NCJ Number
138308
Date Published
1990
Length
253 pages
Annotation
The essays in this book, written as footballers from 24 nations prepared to meet for the 1990 World Cup Finals in an atmosphere of great tension, examine the principal causes of soccer (football) hooliganism as a European and international phenomenon.
Abstract
Several historical essays cover issues of football hooliganism including the roots of player undiscipline and violence, the social history of spectator violence in Great Britain, and the part played by the mass media in generating spectator violence. Other essays discuss European football hooliganism, based on cross-cultural research, and present the results of a case study of participant observation research relating to a group of English soccer fans in the early 1980's. A separate chapter analyzes the lack of comparative violence among American football fans and examines the future of soccer in the United States, which will be host to the 1994 World Cup Finals. The final chapter offers some alternatives to current policies for constraining hooliganism, based on current research and what the authors perceive to be the complexities of the phenomenon. Chapter references