If dead-eyed, scrap-cheeked, hairless, sharp-toothed, chalk-skinned, thieving, bilious, idiot boys in England, bluely tattooed, lips sensually numbed and hypnotized by lager, set out to eat each other’s eyeballs at the behest of Hitler-loving middle-aged real-estate men drunk with the scent of their own sweat-soaked smirking desperate wife-killing mustaches, please, someone, tell me, what on Earth has it got to do with me? It tolls for thee, etc., but one thing I’ve never understood about the fetishization of hooliganism among a certain class of (liberal, educated, comfortable, not looking to invite a truncheon to the face) football fans is what it has to do with football: that is, how it’s meant to involve me in mankind rather than give me a privileged window onto nominally real Clockwork Orange freaks whom I can compartmentalize as fictional characters while simultaneously using their reality to get a danger kick out of the deep cultural background to my watching a sport on television. It’s dehumanizing, I mean; the kid in Palo Alto leaving an Amazon review for Among the Thugs that raves about its “ultraviolence” isn’t approaching the subject with sympathy for these broken specimens or for their victims, or with sociological curiosity, or with anything other than lust for an aesthetic drug: the two-doors-down thrill of somebody else punching somebody else in the face, neatly delivered by the ex-editor of Granta between Facebook visits and a glance at Yahoo! news. It’s not a true story, it’s based on a true story. I’m not patient with this. There’s something wrong with this.
I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the world. In America, people who like thinking about “soccer violence” are not people who will ever go to a soccer match at which violence might take place. It’s just a line to chuckle to once you’ve got the commentary track to your Fight Club DVD memorized. Dude, those people are crazy.
Bill Buford’s book isn’t looking to feed into this attitude, exactly. But then, it kind of is, because what interests Buford is the pleasure of being caught up in a crowd, and specifically the pleasure of being caught up in a crowd that turns violent, which is basically an aesthetic pleasure, though he doesn’t use that word: he says it’s a drug, it’s entertainment, it’s an escape. It’s absinthe and Star Wars and the decadent endpoint of highly cultivated uncultivatable sensibilities. And the voyeuristic fascination with the details, with which (fascination and details) Buford’s book is drenched, is basically just the same aesthetic pleasure at one safe remove; it’s a kind of mental slumming through other people’s pain.
I could tell you why I don’t really trust it, this book, why I don’t quite see the value of this sort of post-Truman Capote, post-Norman Mailer New Yorker-style participatory journalism in which the random clatter of real life somehow helpfully falls into place within the outlines of an interpretive theory (but real life isn’t like that, as Chekhov said about Ibsen). But the fudged details, the ones I caught, aren’t really what bothered me. I just couldn’t quite take the X-Games theater, the marketed savvy of it all. The potential for this behavior is in all of us, he says, but the way he shows us that fact (involving us in the pleasure the hooligans take in surrounding a teenaged Italian boy and kicking him until he’s unconscious) really just invites us to enjoy the fact that the actuality of this behavior is in some of us. That is, in someone else.
I suppose it would be possible to read Among the Thugs with a detached curiosity and learn something and ask a question when you see the author at the 92nd Street Y. It’s that it’s so possible, so widely and deliberately and cannily possible, to read it in that other way that drove me off.
Read More: Leaves of Grass, Swooning for Hooligans
by Brian Phillips · December 13, 2007
No keener to pick the book up post your excellent review than I was earlier. Reading this, I wonder if the entire experience of football from afar isn’t an extension of our impulse to simlutaneously ‘get close’ to and distance ourselves from a certain kind of culture and psychology. Watching, talking, dissecting football in Europe and South America – doesn’t it allow us to approximate feelings that we enjoy at least a little because they’re so far from us? I see a lot of this in some of the knee-jerk blogger responses to ‘hooliganism’ in Italy, for example. The concern for humanity is no doubt real, but the circumstances are so incredibly Othered that morality and aestheticism get mashed together irreparably.
So much about football is performance-oriented, it’s like a hall of mirrors. It’s so hard to tell appearance from ‘reality’ that it’s best to just keep oneself deeply involved in both. Maybe.
[On a related note: the tendency of some US fans to denote soccer by using the Spanish word ‘futbol’ – what think you of it?]
I do know how to spell ‘simultaneously.’ Sorry.
Roswitha — I don’t much like the use of “futbol,” for various reasons, largely related to the excellent points you’ve raised here; it seems a little touristy, is the short answer. But the usage problem is hard to get around. I generally call the game “soccer” in conversation but most often call it “football” here because so many people who read the blog aren’t American, and I’ve never focused on the American game, and “football” just seems like the universal word for discussion under those circumstances. But it’s still a little strange, and probably a bit touristy in its own right, although I hope not terribly so.
I’ve also tended to follow the English practice of using plural verbs for groups (“Arsenal are a young team” rather than the American “Arsenal is a young team”) which was another choice made in favor of an international audience—and just because that’s how the teams are talked about in the journalism I read—but it can’t quite be an innocent one, I think. And it’s especially odd as I’ve continued to use American spelling, feeling that crossing that line would somehow mean entering into self-misrepresentation.
What I mean to suggest with all this is not that I’m a cultural hypocrite, but that firm conventions are going be hard to come by, inevitably, in a really international discussion of a really international game. To some extent we’re bound to be tourists, as you say, and enjoy the thing because it’s far from us; but to some extent we’re groping our way toward something we have in common, and if one of those is bad and one of them is good it can still be really hard to tell the difference. Not in the case of fetishizing hooligans, obviously, but in the case of verb forms, maybe, and even of the name we give the game.
You’re right, I think, that when appearance and reality get so mashed up it’s best to try to mean well, and stay invested in both.
Oh, nicely put. And I don’t think it’s cultural hypocrisy on our parts either — I completely disavow the idea that this globalised fandom is invalid because it’s different from local, grassroots fan culture. But the negotiation of the way to the common ground is fraught with dangers, as you say.
I don’t like ‘futbol’ because, when it is used by English speakers, it seems like an exoticising mechanism. It limits football to foreignness [and, although I suppose this makes a small bit of sense in the cultural context of North America, exclusively Hispanic foreignness]. Maybe I’m being oversensitive for reading race and class implications into it, but to me it reads as an identification of football as the immigrant sport — there’s no ownership there.
I like ‘soccer,’ actually. I read a lot of PG Wodehouse and his early stories almost exclusively refer to rugby when he mentions ‘football,’ and he calls the other kind – our kind – soccer, too. My grandfather calls it soccer, tons of Indians of my generation call it soccer. Now I’m not sure whether we youngere ffolkse do it because of our colonial heritage or because of anything from hither shores that reaches us does so through an American pop-culture filter. But I find the UK-based Telegraph-reading snobbery about the word unjustified.
The OED has “colloq.” after soccer and not after football. I think this is still the case. Verbal snobbery dies hard.
Roswitha — I generally agree with you about “futbol,” but in equivocal defense of the Americans who employ it, I think they mean it less to signify the alienness of the sport than to signify their own commitment as fans. It’s easy, as an American fan, to feel that “soccer” indicates something casual and trivial, a kind of unthreatening subculture, like surfing or folk music. Passion and seriousness about the game are associated with other places, and especially with Spanish-speaking places, for obvious geographical reasons.
So I think the American fans who use “futbol” largely mean it admiringly, and even a bit enviously. It suggests huge stadiums full of roaring fans, players who are legends in their cultures, etc., where “soccer” can suggest floppy-haired teenagers who do more drugs than the other varsity sports teams. It’s possible that we’ve internalized the Telegraph snobbery, or else we’ve just read so many mocking columns by American sportswriters about the dullness and stupidity of soccer that it’s easier for some of us to divorce ourselves from the word and align ourselves linguistically with people who appreciate the game. (EDIT: Though again, like you, I think that this realignment is a mistake and that the exoticizing overtones are impossible to avoid, whether or not they’re intended.)
Henry — That’s fantastic; I had no idea. And yet Geoff Hurst is probably still listed under the definition of “hero.”
I’m Afghan by background and for us the the game is “fotbaal”. But having been brought up in Australia I had to accept, grudgingly, that “soccer” was the preferred title here.
But I still refuse to call any other game football. Rugby, League, Aussie Rules sure, but football? No way!
It was hard enough for me to swallow this “soccer” thing. I always associated the term with the gridiron jocks of America and the cricketers of India.
Among the Thugs is a pretty good book, given that it isn’t written by someone particularly invested in making a point – it was simply a professional American writer who decided he’d write about the problem of football violence in Europe – and this enables a great two-sided quality to emerge. I had my own book on the subject published this year, entitled “Perry Boys”, which chiefly deals with an aspect of that culture that went unnoticed by Buford, that of the designer clothing fetish. “Perry Boys” discusses the conditions in northwest England that led to the later “casual” culture, that streamlined form of hooliganism that was created from the galvanisation and cohesion wrought when Liverpool and Manchester lads suddenly discovered that they were in on something nobody else was, i.e. the wearing of expensive sports and designer wear, which delineated their willingness to participate in soccer violence.
I think Buford was an ideal man for the job; he didn’t favour them, neither did he overly distance himself from them, and like John Sugden in “Scum Airways”, he actually found himself enjoying some of the mayhem – for precisely the same reasons those young lads were lured into it in the first place.
Adrenalin and fear are one and the same, and we as animals continue to crave the sensation they create in us. When the traditional football violence was combined with fashion sensibilities, a new order was created, and Manchester and Liverpool led the way…
Ian — You write that “we as animals” will continue to crave the sensation that “adrenalin and fear” create in us. I think you’re absolutely right, and as I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, I think that’s one of the reasons we follow sports in the first place.
But I just can’t accept this as a justification for hooligan violence. I realize that you’re not precisely offering it as one, but you praise Buford for presenting both sides of his subject, and this is presumably the “pro” side: that young men want the edge or the buzz or the thrill of group violence, and so long as they’re only attacking one another, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do it?
But in Among the Thugs, so many of the people who get caught up in this violence are innocent. They’re not out looking for a fight, they’re just football fans who happened to be in the wrong place when a group of drunken Englishmen decided the time was right to smash someone’s head against the concrete. There’s the Italian father who gets beaten to a pulp while trying to hurry his family into their car to escape a fight; there’s the pair of middle-aged fans who get beaten unconscious, then abandoned (until fifteen minutes later, when the hooligans come back to kick them some more); the list goes on and on.
And when innocent victims come into it, then to me, the idea of presenting “both sides” starts to seem faulty. There aren’t two valid sides in stories like these, because nothing on the hooligans’ “side”—not the economy, not the buzz, nothing—can justify a gang attack on someone who wasn’t looking for a fight, and whose only crime was wanting to see a football match.
I understand that you were a part of this scene in its early days; I wasn’t, obviously, and I don’t doubt that your experience is very different from these sensational extremes. I only have the accounts in Buford’s book to go by, and based on those accounts, his determination to present “both sides” is precisely the problem with his approach. An animal impulse isn’t a justification, no matter how thrilling or pleasurable it is. A rapist has an animal impulse.
Am I being too prudish? All I know is that as someone who loves the game of football but has no interest in the violent subcultures that flock to it (and even less interest on being on the wrong end of one of them), as far as I’m concerned the less glorification of hooliganism the better. That’s not to say it can’t be interesting in a sociological sense—and your book does sound interesting—but I’d rather keep the thug-life, crowbars-through-car-windows fantasy aspect of the subject as far from football as possible.
Brian, I think whenever we enter a philosophical (read: clever) discussion about animals and biochemistry, we enter a realm where morals, ethics, etc, are left behind. You have to remember than England has a terrible history of disorganisation compared to other industrialised nations with regard to its sense of ambition and destiny, especially among the lower working class. What I mean by that is, when faced with post-puberty and a school “careers” class, most English choose to drink and engage in mischief, rather than organise themselves into more formal teams and organisations in order to relieve the energy of youth (and the aggression generated simply by being a medium-sized mammal). Youths in other countries inherit a far more sophisticated social network, where myriad opportunities for personal growth present themselves, and consequently they are engulfed on a track that facilitates their education and coming of age as young men without ever having to become habituated into an underground culture.
In England in the 70s and 80s, we were left to wander the streets, and to find whatever little adventures we could. It is of no matter that most, if not all, of us were perfectly capable of becoming electricians, plumbers, joiners, bricklayers, or even scientists and engineers. The fact was we didn’t live in the kind of world where these opportunities presented themselves, coming as we did from the very bottom of the totem pole. This isn’t an excuse, this is the truth.
My own parents were not boozers, or wasters, they understood totally that going to college and obtaining some kind of qualification was the key to a better life, but if pushed for information on the exact nature of that qualification they would be at a loss to define anything about it, or the path to it. And if asked where the money for this enterprise would be found…well, the less said about that the better. Many of my friends ended up doing wel for themselves, and some went to college and earned degrees, but sometimes intelligence and capability can become a curse, if left to bloom without structure, and this was indeed the case with many of the “original” casuals in the northwest of England.
Why do you think Mancs and Scousers distance themselves from, and are unable to get along with, regular England fans? It is because they exhibit the stupid tendencies you described, going and kicking people who are already unconscious, or simply making a toxic nuisance of themselves in public squares across the Continent.
I’m not saying that football hooligans are all angels, but I think that when large numbers of young men are denied a basic rite of passage employed since the Stone Age, they tend to agglomerate and do mischief, and this in itself is interesting. Football the world over attracts hooligans, and the British are by no means the worst, by a long way in fact. But what we are are the products of an industrialised nation that carries a shameful record of neglect and bad economy, one which has slowly created ever-worse tendencies among its young and poor.
People have eyes and ears, and when they’re marginalised and treated like animals (as in the case of the way they were penned into the old terraces and trains of the pre-Premier League world), they will behave like animals, because, intellectually-speaking, they are animals…Ethics aside, this is the most interesting aspect of it. That innocents are sometimes caught up in this is a negative side-effect, but the situation is far more complex, as recent events in Rome illustrate (Man Utd fans beaten and arrested, etc, including “innocents” by the Italian police).