At Least We Don't Have Football Hooligans
Categories: Sports , Rediscoveries , Staff Picks , Nonfiction
Raise your hand if you're gearing up for the World Cup matches in Germany. Thirty-five hundred English fans have been banned from attending because of past bad behavior at previous football (we call it soccer) matches.
Bill Buford was editor of Granta and fiction editor for The New Yorker, and then he gave it all up to study cooking seriously. His book about the learning experience, Heat, got such a good New York Times review that I wanted to read something else he'd written and discovered his 1992 bestseller, Among the Thugs.
Buford had lived in England for fifteen years and never seen a football match. Intrigued by the sight of soccer fans systematically destroying a train, Buford took a package tour to Turin, Italy, with a group of historically violent Manchester United supporters and was carried away by the rioting and looting that followed the game.
Buford's original thought was that the rioters were disenfranchised outsiders who used soccer violence as a way of venting their understandable rage against society. Surprisingly, he found that many of the supporters had high-paying jobs, and he had to find new theories to explain the violence that football engenders around the world. Part of the blame seems to go to the nature of football itself.
- Washington Post article on football hooliganism.
- Wikipedia entry (with good bibliography at the end).
