Hooligan Class

In this article a sociological diagnosis of football hooliganism as a world phenomenon is given. The author uses mainly English (newspaper) data about football violence (in and outside England) as an empirical base to explore how hooliganism can be theorised and understood. These data can usefully serve as a rough indication of the worldwide incidence of football hooliganism in the twentieth century. The author favours the figurational/process-sociological approach to football hooliganism which is historical and developmental. It also involves an exploration of the meanings of hooligan behaviour via an analysis of verbatim statements by the hooligans themselves, locates the football hooligans in the overall social structure, especially the class system, and examines the dynamics of the relationship between them and groups in the wider society. It is important, nevertheless, to stress that it is unlikely that the phenomenon of football hooliganism will be found always and everywhere to stem from identical social roots. As a basis for further, cross-national research, it is reasonable to hypothesise that the problem is fuelled and contoured by, among other things, what one might call the major 'fault-lines' of particular countries. Effective policies are urgently needed if the great social invention of football is to be protected from the serious threat posed by a combination of hooligan fans, complacent politicians and money-grabbing owners, managers and players.

Drawing upon an extensive search of the local press, this article offers a quantitative and qualitative analysis of incidents of crowd disorder at soccer matches in South Wales in the period 1906‐39. As well as contributing to the existing academic debate on the extent of football hooliganism in this period, it develops that debate through firmly situating the trouble in the class and cultural values of those who witnessed and perpetuated it. The paper argues that crowd disorder at and around soccer matches did take place, it was not a serious problem, certainly not on the lines of modern disturbances, and rooted in the working‐class values of the day.

In this study my goal is to identify the causes that explain certain labels' capacity to endure and to keep their discriminatory effectiveness over long periods of time, and even provoke moral panics. I will argue that although the labeling approach to deviance has been successful in showing the constructed nature of labels it has not been equally successful in explaining the reasons for the durability of some of its products. In my view this shortcoming can be overcome by the introduction of relevant historical content informing the everyday processes through which labels come into being and bring to bear influence in society. In this sense, the theory of social representations offers an important reference. The central argument I will be expounding in this article is twofold. First, a deviant label can be understood as a constituting symbolic theme, interacting with a wider constellation of themes concerning a social representation. Second, the resilience of a label will depend on the extent it stands in opposition to, or corrupts, the crucial assumptions of the core themes that work to uphold the structure of a social representation. In order to ascertain the efficacy of my argument I looked at the origins and early history of one of Britain's most disreputable labels: that of the “hooligan.” I conclude by saying that the endurance of this label and the moral panic it generated were grounded in its power to radically counter one of the core themes—that of respectability—sustaining the social representation the Victorian middle-class built in relation to itself.