Football Hooliganism - Things I Read for my Students...

Review - Kicking Off: Why hooliganism and racism are killing football by Dougie Brimson, (Headline Publishing Group, London, 2006)

It’s all about escaping the home and doing something by and for yourself, almost certainly for the first time. Factor in the idea of travelling around the country with lads who, through shared experiences, become mates for life, plus the simple truth that it sometimes involves doing things your mum would go apeshit about if she ever found out, and the attraction is magnified even further.

One of the things I enjoy most about teaching my Y13 students is the wide range of films and books they introduce me to in the course of their theme research.  I try to read and watch all the texts they use, so recently I watched Green Street Hooligans (dir. Lexi Alexander, 2005, screenplay Lexi Alexander & Dougie Brimson) and The Football Factory (dir. Nick Love 2004, screenplay Nick Love & John King), and read Dougie Brimson's book  Kicking Off: Why hooliganism and racism are killing football (Headline Publishing Group, London, 2006).

It was fortunate that I had watched the movies before reading Kicking Off, as without the basic grounding gained from the films I would have been struggling to understand the subtexts in Dougie Brimson's study.

Thanks to the two films, I was clear that 'the company' and 'the firm' were euphemisms for football supporters' groups; or as Elijah Wood's character in Green Street Hooligans puts it: "So, a firm is basically a gang." I had a clear picture of what was meant by such labels as 'clashes', 'incidents' and 'serious disorder', all of which indicated that gangs were fighting each other, usually hand to hand, or using whatever blunt or sharp instruments were available, and might fatally batter and stab, but rarely shoot each other.

Without this background, the first two chapters of Kicking Off would have been all but incomprehensible to me, consisting as they do of interminable lists of ‘clashes’ and ‘incidents’ between football supporters across Britain and Europe, week after week, chronicling the period 2000-2006. (His earlier book, Barmy Army, covered events before 2000).

I stuck it out to chapter three, hoping that eventually we would get to some analysis which would attempt to explain the reasons behind the culture of football hooliganism and explain its continued existence. And we did indeed begin to get to some discussion of these issues.

According to Brimson, much of what is published about the phenomenon of football hooliganism is factually inaccurate. He complains:

The number of books and articles I’ve read that claim to be painstakingly researched studies of football-related violence, but which are obviously based on nothing more than the blindingly obvious, rumour, presumption, other people’s work or even simple fabrication is staggering.

[And yes, in case you are wondering, this is typical of Brimson’s style and the standard of proofreading.]

Brimson explains that in the early seventies when hooliganism began to impact on the games, there was a rush of academic speculation from sociologists, anthropologists and criminologists trying to explain why the “lads were behaving as they did”.

Instinctively they focussed on class, education, background and politics before rebellion, alienation and even anarchy were added to the list, until eventually they had all hooligans tagged as being working-class, right-wing, poorly educated products of broken homes, searching for some kind of family or sense of belonging.”

According to Brimson, this is all wrong.  He argues that the majority of supporters are working class simply because football is the working class game.  According to him, “many lads active at the time were reasonably educated and in decent, stable employment, with the majority, certainly in my experience, from traditional family backgrounds.”  (This picture is the one conveyed in Green Street Hooligans, where Matt (Elijah Wood) is surprised to discover that Pete is a history teacher when he is not running around bashing other people up.) 

Brimson explains that because the violence is now more under control, there is a resurgence of interest from “older lads” who are drifting back to the scene, “come back to try and recapture the buzz they used to get from being among a group of like- minded males and occasionally playing up a bit.”

The male culture seems to be a big part of the hooligan scene. Brimson contradicts his earlier statements about the ‘lads’ all coming from ‘traditional family backgrounds’ by admitting that many of the young supporters he had spoken to recently came from single parent families and that, being brought up mainly by mothers, they found on the terraces a “compelling and powerful male influence.”

Why Football Hooliganism?

Some of the reasons Brimson gives for the on-going existence of the ‘firms’ include:

• ·     Hooliganism provides the “lads” with a ‘good time’, week in, week out;
• ·      It sells newspapers, so the media actually love football hooliganism, while pretending to deplore it;
• ·      It keeps large numbers of police officers employed and gives them the excuse to follow football and participate in the strategic games of football hooliganism while ostensibly preventing it;
• ·      It provides some excitement for the otherwise dull lives of many of the working class men.

The Media

In Brimson’s previous book, Barmy Army, he summed up his view on the role of the media in supporting football hooliganism as follows:

“…the British press love football hooliganism….
Hooliganism provides everything a good story should have; drama, tension, fear and villains. Throw in a bit of shame and occasionally the odd pinch of xenophobia and you have perfect press….the majority of journalists are not driven by the desire to expose the truth, but the need to shift papers and draw viewers. And when you have something like football violence, which explodes onto the scene every so often and makes good copy, why on earth would you want to try and stop it?”

Five years later he was still standing by his statement, even while pointing out the irony that “if we are ever going to see any kind of solution to the issue of hooliganism, the media is the one group capable of securing it.”

Hoolie Lit

After a brief discussion of the burgeoning genre of hoolie lit and his own role in it, Brimson proceeds to discuss some of the criticisms leveled at it. “The authorities are at the front of the queue of people who not only consider these books as being little more than irresponsible celebrations of a form of violence they are desperate to eradicate, but also regard certain titles as being no more than training guides for wannabe thugs.” Who would have thought?

Brimson argues that fictionalized accounts of the hooligan phenomemon are more influential than non-fiction, and that “fictional accounts have all tended to paint the hooligan lifestyle in a positive light and as a result have attracted accusations of glorification.”

Funny that. Brimson offers no defence for his own involvement as screenwriter for Green Street Hooligans, despite admitting: “…when hooliganism looks as much fun as it is usually made to look on screen, can it really be that much of a surprise that so many teenagers are getting interested?”

The Police

Described by Brimson as “Britain’s biggest and most organised mob.” It seems mind-boggling to me (as a New Zealander, far removed from this problem and its culture), that a phenomenon which requires the police to mobilise on a weekly basis is allowed to continue.

The British government has passed a raft of legislation related to football hooliganism: The Football Supporters Act 1989, The Football Offences Act 1991, and The Football Disorder and Disorder Act 1999. Football hooliganism is big business for the UK police. They have Football Intelligence Officers (FIOs), they have extensive CCTV, and use mobile phones to film and email information to their control centre. They have a national UK Football Policing Unit and an extensive database on football supporters.  According to Brimson, the cost of policing Euro 96 was around £25 million, of which around 75% was funded by the Football Trust.

Racism

I'm not going to say much about the extensive section in the book on racism in football, except to say that it made disturbing reading. It was upsetting to read about black players as recently as the late 1980s being pelted with rubbish and subjected to verbal abuse, not only by the opposition’s fans, but by their own team’s supporters. I found this part of the book even more unbelievable and surreal than the rest of the discussion of football hooliganism, and I feel even less qualified to critique it.

Mind-boggling

By the time I limped my way to the end of Brimson’s book I found that although I knew a lot more about football hooliganism than when I began (and certainly more than I ever wanted to!), I was no nearer understanding it.

I try to imagine this kind of culture being allowed to develop in NZ around our national game: rugby. It just does not compute. Imagine hoards of young people going out and bashing each other up every weekend ostensibly over a game of rugby? No.

The nearest analogy I can come up with is the 1981 Springbok Tour with its Wednesday and Saturday games where we all went out and protested and the police all came out and followed us around and hit us. None of us want to live through that again. It nearly destroyed our country. We were doing it to fight against racism, to fight for human rights, to fight against injustice. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to put themselves in a similar situation ‘for fun’.

Yet at the end of The Football Factory when Tommy’s Grandad Bill, lying next to him in a hospital bed, asks him: “Is it worth it?”  Tommy’s answer, delivered on his way to the pub, is as follows:

Kicked half to death, florists, cabbies, nightmares and visions, one of the old soldiers gone forever, Bright gone for a seven, and bollocks so ruptured that the only thing I’ll be pulling for months is a chain, after all that, you really do have to ask yourself if it was all worth it… ‘course it fucking was.

He’s heading right back to hang out with his mates and get his head kicked in again. The moral of the story: football hooliganism is fun.

In Green Street Hooligans, after choosing to participate in the fight where his friend Pete is killed, although Matt heads back to the US, the first thing he does is go and seek justice by taping a confession from the guy who stiffed him out of his place at Harvard, and threaten him with violence. Don’t get me wrong, the other character is scum, but the moral of the story is that Matt is now a ‘real man’ having learnt to fight and stand up for himself in the real men's world of the football ‘firm’.

And Brimson writes: “…for those who were there through what was in effect the ‘golden age’ of hooliganism, it was a life shaping time, so why shouldn’t they remember that with fondness? ....rightly or wrongly, I know I do.”

Scary.