Yesterday's "Animals" are Today's Chaucers
By Simon J Black
Published: 01/30/2008
In his latest sports column for Canadian Dimension, Simon Black describes the curious rise of hooligan lit and what it means for popular culture.
Hooliganism’s entry into the world of British arts and culture was also marked by a number of documentaries and feature films, each finding a receptive audience in that vague demographic the British press refer to as ‘Middle Britain’. The 1988 release The Firm featured respected Shakespearean actor Gary Oldman while the more recent Green Street Elite starred erstwhile hobbit Elijah Wood. Apparently, hooliganism meant serious business for the serious thespian. And although yet to find its way onto the shelves of Chapters and Indigo, hooligan lit’s artistic battering ram to break into the North American market may well be the wildly successful Bravo television series, The Real Football Factories. Each week the show’s host – the star of hooligan film The Football Factory – takes viewers to a new battleground in the global world of football violence, from northwest England to the outskirts of Istanbul.
Although football hooliganism first appeared in the UK in the 1960s, it wasn’t until the late 70s and early 80s that the phenomenon became so widespread as to warrant the attention of the British government, the media, and academics. Three competing explanations for the hooligan phenomenon became popularized in the public discourse:
A) The Conservative: Hooligans are lawless thugs on par with Bolshy shop stewards and further proof of the continuing deterioration of British society. Thatcher called hooliganism the “English disease” and promised to crack down on the “animals”.
B) The Socialist: Hooliganism is merely another expression of working class alienation and further proof of working class unrest and discontent with the status quo.
C) The Feminist: Solely a male phenomenon, hooliganism is further proof of a masculine sports culture founded upon aggression, competition, and violence.
Explanation A) was constructed by Thatcher and her coterie of political advisors, conservative think-tanks and promoted by the rabid right-wing press, especially Rupert Murdoch’s stable of tabloid rags. B) was lazy sociology and encapsulated the Marxist tendency to reduce all social phenomenon to the sphere of the economic. Hooliganism was never simply about escaping the dole, dope, and despair of inner-city England as any working class football fan who hasn’t engaged in hooliganism would tell you (I once asked a football loving relative his opinion on the origins of the hooligan. While observing the generously scattered dog shit in his neighbour’s unkempt front yard, he said cryptically in his thick Liverpool accent, “it’s got little to do with class but with class. Some of us got it, others don’t, whether you’re a Tory voting toff or some lad down the docks”).
The feminist approach has proved the most insightful and while there have been few explicitly feminist treatments of hooliganism, much of the academic research on the subject points to the phenomenon as another instance of organized collective male violence no different from underground boxing or motorcycle gangs. Indeed, recent studies of hooliganism have found it to have cross-class appeal and participation; it’s not just the past time of unhappy assembly line workers. Hooliganism appears to be a subculture of men who enjoy battering each other, take great pride in their ability to batter and get battered, and use their support of football teams as a cover for this behaviour. And now some of these men make quite a bit of money writing about it.
Leafing through I’ll Kick Your Head In by the notorious ex-hooligan and self-styled hooliologist Cass Pennant, one wonders what the greats of British literature, like Chaucer, might have made of this new literary genre had they been alive to read it. And more importantly, one wonders what its readers take away from it. Another literary great – and not a bad goalkeeper in his day – Albert Camus once said, “All that I know about morality, I most surely learnt from football”; but then again, Camus was French.
Published in Canadian Dimension March/April 2008