Spectator behavior at major sporting events in England is approaching wild chaos
Wherever you play sports, it feels like the fans have forgotten any sense of restraint. If it wasn't outrageous enough to watch cocaine-fuelled hooligans ruin Cheltenham's Gold Cup day, we experienced the spectacle at Manchester United just 48 hours later when one sneering twit turned to the far side and put his hand to his face in apparent mockery of 97 Liverpool fans crushed to death at Hillsborough.
“Just show a little class,” pleaded Jurgen Klopp, desperate to prevent a replay on Sunday. The German is pleading with the English to show a little decency: expect to hear more about this soon, not least when England begin their European Championship against Serbia in Gelsenkirchen. Except that class may be conspicuous by its absence from the national game, and the chants of tragedy are just one symptom of the recent slide into savage chaos. Pitch invasions, the throwing of flares, the exchange of Class A drugs in the men's cubicles before kick-off: these are increasingly manifestations of the modern malaise.
However, it would be unfair to suggest that these pathologies are limited solely to football. In rugby, the vulgarity of some England fans singing an unprinted version of the music hall ditty «My Old Man (Said Follow the Van)» on the midnight tram back to Lyon Part-Dieu last month has caused intense cultural revulsion. The same thing happened with last year's story about an Italian journalist who was doused with beer in Twickenham. Not that this incident was anything special. I felt just as wet after the final whistle of England's last draw with the All Blacks. While the benefits of this job should never be underestimated, I always think you've never lived until you've tried to write 1,000 words on a deadline using your laptop marinated in a medium-strength camp.
“There are problems in many sports,” says Dr Martha Newson, a cognitive anthropologist at the Universities of Greenwich and Oxford and a world leader in research into the rituals behind fan behavior. “Football is simply given too much attention because of its history of hooliganism and because it is easier to scapegoat.”
The image of Britain falling apart
There is a heightened awareness of dysfunction all around us. Sport is a mirror of society, and when Oxford rowers bemoan an E. coli outbreak at a boat race due to raw sewage in the Thames, and Newcastle fans unable to return home after the 3pm kick-off at Fulham due to train strikes, Impressive The shape of the country is bursting at the seams. This is intensifying amid increasing scenes of unrest. Take, for example, the police officers injured in violent fighting in Millwall last month, or the man left bleeding from the head when Wolverhampton Wanderers and West Bromwich Albion ultras came to blows. Here's a sport that saves you from chaos.
A straight line can be drawn between the deterioration of fan behavior and the image of a Britain that is falling apart. As the 2021 Euro final at Wembley turned into a dystopia of hard drugs and mafia rule, it was tempting to blame the fiasco on a lockdown that severed the threads of civilization. Baroness Casey's account of that terrible night included 29 separate references to the pandemic. But after stadiums have been restored to full capacity for almost three years, this trend of using Covid as a universal excuse is no longer going away.
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