Football Hooligans : Basic Instinct or Acquired Taste?

Football hooligans (or soccer hooligans) have been a menace in sports for a considerable time. What is it that transforms them from ordinary law-abiding people into unruly violent gangs?

If sports is symbolism for aggression, then the distinction between the symbolic and reality is not always understood or observed. Far too often we've seen marauding fans of different factions facing off each other and not infrequently even engaging in actual combat.

Perhaps that's too wide a statement - I have particularly in mind football hooliganism. (And by football here I mean soccer.) What is it about football that enervates some of its fans to such a level of aggressive and violent display? I am not going to answer this because I don't know the answer.

But the phenomenon is there - though it seems that recently it has died down or it is in hibernation.

We don't see this, so far as I know, for example, in tennis. Maybe that's a different kind of game, somehow more 'genteel'. It's actually hard to imagine tennis fans forming into fighting gangs, though you may think that the tennis racket can be a formidable weapon. And we don't see this in American football, which is an aggressive sport with no lack of fervent fans.

Sports is a necessary facet of our lives. Maybe it is necessary as a means of channelling our basic instincts of violence and aggression into something socially acceptable. Of course, it also has other benefits such as building character, team spirit, competitiveness. It is also a vast money-making machine!

But in the real world of sports, the basic instincts too frequently rear their ugly heads, but ironically not so much among the players but the spectators.

So what is it about football that brings the worst out of some of its fans? Somehow they have lost the real sense of the sport as sport. They set out as warriors to face their enemy, and literally so, with the intention and expectation of going into combat.

They will sacrifice themselves if necessary. They will prepare themselves and immunise themselves with an excess intake of beer and lager. They will taunt their enemies and when their adrenaline is fully charged, they will transform themselves into true warriors. But because there are no generals directing these armies, the resulting 'combat' takes on the appearance of wanton hooligans creating chaos.

The streets of Amsterdam and other cities have been used as a battleground.

British football hooliganism has often taken the headlines, but this phenomenon is by no means so confined by nationality, as the video inserted here shows.

"Let the games begin!"

            ^{Credits: pdsphil - creative commons}