Video: Hooliganism at the 2006 World Cup
I recently finished reading Among the Thugs, Bill Buford’s book about English football hooligans. In it, Buford dissects the nature of a mob, mob mentality and, in turn, mob violence. Calling it a disturbing read is an understatement.
While I read the book and because I had never seen anything like what he described, I conjured up mental images of what those drunken, late-night mobs must have looked like. It was a couple days after I finished Among The Thugs that I came across the video below. It turns out that those pictures I envisioned were almost dead-on; hooliganism looked exactly as I thought it would. (I suppose that’s a tribute to the author’s storytelling ability.)
During the 2006 World Cup in Germany, Panorama, an investigative television show that airs on the BBC, sent undercover videographers to document hooligan activity. What they found, while shocking, also inspires a sort of train-wreck fascination. One can’t stop watching and wondering: Why do people act like fools? What inspires people to do evil, destructive things?
I reckon those are timeless questions applicable to more than just football violence and, while the program offered some answers, it served best by offering viewers visual evidence of that which they’d only seen in print.
The video is long (59 minutes) so set aside a good chunk of time to watch it.
3 comments
Read the book, seen the video. Amazing yes. Rich who writes Craven Cottage Newsround, a Fulham blog, has told me there are times when he goes on holiday and is almost ashamed to be British. But let’s not kid ourselves. There are so many countries where this very same thing happens. Bruce over at DuNord just linked to some youtube video of a show from the UK where this British guy, who used to be a thug himself, travels around the world to find hooligans. The series they did on the Barra Brava’s of Argentina can make the English mobs look like small potatoes.
But it is still odd that even though this stuff revolts us and we wish we were rid of it, there is still something very fascinating about the old firms. Otherwise we wouldn’t read the books and watch the documentaries and movies concerning the subject.
I also have read the book, and was absolutely fascinated by the violence. On another note, I just finished reading “Brilliant Orange” which was also very entertaining. The comparison between football from the British perspective, and football from the Dutch perspective was intriguing.
I think what we find so fascinating about the firms and about hooligan culture is that they represent an extreme expression of something that’s buried deep down in all of our feelings about sports. We (rightly) think of sports as a celebration of human potential and as a venue for spontaneous drama, but the engine that powers all of the good aspects of sports is the human tendency toward tribalism and conflict. Without those tendencies we wouldn’t need to see our team beat the other team–we wouldn’t find competition so thrilling. Sports is basically structured in such a way that it allows us to experience this part of ourselves in safety, but we still find it fascinating when something lifts off the civilized lid of sports and shows us what’s underneath, whether it’s hooliganism or a Roy Keane tackle that was meant to break someone’s leg.
I’ve written a series on this topic (“why do we follow sports?”) on The Run of Play. I conclude that at its best, football allows us to transcend the violent part of ourselves by using it as fuel for something aesthetic and creative, and at its worst, it perverts our better natures by giving us a pretext for violence in what ought to be only a game.
All that said–did anyone else who watched this video chuckle when the narrator winds up by worrying that “England will soon be sending thousands of fans to Euro 2008. Will this be the next occasion for England’s shame?” Looks like England might just strike a blow against that horror scenario by not qualifying in the first place…