amigo de otros, muchos de los cuales están hoy en la cá carteristas, tironeros, atracadores, traficantes de cocaína, comerciantes de dinero falsificado, e incluso conoció a uno que le arrancó a un policía el ojo de un mordisco.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sports, History, Football, Soccer, Sociology, Memoir

374 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

William Holmes Buford is an American author and journalist. He is the author of the books Among the Thugs and Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Buford was previously the fiction editor for The New Yorker, where he is still on staff. For sixteen years, he was the editor of Granta, which he relaunched in 1979. He is also credited with coining the term "dirty realism".

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd forgotten about this one. It's hilarious, in a grim kind of way, which is how hilarious should be. Expat American infiltrates the notorious English football hooligan sub-culture of the late 80s/early 90s, you may remember those horrible violent yobs. These were hard nuts like the Inter-City Firm from West Ham who yould beat the daylights out of you and leave you broken, bleeding and barfing in a back alley but always remember to leave a smartly printed business card in one of your pockets saying

YOU HAVE BEEN SERVICED BY THE INTER-CITY FIRM

Bill Buford got in with Millwall, who were one of the loutiest, and Cambridge United fans too, who weren't much better, and he writes with a fabulous gusto about it all. Recommended for afficionados of British working class culture. Of course it's all now changed, hardly any football violence happens now. It's a problem that's almost been solved. How did they do that, then? Well, two things happened. The first was Hillsborough, a stadium in Sheffield, in which not quite controlled supporters were allowed by panicking police to pile into a fenced-in spectator area to such an overwhelming extent that a crowd crush built up against the restraining fence, and 96 young people died, right there live on television. That was in 1989. It shook the whole nation. The football authorities drew up new rules for every stadium in Britain : no spectator's standing areas (they were called terraces) any more - football will be all-seating from now on. This was the first major change in football for donkey's years. After that came wholesale gentrification and prices of season tickets going through the roof.
But the second thing which rendered the gruesome football violence a thing of the past was

ECSTACY

Irvine Welsh spins this (to me convincing) theory in his excellent novel Maribou Stork Nightmares. The dance/rave culture that boomed in the early 90s in Britain sucked in all the working class delinquents who had been happily inflicting grievous bodily harm on each other, and infused their bloodstreams with the wonder drug Ecstacy, which was a major component of rave culture. It took a few years but the violence began to melt away. So the all-seater stadiums and the soaring prices, plus the beatific state of mind achievable at 150 beats per minute, solved what had previously been seen as ugly and intractable. Curious how these things work out sometimes.

[Book Clubbed · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolutely bonkers tale, equally brutal and fascinating, of Bill Buford's attempt to embed himself within the English soccer hooligan scene. I mean, these goons make NFL fans look like a group of tepid HR department reps who tuck their sleeveless button-ups into their underwear. Buford tracks the boys for years, and we get intimate backstories, thrilling soccer matches, senseless violence, and cultures (literally) clashing when the fans visit neighboring countries.

If violence makes you a little weak in the knees, this will be a hard read. Similarly, if you are convinced that sports glorify masculine displays of violence that is detrimental to society (probably correct!) then no amount of justification by Buford can probably convince you otherwise.

However, I did appreciate Buford's ability to consider the fans from every angle: the comradery, their mind-numbing jobs, their lack of social mobility, the ecstasy of violence, the local and and nationalistic pride, etc. He sets us within a variety of soccer locales before unveiling his thesis around violence and the gravity of the group (or gang, really), so that the academic musings feel strongly connected to the people and places we have become familiar with.

He also does an amazing job of implicating himself, always questioning and reflecting on his role within the group. When he starts out, he is almost cast as an undercover agent, having to convince the men that he won't betray them. By the end, he is caught in the maelstrom of violence himself, having to determine how he blurred the lines between journalist and hooligan.

Such is the power of the group: easy to criticize from the outside, almost impossible to escape once it has lured you in.

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION!

I can say without hesitation that this is the best of the 55 books I’ve read this year. It’s gonzo-style journalism at its very best; funny, horrific, impertinent, robust and insightful by turns; it one-ups Hunter S. Thompson and does for English soccer hooligans what HST did for Hell’s Angels in his classic book on same. It’s not just a read but an overwhelming experience; intensely engaging and memorable. I doubt I’ll ever forget about Mickey and Sammy and Rod and DJ and Harry, different men from different backgrounds brought together ostensibly under the banner of soccer fandom for the purpose of affecting mayhem as a way of giving defining meaning to their lives. Of all the characters in the book, it is Harry—middle class, securely employed, doted on by a loving wife and child; soft-spoken and seemingly as harmless as his Cowardly Lion appearance—who shatters all the standard illusions, including Buford’s, of what a British soccer hooligan is and what their motivations are. Harry, driven by some unknowable compulsion but in keeping with the irrational violent expectations of his fellow “lads,” ends up perpetrating one of the most wincingly horrific acts of violence you will ever read about.

Author Bill Buford was an American abroad in the 1980s when he began to immerse himself into the culture of English football/soccer thugs, trying to understand what brings their members together, why they engage in petty crime (forming gangs of jibbers, for instance--fans who leave for matches with nothing, bully their way onto trains and into stadiums and return with loot in their pockets), and to find out if there is any sociological pattern to their gang-like violent behavior and to understand the psychology of mob riots. What he finds is disturbing, and shatters all his preconceived liberal-leaning notions.

Buford plunges heedlessly and naively headlong into the melee and comes out the other side bloodied and bruised and glad to be alive but saddened and in some ways more baffled at the phenomenon of mob mentality and violence than when he started. As he gazes with fascination and horror into the mouth of human ugliness (sometimes literally; English soccer punks have even worse teeth than their fellow Englishmen), he finds his penchant for non-judgment falling away; his journalistic objectivity challenged. By the end of the book, he is calling these immature boy-men, “little shits,” these men that he so desperately desired acceptance by. The more he becomes drawn into their world and the more he finds himself accepted in it, the more he finds himself becoming a willing participant in the thrilling violence. Soon he finds himself pushing and cursing at old couples in his way on the street, having his head slammed against a metal pole by a neo-Nazi skinhead and being beaten horrifically by the Italian police during a soccer riot in Sardinia—where the English fans, as is often their wont, make it their goal to own whatever piece of foreign property they occupy. “The city is ours!” is a frequent cry. These fans are not merely waiting for a goal to be scored, they are waiting for the moment of release to wage war.

What Bufords starts with as he begins his journey are preconceived humanistic notions that ascribe mob frustration and violent outlet to various underlying social causes tied to want and deprivation and injustice but what he finds are that many soccer hooligans don’t feel downtrodden, are often respectable and middle class, have jobs and money and family, tend to be right wingers and simply are there for the adrenaline high, the thrill of the total abandon they achieve in their groups.

In short, he comes to find that his preconceived notions are bunk, and what he finds is that crowds are as predictable as they are unpredictable; for every answer there are none. This is, of course, an overly simplistic summary of what Buford discovers, but what he comes to understand and convey to the reader is that all the so-called experts on the nature of crowds—from LeBron onwards—often culled their observations from second-hand sources and spun their theories from the safe distance of their ivory towers, often with an emphasis that absolves society from its complicity. The mob is never *us.* It’s a theme that constantly emerges in press accounts and official inquiries in the aftermath of violence. It’s all due to a few bad eggs, some outside agitators, etc. It’s never us.

Buford cites press accounts of sports violence, eerily, from the past—some as far back as 1909, in which nothing in the social order has changed at all. His own descriptions of how a riot escalates—how individual participants, feeding off the collective energy and the collective mob in turn feeding off individual acts of inspired mayhem—are vivid and pungent. His description of how the sound of glass breaking animates a crowd and lends an aural stimulant to escalate violence is incredibly evocative. Buford explains how riots are an act of consent; there may be emergent leaders of a mob, but ultimately it’s the collective that decides what it will do. The book elegantly examines the process by which the boundaries toward violent escalation are transgressed.

Those of you worried that this is a book about sports should disavow yourself of that notion. It’s a book about psychology, about human nature, about the conflicting complex currents in the social order and its dizzying alliances, about tribalism, nationalism and social change, about the complicity of the press in fanning the flames of disorder and about the contradictory impulses and actions that drive people alone and in groups and about the transgression of that thin line known as the law and civility.

I wrote many notes while reading the book, but rather than engage in confused analysis I would direct you posthaste to the book itself. It’s peerless.

[Anders · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning work of non-fiction, Among the Thugs chronicles Buford's attempts to understand the English phenomenon of soccer hooliganism by immersing himself into its characters, events, and lifestyles. He starts as an outsider, an American living in London for many years without ever attending a soccer game. Intrigued by the stories of violence and lawlessness the games ignite in the supporters of the teams, he sets out to understand how and why so many young and working-class people are continuously worked into a fervor attending soccer games.

But the deeper goal of this book, and this is where it gets interesting is: what are the societal factors which have produced this demographic? Buford comes to the conclusion that the problem is that England's former working class, which has a strong sense of cultural pride attached to it, is no longer the working class. Their income now puts them in the middle class, and the awkwardness of this shift has left them disaffected, in need of the jolts of adrenaline that rioting produces. When they riot, they riot against everything and everyone: their dreary suburban lives, as they randomly assault passersby and destroy property; state power, as they provoke, outsmart, and attack police forces which seek to contain them; and even each other, as they reserve their most vicious attacks for the fans of competing soccer teams. They riot to feel on top of the world, even for only a few minutes, in spite of the danger.

Bill Buford is living the good life. As a highly successful non-fiction author, he puts himself in reality-show-like situations which place him in a lot of potential bodily harm. In Among the Thugs, Buford is often in sketchy situations without a safety net-- in this book he participates in a number of soccer riots, attends a white power party in a pub in England, makes friends with the sketchiest thugs he can find. Basically, he gets your heart pumping from time to time. And not surprisingly, these situations render increasing returns. He gets your attention for when he schools you with the social insights.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this book could've been a lot more annoying. The premise-- studying the soccer hooligans by "becoming one," inasmuch as that is possible-- is a little X-treme for my tastes. But Buford really makes it work, as he seamlessly and realistically combines an interesting, compelling story with his spot-on insights into the English working class.

[Charlie Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a great book- the fruits of years of ethnographic research. Every few years, an incident happens in English football which makes people question the culture- is it racist, violent etc. This book describes a time that was on a whole different order of magnitude. The level of tribalism, and the thirst for violence was something largely forgotten or never even known of by most of us in the modern day. One of the great pieces of sociological research in recent decades, certainly one of the best I have read..

[Wheeler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Note: This is a truncated review due to character limitations. For the full review, please see this link
There are two kinds of violence in Among the Thugs.
The first is the violence we, the reading and civilized public, are supposed to abhor: violence perpetrated by the football (soccer) hooligans.
The second kind of violence is that perpetrated by the police forces against protesters of all stripes, including those football hooligans, American author Bill Buford all but outright states is an entirely acceptable form of violence perpetrated by state actors.
Don’t get me wrong: Among The Thugs is an enjoyable read and the violence is certainly disturbing.
Buford falters many times and a large portion of his falters are the sanctioning of state terror and violence.
Although that argument can certainly be made, that the state is allowed to kill but we as individual non-state-sponsored actors are not, it is certainly a flimsy one.
All around Buford excuses the action of state actors (police, stadium owners, the military, politicians) while condemning the actions of their non-state counterparts in similar situations.
Buford also leaves the audience hanging, wondering what the outcome of at least one tragedy is. Specifically, the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 that killed 96.
He also likes to judge, judge and judge.
Buford: Free of sin
The other major place Buford falters is in his judgment of the people he is following, the thugs as it were. I’m not writing about judgments of actions (they are abhorrent) but rather, personal choices that affect no one but the person who does them.
I mean, he’s really judgy. Didn’t go to college? To Buford, you’re scum. (More on that latter. Buford is a classist.) Tattoos? The same. Club supporter? The same. You did go to college, but you’re a supporter, involved in the violence (much of which is directed at willing and wanting participants of other clubs)? Well, you’re scum whom Buford will spend many, many pages and a long time interviewing, trying to figure out why you’ve chosen to be scum.

“The throng itself was something to behold. The flesh exposed was your standard, assembly line, gray weather English flesh . . . everybody had a tattoo. And not just a tattoo but many tattoos . . . It was also hard not to wonder about the person who would do this to his body . . . All around I saw meters and meters of skin that had been stained with these totemic pledges of permanence.” (Emphasis added)

A few pages later, Buford assures the reader that he’s not judging. Please, allow me to be clear. In my reading, Buford is pulling a classic, “Look at the freak! Laugh at the freak!” routine.
“Violence or no violence, mine was not an attractive moral position. It was, however, an easy one, and it consisted in this: not thinking. As I entered this experience, I made a paint of removing moral judgment, like a coat.”
Later on, he writes about the things the Manchester United fans liked, this is presumably written without thought to the final chapters of the book, about these people actually being humans and actually liking other things.
He makes a list of their likes.
“That was the most important item: they liked themselves; them and their mates.
The list of dislikes, I decided, was straightforward. It was (over and above Tottenham Hotspur) the following: the rest of the world.”

Buford: Only the poor do evil things
Well put together young man? Good job? Decently educated? Meet Steve. And DJ, further down.
“In fact, for a while, I went out of my way to spend time with Steve, if only because, being articulate and intelligent, he was good company and because I always believed that he would be able to reveal something about why he, of all people, was attracted to violence of this kind.”
Notice there how Buford baldly states that the want to be involved in this kind of group fighting and violence is seemingly not something the intelligent and articulate would want to be a part of?
Next stop on his logic train is: Domestic violence neither happens to nor is it perpetrated by members of the educated middle-and-up classes because they’re just too good for that.
Those who choose to kill outside and inside the heat of the moment, those who rape, those who lie, those who commit violence against their intimate partners and children (domestic violence) come from all demographics.
Steve has an interesting argument, and one that I think holds water. The violence directed at others and property, in the context of the UK, is created by the inability of the hooligans to direct it at each other, i.e., the opposing clubs, who want to spar. Because the police are so efficient at preventing the violence between clubs, when it comes come out, the violence is done towards everything else. So too does the violence increase in severity, in the form of stabbings.

“What made them particularly unusual was the way Steve presented them. He was rational and fluent and had given much thought to the problems he was discussing, although he had not thought about the implications of the thing – that this was socially deviant conduct of the highest order, involving injuries and maiming and the destruction of property. I don’t think he understood the implications; I don’t think he would have acknowledged them as valid.”

What Buford does not here acknowledge is valid is the hooligan’s point of view. He tries to claim that their behavior is “socially deviant conduct of the highest order,” even though it’s being practiced by willing participants of some scale.
As much as I am loathe to make this comparison (and argument), I think it is worth considering:
The hooligans (of differing clubs) are willing participants in, what was until the police stepped up their game, a violent but not usually life-threatening activity. Everyone, except for children not reined in by their parents, is a consenting adult consenting in the activity. What other “socially deviant conduct of the highest order” was only, within the past 40 years, deemed to be acceptable between consenting adults?
In Belgium, euthanasia (or suicide) is totally legal if signed off on by three doctors, even for non-terminal things, like depression or schizophrenia or dementia. While in the US, this might be socially deviant behavior but in Belgium, it’s fine.
Who is Buford to say this is socially deviant behavior, especially when so much of the population is engaging in it, when the behavior is made extreme by the authorities whom he so praises and lauds?
Later on, he goes on about the physicality of the football matches, as a spectator. Packed in as sardines, no seats, moving as a crowd, running to the exists once the game is over. This he calls deviant, despite the fact that it’s how an entire country’s fans behave. And not a small country, either.
No, I think Buford does not know what deviant means.
This theme, at the top of this section, deals with Buford and his inability to understand violence outside of the context of the lower classes. (The way he sees the world and writes, it is truly a wonder he was raised in America, and not Great Brittan, with its diffusion of class.)
Steve is not the only person who consents to this violence, who is educated and from an upper-class family. There’s DJ.
“(I) couldn’t get away from the starkness of the conclusion I kept reaching: that there was no cause for the violence; no ‘reason’ for it at all. If anything there were ‘unreasons’: (sic) . . . . there was economic plenty and an untroubled, even complacent faith in a free market and nationalistic politics that was proud of both its comforts and its selfishness.
“I couldn’t believe that what I saw was all there was.
“This was where DJ came in. In the figure of DJ, I has the fundamental contradiction at its most concentrated.”
DJ had education, intelligence, awareness of the world, money, initiative, strong, supportive, rich family, Buford writes.
Here, again, we see Buford’s notion that if one is intelligent, or educated, or doesn’t come from a terrible family, he will not want to engage in violence.
This conceit is grounded in the wrong conception of other societal ills, like domestic violence. As written above, things like domestic violence, or violence for that matter, do not know class boundaries, do not care about education or care about family support.
The same goes for drugs. Or serial killers. (Jeffery Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, BTK Killer). Or rapists. Societal ills are not concentrated by class or education.
Let me repeat that: societal ills do not differentiate based on class, gender, race or education. They hit everybody, up and down the line. Buford’s conceit is just wrong, and I think, backwards.

Kettle calling the pot a fascist
Buford writes a lot about the National Front, the British fascist party, aka, white supremacists. To him, they are evil. A somewhat ridiculous evil, but an evil none the less. He never acknowledges the fascist behavior of the authorities that he signs off on, or that, when he rails against it, he later feels guilty about it.
I am NOT condoning the National Front, rather, I am attempting to point out Buford’s hypocrisy in holding up fascist police actions as normal and acceptable in comparison to his condemnation of the actual fascist party.
The scene that sums up what is wrong with what Buford puts forward comes near the end of the middle portion of the book. He’s at the front of the crowd and there is a dog handling police officer who has his attack dog by the collar with one hand and the dog’s chain in the other. The officer is whipping the crowd (they have not committed violence yet) in the face with the chain. Buford is one of the whipped people. The indignant white privileged American in Buford comes out.
After being whipped in the face, specifically the jaw, Buford yells at him, asking what the officer thinks he’s doing, hitting people minding their own business. He demands the officers badge number, so he can report him for police brutality. He does this in his American accent. The officer walks away.

“I have gone too far, I remember thinking. I have let myself become one of them. Here I am, being whipped by a policeman, arguing with him being urged on by the supporters behind me – by the supporters behind me? By the one thousand supporters behind me: here I am at the front of a crowd, among the people leading it.”

Good ole’ American fascism at its best: feeling guilty about standing up to police brutality.
Later on, or maybe before, we learn the police in this or another instant let loose the dogs on the crowd which had not done anything yet. Here in America, a police woman who let loose her dog (ordered by her sergeant) on a homeless man who was already subdued went to jail for a few years for violating that man’s civil rights. In a perfect world, I would like to think Buford would get upset about this kind of pre-emptive treatment by police of people who have not done anything wrong. Yet.
Police brutality and rioting: OK with Buford, but with you?
It is fascinating to watch, or rather read, as Buford condemns the populace for standing up to unjust, fascist regimes. Take the example of his explication of a photo from a Yugoslavian protest, of a well-dressed man dragging a tank captain out of a tank, the tank being used to break up the crowd.
One of many American moments of crowd violence that appeared well before the publication does not appear: Kent State Massacres, or any police riot, for that matter. This is a troubling juxtaposition, considering Buford’s veneration of the police and military forces.
Back to Buford’s explication of the Yugoslavia riot photo:

“I note that they are mature adults – with handsome, attractive faces; one has a stylish haircut. I note the high calculation of their act – coming up behind the hatch and pulling out an armed man. It is bold, but thought out, the risks weighed. Studying this scene on the tank, in media res, I can infer the order of events that led to it: the crowd, having surrounded the tank found itself unable to commit the next act – an unequivocally criminal one, antisocial, lawless – and then one man, the man with the mustache, scaled the tank. He was not a leader, or at least not a leader in the sense that we believe crowds to be governed by leaders.” (Emphasis added)

Buford describes how the authorities will consider the mustached man as responsible.
Then: “He is merely the first to cross an important boundary of behavior, a tactic boundary that, recognized by everyone there, separates one kind of conduct from another. He is prepared to commit this ‘threshold’ act – an act which, created by the crowd, would have been impossible without the crowd, even though the crowd itself is not prepared to follow: yet.” (Author’s emphasis)
Buford goes on to write that there cannot be many times in one’s life when the structures of a civilized life, shelter, routine, responsibility, the sense of right and wrong, disappear into this crowd violence.
Buford is, unequivocally, defending the use of the military personnel and weapons of war to quell protest by citizens in the military’s own country.
Take a minute to think about, say, the Occupy Wallstreet protesters, across the country. You may not have agreed with them, but what should they do, and what should you do, had the government chosen to roll out the .50-caliber machine guns, the armored personnel carriers, the tanks and other weapons of war against the people, in this instance lawfully, protesting the actions of their government.
Buford’s opining about the lawlessness of people protesting things like brutality leads to the acceptance and further violence. A perfect example, the cop who thought it was OK to use pepper spray on non-violent sitting protesters at a California public university, part of the Occupy Wallstreet protests.
How would you feel to see a tank riding down your street, presumably prepared to start firing its cannon into your town, in response to protests?
In Buford’s opinion, the government has not broken the social compact it has with the governed when it brings out the weapons of war to end street demonstrations. In his opinion, this is still consistent with civilization.
Please think about Buford’s position here. He claims the crowd is not acting in a civilized manner, although he takes no actual position on the crowd’s rationality.
I will instead write that the crowd was, contrary to Buford’s implied logic, acting in an entirely rational manner and in fact, likely, in a civilized matter. The people were responding to a military invasion with the only means available to them: their craft.
Buford should be held up as a shining example of the logic of a fascist. The police are always right. Might makes right. Etc. Etc.
Police riots: In 1968, police officers rioted against protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. From the Federal Judicial Center’s summary of the Walker Report, following the riot. To be clear, 1968 was far from the first police riot.

”The nature of the response was unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions, particularly at night.
That violence was made all the more shocking by the fact that it was often inflicted upon persons who had broken no law, disobeyed no order, made no threat.”

What this description leaves out is the simple legal and physical power difference between police and the public. Hitting or threatening to hit a cop is a much greater crime than being hit by a member of the public (battery on a peace officer vs battery) and the cop has the right to hit you. You don’t have the right to hit the cop. In federal law, the difference is so stark that just landing a glancing blow on a federal cop could mean 10 years in federal prison.
It should be noted that Buford does not write, either, about things like the Watts riots. In those, just like in the Yugoslavia example, people are revolting against oppression. Consenting thugs and people revolting against oppression are two very different things and should not be conflated in a glib way.
The next example of Buford’s “Let’s go fascist police!” comes at the end of the book in what is a police/military riot.
Buford ends his adventures in Sardinia, where Manchester United, the most feared of all the teams, is to play the Danes, who are made out to be bloodthirsty like their ancestors but appear not to be.
Long story short, the rioters get some good rioting in, followed by a counter-riot by the military/police. Specifically, it is a police riot.
So, the police/military are able to regroup and rally. And when they do, they riot. Buford is at the receiving end of this violence, savagely beat in his kidneys and other organs by one officer, then two, then more. And they don’t stop. The police become the thugs that Buford so denigrates, but Buford does not think of them as thugs.

“The two policeman were soon joined by a colleague . . . I concluded after examining the bruising, was not the shoulders as such; he was trying to get to the collarbone. He, too, was trying to move me around with his free hand, so he could get a clear view of his target; it was the snap-crackle-pop sound that he was after, the one the collarbone makes when it breaks in half.”

Please engage with me in a thought experiment. Your friend is being beaten as described above, except this is on an American street. What would you do? They’re police, so, you run away? But, if they’re thugs, you, a law-abiding American, go for your lawfully concealed-or-unconcealed pistol and threaten to shoot, right? The police are acting like thugs, but are afforded special privileges, privileges Buford has no problems with.
Another man was beat until his thighbone broke.
“I thought it must be difficult to beat up someone with such force that it breaks the thighbone into several parts.”
The bigger point to be made is that Buford, through his writing, helps to further the idea that this behavior by police is acceptable, and especially acceptable when the victims or their violence are “thugs,” an especially dangerous idea in 2015, when “thug” can be construed as code for a young black man.
Observations of the group dynamic
On a positive note, Buford does well describing the dynamics of the group situation and the dynamics of a group situation that involves boys. He describes how, were they to turn on you, they would turn on you in a pack. So too does the pack mentality govern the actions of the adults. Once someone chooses to cross a line, everyone collectively chooses to agree to step over the line, or holds back. The more fluid, or the more involved the event (or rioting) already is, the easier it is for the individual to step over that next line, and to have the group follow.
Conclusion
While Buford does a good job describing the violence of self-selecting crowds of consenting adults (and juveniles) to fight other crowds of self-selecting adults and juveniles, he condones police brutality and police riots.
He also conflates two separate types of crowd violence: that of the self-selecting crowd and the that of the people rising up against conditions in their community.
The latter group is not thugs. They are people revolting against the situation the government has placed them in. They have grievances, and the grievances has extended beyond the breaking point.
Buford also seems to pretend that the educated or upper classes are someone immune from societal ills. This is patently false.

[Alexander Boyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will accompany me wherever I go. It will be the measuring stick for everything I write. Among the Thugs inspects organized violence among the British working class in the form of soccer hooliganism. But that is a simplistic take. The book is the lived experience of the crowd, the violent crowd. There are so many things to say about Among the Thugs, but I will confine myself to three: Lad culture and Barstool sports, a journalist's hope that things will "go off", and a question: where are China's angry youth?

Barstool sports has the world's stupidest catch phrase, "Saturdays are for the boys". It's inane. The phrase seems to mean that a Saturday should be spent amongst the boys, the lads, drinking, partying, revealing, etc. Who doesn't like that? But the phrase includes an obnoxious exclusivity and entitlement. Who are "the boys"? Is Saturday really "for" them? I find it eerily similar to the football lads who live for Saturday, live for the lads, kill for the lads. Buford tries to understand these lads and comes to this conclusion, "Nothing substantive is there; there is nothing to belong to, although it is still possible, I suppose, to belong to a phrase—the working class— a piece of language that serves to reinforce certain social customs an a way of talking and that obscures the fact that the only thing hiring behind it is a highly mannered suburban society strip of culture and sophistication and living only for its affectations: a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits." Barstool is the same. Stoolies, the slavish fans of the site call themselves. Stool, shit. Shitlets, in other words. Buford often wonders if he has wasted years of his life following the shitlets, "What was there to say but: I have now watched a little shit." The noxious veneer of masculinity, courage, and strength that Barstool presents with "Saturday is for the boys" is sad. Reading this book I could not help think about all of those who, like the English soccer hooligans, affect a persona that hides their soulless suburban life.

Through the writing of this book, Buford spends ungodly amounts of time with horrible people. Partying with the National Front in suburban Britain, forgery trials in Greece, rioting in Italy, and he thinks to himself, why? In a way, he hopes to see the behavior that so disgusts him. He wants things to "go off". What is the point if there is no violence, no racism, no abuse of humanity? I thought back to a piece by Luke Mogelson, another New Yorker correspondent (or freelancer?), who wrote "The Dark Side of Longform Journalism". He describes heading to the banks in the shadow of a bridge in Aleppo, where bodies dumped by the regime occasionally washed up. He went there everyday, when the tide was highest and the current strongest and reflected, "You can find yourself, for instance, visiting a river every morning hoping to find a murder victim." He, too, was hoping to find carnage, a carnage he wanted to document. Buford is in turns sickened and exhilarated by the hooligans. But he desperately wants them to "go off". Its a curious question of ethics. Is it ethical to hope for destruction of life and property in order to write an interesting book, make ones name? Buford doesn't stoke the violence, neither does Mogelson. Whether they are at the scene matters little, and reflects instead on their journalistic instincts, but the question remains, is something wrong with them, with us, for wanting things to "go off"?

Finally, as all things relate to China for me... Where are China's angry youth? My students from the town of Niupeng Town (牛棚镇) in Bijie, describe the humongous street brawls they witnessed as elementary schoolers. Middle schoolers, high schoolers, young adults, hoped up on methamphetamines and drink would brawl in the streets of this small town in the mountains of Northwest Guizhou. Stabbings were common, the occasional murder, riots in the truest sense. But when I asked further, they said it was over now. They hadn't seen a brawl in years. Where did these angry young men go? I think one answer is the internet. Waves of NMSL （你妈死了）and mass cyber bullying provide some semblance of the rush of crowd violence, but surely it can't be the same. I want to go find China's angry violent youth for myself. Possibly they joined the police themselves. Youths looking to inflict violence in the name of nationalism and racial chauvinism do not have to look far in today's China. The Party surrounds all. Is that the answer? They've all become the henchman of the Party? Where have they all gone?

[Andrew]

A glimpse into a world now long-gone, but one which I’d always heard about. This, at least according to Buford, is the world of British football in the pre-Premiership era, before Arab sheik team owners and eight-digit contracts and David Guetta UEFA performances, when the football was above all else an excuse to abandon social rules and channel the inchoate rage that seems to dwell at the heart of every English male, one of the few emotions they are permitted to express outwardly. The lumpen-bourgeoisie of Buford’s world, laddish salesmen and contractors, find transcendence in National Front politics, bananas thrown onto the field and all, in grotesque quantities of lager and junk food, and above all else in group violence that, as dumb as it is, is horrifyingly, horrifyingly fun. Because there is something deeply… human… in breaking a motherfucker’s nose.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

For some reason going into this I thought it would be a fun/funny read, kind of an outsider poking fun at lad culture and over-the-top football fandom in the UK. But oof it’s so much more disturbing and depressing than that.

Granted, the writing style is often humorous, with vivid in-the-moment narration that often lingers on the ridiculous little details. But then it lingers on the details of the violence that seems to come from nowhere, random and brutal, utterly pointless in that the violence itself is the only goal.

Buford seems to be on a quest to understand what this is and where it comes from — has it always been part of British culture? Is it because the working class is slowly being dismantled, jobs and prospects lost? Is it just group dynamics that go out of control? A way to belong? Or is the violence like a drug, giving the participants a high that they keep chasing?

There’s no neat conclusion, and by the end Buford is so disgusted by these “little shits” that he (finally) abandons the project. And thank goodness because I don’t think I would have wanted to read much more.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among the Thugs stands next The Hell's Angels as an unflinching look at a violent male subculture, in this case the classic English football hooligan of the 1980s. Buford was an American living in England. What he depicts as an idle curiosity about a strange feature of English culture, much sensationalized by the press, became a multiyear sociological study.

It is an undeniable fact that by all conventional measures, attending a football game in England is a terrible way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Bad weather, hours walking and standing on cement terraces, and being crushed in narrow passageways and too-small cages by a drunk, chanting, mass of the lads. There's also a chance of random violence at the hands of supporters of the other team, of the police, or the crowd itself. And then there's the minor problems of no parking, poor transit, and sanitary facilities consisting of 'pee on the people lower than you'. But somehow, thousands if not millions of English headed out to the grounds every Saturday. Football gives the week meaning. In a series of short narrative essays about his experiences across England and the continent, with all sorts of fringe members of "the Firm", Buford explores what that meaning is.

Buford's first topic is the crowd itself, human individuality compressed into the herd, submerged in the crush, the chanting, the mass of movements. The crowd is the the base of everything else in football, an animal energy that is the true draw, not the action on the pitch. Crowds are fickle things, always an outsider to the body politic. The crowd demands a leader, but one cannot just declare themselves the leader of the crowd, you must be chosen.

The second theme is violence. The crowd is a means to an end, and "when it goes off", as signaled by someone throwing a trash bin through a window, the crowd becomes animated in mass violence, from throwing stones at riot police, to mass property destruction and semi-random knifings. If being part of a crowd is transforming, being part of a violent mob is ecstatic: Buford describes feeling like he could fly, the electric thrill of chasing and being chased, and he was a journalist maintaining his distance from the event.

The third theme is racism. The lads are proud to be English, happy to tell you they don't much care for non-white people or foreigners, and delighted to go to another country and be as beastly as possible to the inhabitants. Buford attends a National Front white power disco, a profoundly weird homoerotic punk-rock rave, of shirtless skinheads men jumping up and down in a mass and rubbing each other's heads while their girlfriends look on. While the football firms are gleefully racist, and white power foot soldiers football fanatics, there's not a true alliance between the two, because the mid-80s leadership of the National Front are a bunch of dweebs afraid of the raw physicality of the crowd.

And of course there's the minor stuff, life "on the jib" to get as much stolen beer and illegal rides out of football as possible. After all, who can compel payment from a crowd? There's the ambiguous relationship between hooligans, the press, and law enforcement. There's the Hillsborough disaster, and crowd control reform. There's the international hustling of 'DJ', a counterfeiter and aspiring photographer from a privileged background.

But ultimately, this book is about The Lads and their mythos. Buford observes that in England, it is just not done for members of the literati to talk about the working class, and so no one will admit that the true "English working class" has vanished. I quote in full.

"It is still possible, I suppose, to belong to a phrase-the working class—a piece of language that serves to reinforce certain social customs and a way of talking and that obscures the fact that the only thing hiding behind it is a highly mannered suburban society stripped of culture and sophistication and living only for its affectations: a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits. This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell."

Yeah. You feel that?

Go Manchester United!

[Ed Erwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll never understand humans. I think I'll stop trying.
This is a pretty interesting story of a guy who hangs around with football 'hooligans' in the 1990s. After about the first 1/3rd it seemed a bit repetitive to me.

(The picture on the cover is some random guy. Not the author or anyone he talks about. The author, BTW, is an editor for Granta.)

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Topical this week!

I know this is a terrible thing to say, but I do take some perverse comfort in knowing there is at least one bizarre, violent social problem occuring in modern industrialized nations, that the United States does not have.

[Dalia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5-- Definitely engaging but the narrator bothered me often. This was also never as sexy as the cover likes to broadcast which was a disappointment.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I originally read Among the Thugs last year, but with a (potentially) lengthy amount of hospital time looming, I decided to return to it, just because it was such a page-turner. Thankfully the hospital visit turned out to only be out-patient surgery (and also thankfully, the surgery went as well as could be hoped). Be this as it were, I still managed to rampage through this book. As my girlfriend will testify, I spend too much time reading about soccer/football (debatable) and other sports (probably true). This time period in English football still fascinates the hell out of me however.

While others have broached the topic, Buford comes from an American perspective, which in the 1980s meant little understanding of football. Reading his account of the rampant hooliganism ever-present in Britain during the ’70s and ’80s from the perspective of an uninformed football fan allowed the author to address the issue with less prejudice. It helped me, despite my knowledge (albeit somewhat limited) of the history of English football, to broach the phenomenon of the English soccer hooligan.

It is difficult to explain the cultural and societal impact of football in England to someone from the United States. The States are too spread out, its professional teams too far apart to develop the connection these clubs have with the communities they are in. At work the other day, while watching City play United in the Manchester derby, I tried to explain to a co-worker why there was so much enmity between the two teams. A history of success on the red side of the industrial city and jealousy and spite from the blue half is part of it, but it comes down to how the fans self-identity.

A better example would perhaps be the rivalry between West Ham and Millwall. Both these squads were formed in the late Nineteenth Century by shipyard workers, from rival companies. As these workers competed on the football pitch, they also competed for jobs. It’s as if the Yankees and Mets, Cubs and White Sox, Dodgers and Angels intensified their rivalry already due to proximity by adding a shared history dating back to the late 1800s where they competed for jobs and contracts complete with riots, strikes and picket lines. Even if baseball clubs shared a similar history to football clubs, professional teams in the United States are still too spread out over a landmass larger than the EU compared to the island-bound UK. The late Sir Bobby Robson perhaps said it best:

“What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.”


The direct and strong ties between the community and its football club(s), in addition to the recession faced by the UK in the 1970s and ’80s made the hooliganism, if not an inevitability, than a very possible outcome. The strength of Buford’s chronicle of about five years inside the world of the “Firms” (the chosen nomenclature for the hooligans for respective clubs) lies in his ability to discern crowd theory and the inherent weaknesses in argument made by sociologist decades before. He disagrees with the findings of Edmund Burke, Gustave LeBon, Hippolyte Taine and Freud, arguing their vantage points on crowds was too far removed from the heart of the action. He looks at the progression of the crowd, in its various guises:

“Every crowd has a threshold; all crowds are initially held in place by boundaries of some kind. There are rules that say: this much, but no more. A march has a route and a destination. A picket line is precisely itself: an arrangement of points that cannot be crossed. A political rally: there is the politician, the rally’s event, at its center. A parade, a protest, a procession: there is the police escort, the sidewalk, the street, the overwhelming fact of the surrounding property. The crowd can be here, but not here. There is form in an experience that tends towards abandon. I have described the relentless physicalness of the terraces and how the concentrate the spectator experience: that of existing so intensely in the present that it is possible for an individual, briefly, to cease being an individual, to disappear into the power of numbers - the strength of them, the emotion of belonging to them. And yet again: it is formlessness in a contrivance of form.”

In this, the hooligans found their method of rebellion, their statement against the inequity of a (sometimes) working class life. By surrounding themselves with like-minded fellows, equally prepared to make a statement with force, the crowd overcomes the individual and a person who acts as pleasant as anyone in his everyday life can become a battle-hardened criminal in the midst of the crowd.

This is the success of Buford’s book; he, through an exploration of hooligan-culture in the 1980s, helps find why random mobs have shaped the destiny of the world throughout the century. As a leaderless crowd becomes directed toward a common purpose, the leaderlessness of the crowd becomes unimportant because all the members of the group lose their identity. Anyone can be a leader and anyone can be a follower, a soldier. The only thing that matters is the willingness to take charge, perhaps a true meritocracy. Status does not matter in the crowd, your profession or salary falls to the wayside. All that matters, especially in the crowds Buford describes in Among the Thugs, is whether or not one is committed enough to stand for his or her beliefs when called upon.

[Mak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utrulig bok. Den handlar ikkje om fotball, fotball er berre eit slags påskudd for alt som skjer.

Boka er ein sosiologisk feltstudie av folkemassen, der ein mann prøver å lære kva som driver massen og individane i den. Den skildrar dei primale mekanismane til massen, gleden den skapar og kjelden til den gleden: Grensesprengande vold og hærverk der absolutt alle er offer. Det er eit bilde av England frå ein nær mytisk tid som pregar engelsk fotball og heile landet den dag i dag. Som det står i eit kapittel: Dette er normalen. Dette er ein vanlig laurdag i England i 1980-åra.

[Roy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The English disease in all its gory. This book does a wonderful job of reporting and commenting on the horror of soccer crowds. For me, this comes after a six month fascination with soccer violence. There is very little to explain why hooligans do what they do, but what interests me is that this is a problem that seems to effect most western "civilized" nations except the good old U. S. of A. In discussing this issue with a friend, we both expressed surprise. Surprise not in the predictable rioting of sports fans, but that nothing like this happens in the states. Sure, occasionally some cities and college campuses will take over a few blocks in drunken reveling in honor of a championship, but a weekly event across the nation? Dozens of violent encounters at each game? Oddly, not here.

Buford is also an American, and so he brings this perspective to his book. If you know nothing about hooligans, than you will find it fascinating. If you are already familiar with the problem, as he is, then you are probably already sick of it. But like a car accident, you just can't look away. Buford does a particularly good job of retelling events that he has stuck himself in, without a camera, tape recorder, or even notebook for notes. The rioting scenes are very well written and still, to me, quite unimaginable.

[Ben Donovan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a perfect book and I would love to tell you why.

The first in a list of rereading favorites.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

i read this 20 years ago in college (someone else was assigned it for a class, and i was smitten by the surly bald smoker on the cover and the vaguely forbidden feel of it all). it blew my mind a little bit then, mostly for the scene where a guy bites out someone's eyeball). there were also the ghosty invocations of heysel and hillsborough, a million miles from my lived experience of fandom. american fans are more likely to die of a mass shooting while buying tailgate goodies than from a crowd crush.

re-read this month, it just sort of leapt off the shelf after i'd been spending much more time with unamerican football (i spent my extended pandemic having children and avidly watching sunderland gurgle up to the surface of league one; learning as i went about ASBO-type behavior in and out of grounds. my sunderland fandom dates far enough back that i remember when a newcastle fan punched out a police horse after a tyne-wear derby (rest in power bud the horse) and i feel like i've slowly gotten more literate in the absurd extremes of that behavior, but never quite grokked the mystery of firms and ultras and casuals and _cam on ingerland_. on a second read: this book is precisely observed and grim-funny and and aware of how crass and exploitative the whole undertaking of journalism is, almost in equal measure with buford's (justified) horror at a lot of what he rides along for. a great deal of post new journalism/hunter s thompson-manque writing hasn't aged well (or wasnt good to start with), and there are some ashy patches like that here, but overall i think buford latched onto something real and vital here - it's not hard to trace out the line from where he ends to where we are now (too many people with unfulfilling lives acting out, and a kind of performative cultural working-class-ness that makes people potential customers for revanchist politics). anyway this got pointy headed and im procrastinating but yes ok have a good afgternoon. the cover of this is still great.

buford is a bit jaded by the time we get to the sardinian epilogue but it's well done and it pairs well with pete davies' all played out, covering some of the same ground.

[Monika | leniwiec_ksiazkowy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this book and laughed a lot, the author's mocking style is something I truly adore. However, the more I read, the less I laughed, as the story became darker and darker. Now I would like to restart humanity because there is clearly something wrong with its current shape. A difficult read about the crowd psychology and brutal human nature.

[Zosia · Rating 5 out of 5]

GENIALNA. Poruszająca, niepokojąca, momentami zabawna a innymi wręcz przerażająca i odrzucająca. Szokuje mnie skala zaangażowania oraz poświęcenia autora, który poświęcił lata pracy by wejść w różne środowiska kibicowskie i stać się ich częścią. Oprócz tego styl w jakim napisał ten reportaż absolutnie przypadł mi do gustu. Niezbyt prosty ale i nie przesadzony, idealna równowaga między ilością kolokwializmów i przekleństw (nierozerwalnie zresztą związanych z środowiskiem "kiboli") z dziennikarskim polotem i smakiem.

[audenbg · Rating 5 out of 5]

horrifyingly fascinating. the sheer volume of violence seems like something from a bad movie, how terrifying it is to realize that this all actually happened in real life.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are the only types of books journalists should write. Firsthand accounts of hanging out with various lowlifes and perverts.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Yo a looong way fwom Baan Ruge, Thibodeaux!'

Is what you might expect from a good Cajun bwoay reporting and investigating a phenomenon which now, to all extents and purposes, has gone. The opening sections lead you to suspect it will be little more than the usual 'The Football Factory', John King teenage hoolie fodder and thus a one star. mibbees two at most dependent on the kwality of writing. But its better than that. And one section tilts it, makes you realise that Buford IS trying to work something out rather than the usual journo-under-cover slam dunk for the chipwrappers and their Daily Mail and Telegraph readers to drop their toast and marmalade on the Axminster. Its in the section on 'Dawes Road, Fulham'. Its a better analysis of crowd behaviour and mentality and what it meant to be male in the 80s's than the usual regularly papped out and limitlessly better than the 'Im-too-intellectual-for-this' pish of Simon Kuper in his rather dull Football Against The Enemy which appears to be cited by one and all when they need a reference to what being part of a tribe in sport is about. Its too long a section to quote here, but you'll find it.

Of course, its all outdated now. Has been since SKY bought into TV cover of Premiership fitba games, and the mega-money that then swelled into the Premiership coffers, inflating wage demands and transfer fees, driving the game, putting out more and more games and tournaments. Now its all business, with meejya companies trying to outdo each other in their bids for more mind-pap for the masses. And its swelled now with Wummins Fitba too just to rake the wifes and daughters intop the Grand Cash Cow. Darn the ole starship cruiser, watch the game, a few pints (because, believe me, if you want to watch the game at home yir gonna need pockets like Croesus). Its still better to go to the game, still better to get the raw buzz from the terraces; but you're gonna have to accept everything else that goes with it. Accept that yir just another cash cow from the moment you get off the bus to the moment you get on it again after the game. I've been involved in a few 'run fir yir life' moments in my time back then- at every Feyenoord game I've tried to go to, and a few Old Firm games where there are a few old style 'crews' still trying to hang on to old style traditions, the tradition of 'being part of a tribe', of 'wanting to express yerself', of rage. Even the clubs accept it till it goes against their balance sheet and 'image', then comes the clampdown.

Its all about money now. Its happening in every sport everywhere and if its not you can bet yir life that those that control the sport are working out how they can get more coverage, more punters, more meejya and hence more moolah in THEIR pockets.

Buford ought to update this to the state of football today. Sure.... there's very few crews still and you can get to and from games without gettin' slashed or being packed into a pen wi somebody pishing down yer legs. Bradford and Hillsbrough changed that. Grounds and facilities are better. There is a class thing about this. MPs selecting teams to go on their resumés, career path structures for ageing players. Buford hints at this in his late 80s analysis of Football violence. But most of its gone along with a lot of the passion. Would I have the old ways back?

GTF!!!

[prozaczytana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Długo zabierałam się za "Między kibolami", ale kiedy w końcu to zrobiłam - cieszyłam się, że zrobiłam to we właściwym momencie, bo dosłownie płynęłam przez ten tytuł. Autor zachwycił mnie humorem (to też zasługa Krzysztofa Cieślika, który przełożył książkę!), nieskomplikowanym podejściem i czynnym zaangażowaniem we wszelkie kibicowskie spotkania, dzięki czemu wszystkie wydarzenia zostały przedstawione z pierwszej linii frontu. Niestety w końcu entuzjazm opadł, bo ile można czytać o tym samym?

Sam temat bycia kibicem bardzo mnie interesuje i swego czasu nieraz stawiałam się na meczach, więc niewiele w tej książce mnie zaskoczyło. Jeżeli ktoś nigdy nie miał do czynienia z tym światem, to może poczuć się zaintrygowany, ale również przerażony, bo wiele tu rozlewu krwi, brutalnych ustawek i agresji. Skąd się ona bierze i czy ma jakikolwiek cel z punktu widzenia kiboli?

Właśnie zabrakło mi bardziej profesjonalnego podejścia do poruszanych wątków. Wspaniale, że Bill Buford na pewien czas sam stał się kibolem, ale ta książka to spis wspomnień i nic więcej. Żadnych sensownych wypowiedzi kibiców czy specjalistów, podsumowania od autora, jakichkolwiek wniosków... Czułam się, jakbym poznawała relację człowieka, który przez pewien czas wszedł w środek kibolskiego świata, a potem odciął się od niego, kompletnie nie zastanawiając się nad jego sensem.

Od literatury faktu wymagam nie tylko zaskoczenia mnie czy nawet wzbudzenia konsternacji bądź przerażenia. Ja jeszcze potrzebuję rzetelnego podejścia, a tego tu zabrakło.

[Samantha Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably one of the scariest books I’ve read in a while. It’s also one of the funniest. Even if you’re not into 1980’s British Football, I think this is a must read. Buford’s journey into the world of football hooligans takes him to different countries, far right parties and more. His subjects are fascinating, violent and terrifying. I see parts of their spirit and ethos in a lot of the current male podcast far right boys. So while these men are definitely a snapshot of their era, their history rhymes with problems of today.

This book made me feel gross and hungover from the drunken antics. Especially the chapter in Turin. I will warn that Buford does a good job at making you the claustrophobia of the standing pens in the stadiums which leads eventually to discussion of the Hillsborough tragedy so if you’re claustrophobic be wary.

[Alex Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic reporting on a subject that is so often glorified. It really nails not just why violence is so deeply ingrained into the working class culture but also WHO it is ingrained into. It’s not always the uneducated, unemployed, uninformed but also the aspirant middle class with everyday frustrations.

It also touches on radicalisation to the right and how easily brainwashed people can be when part of a “firm”.

The parts about crowd theory and how it relates to every aspect of life is absolute dynamite.

6/5

[Griffin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievably good. Unbelievably violent. There’s one particular anecdote that made me want to vom. I thought this was going to be about football hooligans, but it’s really about disaffected, nationalistic, white men. Interesting to contrast and compare Buford’s observations of these people with the similar breed of the 2010s and 2020s. A truly manic book, I loved it.

[JKassise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like the author, I found my self having a lack of appetite for the narrows of lad culture and antics many times throughout the read. The violence perpetuated is sobering, and yet we are standing shoulder to shoulder with the author as spectators, saying we’ve seen enough. The next moment we’re on a flight to the World Cup, and a German boy is stabbed. The insight into the workings of The Crowd is interesting to say the least. The almost cartoonish characters peppered throughout the several years the book takes place act as waypoints through a central theme of explaining working class Britannia, and the hell scape that is the UK on a Saturday night in the 80s.

[Michael Legge · Rating 2 out of 5]

Shame he dies in the end.

[Alan W. Rudolph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've long been fascinated with football hooligan firms, all the way back to the 1989 BBC film "The Firm" starring Gary Oldman that dramatized the Inter City Firm of West Ham United during the 1970s and 1980s. (Yes, Iron Maiden fan here.) And given 40+ years of devotion to heavy metal music and all the countless experiences in mosh pits, I am fascinated by the sociology of crowds energized to near-mindless frenzy.

I do not recall what I was reading that cited this book. Actually something about neither hooligan firms nor mosh pits and it's now driving me nuts that I can't recall...probably because I started it, then stalled for six months before returning to finish it… But I was intrigued to know what Bill Buford had learned about the violence and its causes from his six years of embedding himself with the football hooligans in their pursuit of the high. From the subtitle it's apparent that it is not JUST about that. In fact, if I had been seeking only that I could have clued myself in earlier* had I started with the glossary (well, who would?) where he states: "This book is not about the game of English football, but the game is at the heart of the culture I have tried to describe."

I will not write this review with ham-fisted points to highlight relevance to current affairs. Instead, I have opted to excerpt a good quantity of Buford's own words and have left spotting that subtext as an exercise for the reader to infer from selections that I have included.

There IS plenty of stereotypical hooliganism here, particularly in Part One. The chapter "Turin" recounts a visit to that city from ostensibly-prohibited supporters of Manchester United that still manage to get into Italy for a match against Juventus. But this is when we begin to go below the veneer of simply recounting the events and divine Buford’s desire to spend a good chunk of his life immersed in weekend ritual of rioting: to comprehend what sparks supporters who are otherwise average blokes to rioting. Many supporters in this story are not lacking meaningful existence: gainfully employed in steady jobs, some well-off, with families and relatively solid community, stable home life and a lack of criminal intent or predilection to violence for its own sake.

Regardless, there is no difference between such supporters and those (to borrow a phrase from the metal community) "trve kvlt" hooligans specifically seeking violence and the rush they get "when it goes off." Yet it's precisely the potential for "it" to "go off" that draws each kind of supporter to that thrill. That chapter on Turin effectively illuminates how an undercurrent of tension, adrenaline, and danger flashes over into unmitigated violence, which is often not just contained to the ground where two sides square off on the pitch. In fact, even more are drawn into the maelstrom when it spills from the underground and the coaches and washes over the local community and hapless citizens that get caught in it.

To be sure, there ARE plenty of thugs truly devoted to violence here, particularly in Part Two. I found the chapter on Bury St. Edmunds completely fascinating yet it had almost nothing to do with violence on the terraces or in the streets. It does vividly describe a National Front disco, including both boots-and-braces skinheads (who were by that time already viewed as an anachronism) and others in the NF who despised skinheads (I was clueless there was ever such a division); the rules for such an event including the very specific timing – only at the END – when it was appropriate to play White Power music; and the attendance of an entire "executive branch" of individuals with neat haircuts and calm demeanor that dressed in flannel trousers, jackets, scarves, and cashmere jumpers and didn't touch drink at all, only coolly observed the activities. Who were these people? (This chapter was also the point when I realized why I love Buford's writing so much: his droll humor, especially whenever he was NOT doing what he thought he should be doing or preferred to be doing –which is quite often – is reminiscent of the writing style of Douglas Adams.)

So what exactly is it like when an NF disco reaches its apotheosis? Buford himself:

"There was no longer a center of the room where people were dancing, because everyone was dancing everywhere. On the far side, some of the new members had started in on their football chants...These appeared to be West Ham supporters. They were then answered, from the other side of the room, by Chelsea supporters. A contrapuntal chorus of West Ham and Chelsea songs followed...It was time to change the music. It was time to play the White Power music." [To unite these factions on common cause to avoid worse: having it "go off" between rival supporters during this event. –my comment]

"The music was delivered with the same numbing, crushing percussion that had characterized everything else that had been played that evening, and most of the lyrics of the songs that followed were lost to me, disappearing into a high decibel static...the music was now brutally loud. The room was hot and filled with smoke and smelled of dope. The air had grown heavy and damp. Sixty or seventy lads were in the middle of the room, clasped together, bouncing up and down, rubbing their hands over each other's heads and chanting in unison...covered in perspiration, pressed tightly together. They were bouncing so vigorously that they all fell over, tumbling on top of each other...they all clambered up over each other and, with difficulty, resumed their dancing. They fell over again, wet and hot...The people in the crush were not in control – the business of falling over was not intended and no one was finding it funny...the volume couldn't be made any louder. The volume was turned up as high as it would go."

[In all my years inside a mosh pit or at the barrier, this description is not completely alien. But I have never been so glad to experience an event via secondhand account. (Mosh pits thankfully do not generally feature the head rubbing.) They are also characteristically celebratory and jubilant events. Chaotically physical, by definition, yet neither intentionally violent nor menacing.]

So what beyond the experience of rioting at the weekend? Of crowd violence more generally?

In the chapter on Dawes Road, Fulham, Buford gets into history, the theory: "These are the things that are said about crowds. A crowd is mindless. A crow is primitive; it is barbaric; it is childish. A crowd is fickle, capricious, unpredictable...A crowd reveals our Freudian selves, regressing to a state of elemental, primitive urgency...We find people who have abandoned intelligence, discrimination, judgment, and unable to think for themselves, are vulnerable to agitators, outside influences, infiltrators, communists, fascists, racists, nationalists, phalangists and spies...A crowd needs to be ruled. A crowd needs its patriarch – it's despotic father, chief, tyrant, emperor, commander. It wants its Hitler, its Mussolini...A crowd is a rabble – to be manipulated, controlled, roused." [Thus the executive branch at the disco. –my comment] "Crowd theory tells us why – relentlessly, breathlessly, noisily, as if by shouting the reasons loudly enough the terror can be explained away. But crowd theory rarely tells us what: what happens when it goes off, what the terror is like, what it feels like to participate in it, to be its creator."

Part Three consists of just two chapters. The first in Düsseldorf: "There is such raw terrible power in the crowd. Fascists and revolutionaries understand its power. The National Front knows its potential and how rare it is to see that potential realized and how difficult it is ever to control it...Mussolini understood the crowd and knew to respect its power. It was football – its administrators, its cowboy owners and operators, and the lad culture that has built up around it – that didn't understand either the crowds it was creating or the terrible, killing power that was in them."

What does Buford ultimately find that so relentlessly feeds the root of this violence? It's worth a read of the entire work to get a full understanding, but from the culmination of the chapter on Düsseldorf we're left with the void found when a working class becomes a non-working class with nothing substantive to belong to: "...behind it is a highly mannered suburban society stripped of culture and sophistication and living only for its affectations: a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits. This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up." (This chapter is also where we find some of the most depraved, disturbing violent acts.)

In the final chapter on Sardinia, the violence at last catches up to – and has its merciless way with – Buford himself. The description is so vivid you can see, hear, and almost feel it yourself – the pulse quickens and it's utterly, grotesquely engrossing.

But in the end, what I wanted to know: what of the matches themselves? What was it like to be actually at the grounds for English football league matches during the 1980s?

"I had always assumed that a sporting event was a paid-for entertainment, like a night at the cinema; that it was an exchange: you gave up a small part of your earnings and were rewarded by a span (an hour, two hours) of pleasure, frequently characterized by features – edible food, working lavatories, a managed crowd, a place to park your car – that tended to encourage you to return the following week. I thought this was normal. I could see that I was wrong. What principle governed the British sporting event? It appeared that, in exchange for a few pounds, you received one hour and forty-five minutes characterized by the greatest possible exposure to the worst possible weather, the greatest number of people in the smallest possible space, and the greatest number of obstacles – unreliable transportation, no parking, an intensely dangerous crush at the only exit, a repellent polio pond to pee into, last minute changes of the starting time – to keep you from ever attending a match again. And yet, here they all were, having their Saturday."

To be fair, the same could probably be said for a fair number of sporting events of many types elsewhere in the world. So how does it possibly get WORSE at an English football match in particular?

"[rival] supporters have "infiltrated" and...are conducting a discreet campaign of highly targeted violence – most of it unobserved by the police. I suspect, in fact, that the police are happy to "unobserve" the violence: there is a sense that anything that occurs within the perimeters of the net they have formed is tolerable provided is doesn't slip through and get out into the open, but there is also the sense that anyone who gets hurt probably deserves it – for being there.

The effect is unpleasant. The experience of the whole match is unpleasant – nasty, unsettling. It is cold and windy: there is grit in my eyes, and I can feel it in my hair and underneath my clothes. There is constant movement: too many people have been admitted – a familiar ploy, to get them off the streets – which makes it difficult to do more than try to remain upright and fight for a view of the match. Every now and then, there is another little snap-violent disturbance effected by one of these runt-like infiltrators: everyone cranes his neck to have a look at the thing that has happened; you can never quite see it. Moments later, there is another incident somewhere else, and everyone cranes his neck in that direction. And so it goes on. Someone has taken to throwing spark plugs...It is uneasy and claustrophobic. There is mention of a stabbing, but I don't see it, and it would be in keeping that there would be one, but also that there wouldn't be one, that it would have simply felt appropriate that someone should have been stabbed by now."

So it’s all here: the experiences of the match, the violence of the hooligans, the full recounting of how the hooliganism would expand and flash over unpredictably into fully uncontrolled maelstrom of crowd violence, the theory and history of purposeful incitement and manipulation, and the agony of first-hand experience as a direct casualty. It was everything I was looking for and so much more.

*A more direct analysis might be a work cited in the acknowledgments: The Roots of Football Hooliganism: An Historical and Sociological Study by Eric Dunning, Patrick Murphy, and John Williams (1988). But I have a feeling that work would be much less immersive – so much less visceral – than this was.