Football ‘Hooliganism’, Policing and the War on the

‘English Disease’
Clifford Stott and Geoff Pearson
London: Pennant Books, 2007. 345 pp. £17.99. ISBN 1906015058.
Reviewed by ANTHONY KING, University of Exeter, UK

The jacket photographs of this book depict its central argument with rare precision.
The main picture features a shirtless, England fan being arrested by a number of heavily
armoured, foreign police. The muscular, shaven-headed and tattooed Englishman is
being restrained by the police who appear as menacing cyborgs in black helmets
and body armour. A trickle of blood runs down the left pectoral of the England fan
and, with his head tilted to the left, the photograph references the famous painting
of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by the Pollaiuolo brothers. While popular and
some academic accounts of hooliganism have tended to blame the naked English
fan, like the one in the cover picture, Stott and Pearson prioritize the role of intergroup
dynamics between travelling fans and police in precipitating disorder; they want
readers to ‘leave behind the idea that major riots are simply the product of hooligans
travelling abroad to create mayhem’ (p. 328). Far from being the perpetrator, the
England fan is more often than not the suffering victim of police heavy-handedness
and, even, brutality. The violent disorder which has been a feature of European football
since the 1970s is a product of the clumsy collision of two competing forms of
hypermasculinity.
The photograph on the rear cover illustrates Stott and Pearson’s recommendations
for reducing crowd disorder at football tournaments. The image, taken in a German city
during the World Cup Finals in 2006, depicts a quartet, consisting of a rotund English
fan in shirt and carnival hat, a young and apparently very drunk German fan draped in
a flag and a German and English policeman, both in normal uniform. At first glance,
the group are engaged in a jovial discussion; the England fan rests his elbow fraternally
on the shoulder of the English policeman who appears to be smiling. The future of
European football is international amity. A closer observation is revealing. The mood is
not cheerful in this picture. The German fan is not inebriated but angry; he points with
furrowed brow out of shot. The English policeman also points in a similar direction,
trying to ascertain what has just happened. Behind the quartet, other fans are visible.
Behind the right shoulder of the English policeman, another England fan, whose face
is partly obscured, is shouting and has an expression of visible aggression. The anxious
face of a woman, also pointing in the direction of the incident, appears behind the
policeman’s other shoulder. Clearly a confrontation has just occurred which the police
are trying to resolve peacefully. The picture usefully summarizes the argument of the
book. Instead of the mass deployment of riot police, Europe needs to develop a new
‘firm but fair’ approach to the management of football crowds. Police forces should
deploy in initially small numbers into the fan groups in order to develop cordial relations
with them.
Football ‘Hooliganism’ represents the culmination of 15 years of research,
which Stott began in the late 1980s with Reicher into collective crowd psychology
(Stott and Reicher, 1998). Against essentialist accounts of crowds, which understood
violence in terms of the dispositions of individuals, Stott and Reicher argued that
crowd disorder could, in fact, be comprehended only as an outcome of the interaction
between the crowd and other agents; above all, the police. The crowd was precipitated
into violence by the aggressive interventions of the police. This was an important
argument that developed the debate on football hooliganism in the 1990s. The current
study corroborates that theoretical argument with exhaustive material from all the
major international football tournaments in Europe since Italia 1990, as well as a
number of Champions League games involving English clubs. Stott and Pearson reach
the insightful conclusion that:
when high-profile policing was used in lower-risk situations, it actually coincided
with the highest overall levels of disorder – in other words, the data was consistent
with the claim that high-profi le policing in low-risk scenarios was actually
causing the disorder. (p. 164)
In line with this argument, Stott and Pearson refute pathologies of football disorder
that reduce violent interaction to individual aggression: ‘the English Disease’. Instead,
they explore how violence is a complex outgrowth of interactions on the ground between
England fans, locals and police all informed by the global media. The media are singled
out for special attention (pp. 118, 158). Certainly, Stott and Pearson provide evidence
of how the media cynically exaggerate the dangers posed by the English hooliganism
in order to sell copy. Journalists thereby create the very conditions that they putatively
abhor. Instructively Stott and Pearson compare the treatment of English and Scottish
fans abroad. Against conventional wisdom, Stott and Pearson reveal that Scottish
fans are not by any means always peaceful (pp. 120–1). There have been numerous
incidents where they have been involved in small-scale trouble that could have been
amplifi ed by an interested media. However, where the smallest confrontations involving
English fans are inflated, Scottish disorder disappears from view. Stott and Pearson
show how the media have consistently communicated a stereotype of the England
travelling fan that has actively precipitated disorder by cuing responses from the police
and locals abroad.
In identifying these wider dynamics, Stott and Pearson are certainly not apologist
for the masculine English fan: ‘We recognise, of course, that fans who subscribe to
violent machismo have played an important part in the English disease’ (p. 328). With
admirable honesty, Stott and Pearson record extensive material where English fans
are offensive and, indeed, explicitly provocative while abroad. The authors note an
incident in Frankfurt during the World Cup in 2006 when a small group of England
fans ‘could be heard urging those around them to “Come on!”, “We’re fucking
England, come on!”, “Fuck ’em, they’re German fucks!”’ (p. 305). In the light of this
evidence, it would be difficult to suggest that aggressive English nationalism was
irrelevant to disorder around football. Yet, Stott and Pearson’s analysis of the role of
English fan culture in violence is not as systematic as their criticisms of poor policing.
Their focus on reforming the police and media, perhaps, leads them to de-emphasize
the role of supporters themselves in a manner Stott and Pearson do not always intend.
Consequently, nowhere do they recommend reformations to English fan culture to
match their sensible criticisms of policing.
Nevertheless, Stott and Pearson’s diligence in collating these data should be commended.
The book contains some very detailed case studies that reveal the complex
processes which lead to violence. These descriptions constitute valuable social scientifi c
material depicting the realities of social interaction and their recommendations for
policing reforms are sensible and seem to have infl uenced European policy makers.
Moreover, they exposed themselves to signifi cant personal risks for the purposes of the
research and the book; they should be praised for that. The obvious strength of the book
might also be interpreted as its necessary limitation, however. Stott and Pearson make
a convincing case of how riots begin among English masculine fans, described as ‘the
lads’ or, as Category B fans, by the police. These fans are boisterous, heavy-drinking
supporters who are not committed hooligans but who are sometimes dragged into
violence in particular situations. However, absent from the work is any discussion of
dedicated hooligan confrontations.
Some riots cannot be explained by reference to the police or to the media, except
in the most oblique way. There are hooligan groups in Europe who actively organize
themselves for confrontation. There is still a dynamics of crowd violence here; challenges
are exchanged and small but symbolically signifi cant events (like the knocking down
of one or two opponents) are interpreted as major victories, forcing one group to fl ee.
However, as Stott and Pearson fully recognize, the concept of the England fan as the
unwitting victim of police aggression has very little purchase here. It is ironic that this
book is published in a series which specializes in hooligan memoirs by a publisher who
has contributed signifi cantly to that genre and was himself a famous member of West
Ham’s ICF. It has been suggested that some of what passes for memoirs in those books
may be less than reliable. Yet, the violence described in those books is quite different
from the accidental riots that Stott and Pearson analyse so effectively.
None of this detracts from an extremely useful and interesting book. Stott and
Pearson have identified a clear research question and they have answered it with vivid
evidence. They have taken the bold step of publishing the work with a popular house.
Presumably, Stott and Pearson want to have a wider readership for their worthy work
than an academic publisher would provide. They are right in trying to talk to a wider
audience about these important issues. However, by publishing with Cass Pennant,
Stott and Pearson may have unwittingly lessened the impact of this book among
infl uential audiences: European national police forces and European policy-makers.
It is possible that certain phrases in it that seem to have been included to appeal to
a popular audience may diminish its manifest importance in policy realms. The book
may have less impact than it should. None of this should dissuade professional social
scientists from reading it. It is a timely and informed piece of work from which much
is to be learnt.
Reference
Stott, C. and S. Reicher (1998) ‘How Conflict Escalates: The Inter-Group Dynamics of
Collective
Football Crowd “Violence”’, Sociology 32(2): 353–77.
-respinge idea ca revoltele majore sunt produse de “huliganii” care
calatoresc in strainatate doar pentru a crea haos.
-departe de a fi infractor, fanul englez este mai adesea o victima care sufera
de brutalitatea politiei
-tulburarile de violenta , caracteristice fanilor fotbalului inca din anii ’70
sunt un produs de coliziune intre 2 forme de hipermasculinitate.
-tulburări de grup ar putea, de fapt, să fie înţelese doar ca un rezultat al
interacţiunii
între mulţimea şi alţi agenţi
-in multe turnee internationale de fotbal au fost cazuri de violenta:
- examinează modul în care violenţa este un rod complex de interacţiuni pe
teren între fanii englezi, localnici si politie.
-mass-media exagereaza pericolele create de “huliganii englezi”
-mass-media a creat un stereotip al fanilor englezi
-cartea contine studii de caz care arata procesul care explica fenomenul de
violenta
- unul dintre autorii acestei carti a fost el insusi fan al echipei West Ham.