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BY the time the European Football Championship kicks off in Portugal this month, the issue of football 'hooliganism' will have crept high on the agenda of the mass media. Undoubtedly this coverage will centre on the potential of the English football 'hooligan' to bring a sense of crisis, not just to the game, but also to English national identity. There is good cause. Should the spectre of disorder involving English fans haunt Euro 2004 there is a real chance that the England team will be expelled from the tournament. Such expulsion could lead to a worldwide ban for the national squad and may even affect national club sides competing in European competitions.
At the very least, expulsion would bring a sense of political and economic crisis to English football, and the government would face powerful questions about its ability to control law and order. Lack of international fixtures would wreak havoc upon the repayment forecasts for the new £758 million Wembley stadium. It is little wonder then that the UK government has been doing all it can to try to prevent 'hooligans' from travelling to the tournament. For example, they estimate that by june the courts will have imposed approximately 2500 banning orders, requiring individual fans to surrender their passports for the duration of the competition. But is this focus upon known troublemakers justified? And will this form of social control be enough to prevent a major incident of 'hooliganism' during Euro 2004?
From a psychological perspective the focus upon the 'hooligan' is essentially a reduction of the problem of 'disorder' to the level of individual pathology, be the origin of that pathology the class-based macro social structures of post-industrial Britain (Dunning et al, 1988) or the abnormal motivational needs of the 'hooligan' (Kerr, 1994; Kerr & de Kock, 2002). From this perspective the riots we have witnessed at major international competitions are understood as an outcome of the convergence of fans who are predisposed toward creating 'disorder'. While this 'hooligan account' is widely accepted as a sufficient explanation for football disorder, it is simply not adequate as a scientific theory. More is needed to understand the problem and to deal effectively with it.
The 'hooligan account' encounters difficulties in explaining when and why violence...