There is one question about football hooliganism that begs an answer more than many other: what is it really that makes these young – and in some cases also middle-aged – men find pleasure in fighting? Is it the love of and loyalty to their team that drives them to it? Or does the explanation for hooligan violence lie in the fact that it is basically committed almost without exception by men? And do the brotherhoods that organize into football firms have something to do with class, education, ethnicity or urban origins? Is this in turn linked to something that belongs specifically to football or spectator sport?

Obviously, one cannot ignore that factors of this type are important for understanding hooliganism, but they scarcely explain why hooligans fight. Certainly, men in general commit more acts of violence than women do, and have done so through the ages. But if that suffices as an explanation for hooliganism, then one is simply using tawdry essentialism to support this view of men, where violence is seen as part of their essence or a kind of instinctive behaviour. This in turn allows room for the moralist view of gender that long dominated the debate on gender equality in Sweden, with men portrayed as ”evil” and women ”good”, which largely helps to conceal the fact that violence is also marginal or deviant behaviour among men.

That is not to say that the violence committed by hooligans has nothing to do with gender or sex, but simply that violence is not part of the prescribed or hegemonic ideal of man today. Football hooligans who commit acts of violence also represent a minority in the world of men, of football and of supporters, but that still does not mean that there are no links between the world of hooliganism and those other worlds. Hooliganism, for instance, stands out as an extreme offshoot among the different strains found without exception in football’s male-dominated fan cultures, but on the other hand is profiled as a kind of protest or counterculture against these. From this perspective, hooliganism can of course be understood as a kind of defence or a bastion under attack for its obsolete, violence-fixated ideal of man. Yet even though there is a good deal of truth in this, it hardly explains why violence constitutes the very core of hooliganism.

Football today is a motley, multifaceted pop and youth culture. Hooligans constitute a part of this. This is made clear in particular in Ian Hough’s insider’s account, Perry Boys. The book describes how hooliganism developed in Liverpool and Manchester in the 1970s and ’80s, then spread rapidly to London and most of the major cities in Britain. Its distinctive trait was the ”casual style”, a relaxed, fashionable way of dressing, with jeans, polo neck sweaters, trainers, sport clothes and T shirts representing the basic garments. Today the word ”casual”, which can mean ”occasional worker” as in ”casual labourer” or something composed of a random combination of different things, is synonymous with ”football hooligan” in British English, but also refers, along with hooliganism, to a specific way of dressing and a passion for a certain kind of music.

The casual style has changed a number of times since the 1980s and did not constitute the start of hooliganism. However, it did bring hooliganism into a subculture context more clearly than before, in which the passion for football was combined with influences and styles from elsewhere, for instance, in the form of clothes and music. As football historians and others have emphasized, violence, riots and rampages linked to football matches are not a new or recent phenomenon. There were, for example, reports of violence in the stands and fights between supporters at football matches in Sweden as early as the start of the 20th century. In England, which is the cradle of modern football and where the sport developed during the 1860s from a much tougher, more violence-prone ballgame similar to rugby, there are even earlier reports of football-related incidents of violence and fights.

Such reports perhaps confirm more that football, ever since it began, has had a fan base whose emotions easily bubble over than that it has always been troubled by hooligan problems. The word ”hooligan” did in fact originate in the late 19th century but was not linked to football in any obvious way until the 1960s and ’70s. Many football historians have also traced the development of recent football hooliganism to the 1970s.

This seems to be true given that violence increased both inside and outside English football stadiums, but it still has to be seen in light of the fact that football-related violence was unusual after the Second World War up until the late 1960s. Moreover, the number of violent incidents reported linked to football matches does not provide a full picture of hooliganism over the past few decades. Discussions about hooliganism easily get stuck in the standard model the media follows whenever different kinds of crime are considered, with most reports keeping to the question of how a certain type of crime has ”increased” or ”decreased”. If the focus is determined by this standard model, then obviously qualitative changes – or what in some instances appear to be qualitative leaps – in the development of hooliganism are lost from view.

Football violence today has many faces. There are also indications that football-related violence from a historical perspective has changed in a way that makes it difficult to compare football violence nowadays with such violence in the past. In that sense, the 1970s and ’80s marked a qualitative leap in the development of football hooliganism. The effects of this leap were described as early as 1991 in the book Among the Thugs by the journalist Bill Buford, who joined up with English hooligans in the late 1980s, partaking in their reign of violence in Europe and at home.

Late autumn 1970 also seems to be a turning point in the history of Swedish football violence. That was when supporters of IFK Göteborg stormed the field at Eyravallen in Örebro in order to stop the match as it neared the end in a vain attempt to prevent their team from falling out of Sweden’s premier league. In retrospect, however, this event appears to be more like a kind of embryo of football hooliganism that generated more and more discussion in the 1980s and ’90s, when the expression ”football hooligan” began to be used in the media and as a general term for groups of supporters intent on violence.

In those decades, the violence changed into something more planned and organized, both in England and elsewhere, including Sweden. The organizing had already started in the 1970s, when English gangs of hooligans formed what were called firms, but was only apparent over the next two decades when the new casual style became an emblem for a new generation of football hooligans.

With the firms, football violence lost a large part of its spontaneous nature and assumed increasingly planned and organized forms. The actual word ”firm” expresses this growing degree of organization and planning. The word was not chosen merely by chance, in the same way that military metaphors like ”Red Army” or ”Black Army” have been used by groups of supporters intent on violence over the last few decades to denote their affiliations. The term ”firm” is a multifaceted metaphor, which likens hooligan gangs to a kind of business venture. It is possible to join a ”trade register” (i.e. win recognition as a hooligan firm) and defend and protect the name of that firm or brand. But also included in this metaphor, taken from the world of trade and industry, is the sense that a firm produces something.

The business metaphor used by today’s hooligans seems consistent given football’s integration into a more widespread experience economy in recent decades. The production of experiences for sale constitutes the very core of this economy, while at the same time this orientation toward experience has been coloured by the production and consumption of goods as a whole. This is most clearly visible in advertising, which has been inundated in recent years by experience-based sales arguments – as is true of products or services far removed from the core industries of the experience economy, like tourism and the media. Moreover, these are precisely the industries that football has been integrated with – and, as far as the media is concerned, financially dependent on – since the 1960s and ’70s. At the same time, football has become increasingly internationalized at the club level, which is confirmed among other things by the large number of European championship titles that club teams compete for today.

The coining of the expression ”experience industry”, which can be dated to the late 1980s and early 1990s, carries with it the delusion that the word refers to something that is also entirely new. It is not, but today’s experience economy differs from the one that developed toward the end of the 1980s, especially in terms of the degree of mediazation and globalization.

As an event culture, football marked its entry into the global experience economy with the 1930 FIFA World Cup in Montevideo. As a result of the rising popularity and global spread of football, the World Cup soon became an international event in sport on par with the Olympics. With the introduction of European championship titles for club and national teams, football took the lead in the 1960s and ’70s in arranging large-scale international events, both in the world of sport and beyond.

As a mass phenomenon, only the Olympics represents a real competitor to football in today’s experience economy, particularly as the era of gigantic rock and stadium concerts comes to an end. It is also from the masses – or more precisely, the mass behaviour that is a part of football – that football hooliganism derives its power.

It is a power that anyone who has visited a moderately important football match is familiar with and which is evident in the collectively coordinated body movements and singing in unison, cheers, boos and acts of aggression. As manifestations of emotions, these kinds of behaviour seem to be not only a form of catharsis but also a voicing of emotions that is unacceptable outside the world of sport. We renounce the reason that normally guides our emotions and restrains them at the very moment we become part of the masses at a football match. At a football stadium, our behaviour is guided by feelings, mainly feelings that it is unacceptable to live out in the same way in other contexts, for instance, like uncensored expressions of nationalist feeling or local pride.

The expressing of emotions that is a part of football is founded on emotional investments that as a rule were established early in life. This is captured early on, especially in large cities where football has a strong position, and it becomes an expression of the rivalry between different neighbourhoods and city districts and against other cities. Every distinction between ”us” and ”them” thus carries with it the seed of an emotional link to and identification with a football team, regardless of whether this distinction originates in territorial boundaries, class, ethnic or other social differences,

The hooligans’ emotional investments in football are not distinguishable in any essential way from those that form the basis of the commitment of ”normal” or ”well-behaved” football supporters. The experience of growing up in a poor city neighbourhood with a feeling of not belonging to ”the community” can certainly, as Ian Hough demonstrates in Perry Boys, form the basis of frustration and a desire for revenge that finds its outlet in hooligan rioting. But, in principle, the rivalry is the same, if not stronger, between different hooligan gangs as it is between ”normal” supporters. However, hooligans violate the ”spirit of sportsmanship” that permeates the rivalry between ”normal” groups of supporters with the notion of tolerance and excludes any thought of violence between them.

The strong feelings and rivalry that football generates seem paradoxical in many ways if one looks at the actual game. Comparing football with other games, like hockey, American football and rugby, the incidence of violence by hooligans and in the stands is in inverse proportion to how violent or rough the game is. Of course, scuffles and violence do occur in football, as does hard and unfair play, but it is less frequent than, for instance, in hockey. On the other hand, there is a theatrical element in football that is lacking in most other ball sports and which is visible in players exaggerating the effects of being subjected to unfair play or quite simply faking it. This theatrical element, which in some cases is reminiscent of that mixture of sport and theatre known as wrestling, restrains violence on the field, but scarcely tempers the audience’s emotions or indignation, either over the player faking it or playing unfairly. Still, the audience’s ritualized way of responding to the spectacle played out on the field shows that they are a part of the act, and that it is not a question of emotions that are bubbling over, but rather that their response is well rehearsed and well directed.

On whole, it is difficult to see any connection between football as a game and the hooliganism it is linked to. The explanation for hooliganism is rather in the feelings that are channelled via football and expressed most clearly in the rivalry between different teams. But this explanation also has its limits, especially when it comes to explaining why this rivalry turns into violence among some supporters but not all. This explanation also seems more credible for spontaneous football violence than violence that is planned and organized.

It is easy to see football’s emotional intensity and the rivalry between different groups of supporters as the reason for all the football violence. This type of explanation also gains support from the hooligans’ protestations of the love and loyalty they feel for their teams, but is contested by the official football world and other groups of supporters who blame them for only wanting to try to start a quarrel or looking for a fight. The truth, I believe, lies somewhere between these two points of view.

There is no reason to doubt that the riots and scuffles between rival gangs of hooligans constitute the very purpose of so-called football firms. However, there is reason to question whether it is mutual hatred between them and their strong love of their own clubs that constitute the root of the hooligan problem. If one were to turn the whole thing on its head, the mutual hatred between hooligans seems to be the very prerequisite for what they are together striving for: violence, conflict and the ”kick” or feeling of euphoria this gives them.

It is in many ways easier to explain what the source of the hooligans’ love for their clubs is than the source of their violence. Under the auspices of the firms, the committing of violent acts is presented as violence for violence’s sake. This kind of for-its-own-sake logic is not uncommon in the experience economy, where the experiences themselves constitute the primary thing while what makes them possible or provides them is secondary. We have long been acquainted with this emphasis on the value of a thing in itself from the world of art, where the saying ”art for art’s sake” not only paved the way for modern art but has also become established as the actual basis for the experience of it.

This logic seems absurd when it is applied to violence and demands that we consider violence from a non-moralist perspective. It is easy to defend for oneself the idea that violence can have a value of its own and thus shut one’s eyes to the fact that this constitutes one side of hooligan violence.

Nevertheless, it is just as easy to disregard the fact that violence fascinates and even gives pleasure if one looks to the fictional violence that permeates the entertainment industry and has spread to more and more media genres with the digital experience industry that has developed over the past few decades. But where football hooliganism is concerned, it seems more in harmony with the general focus on experience that characterizes today’s production of goods and services than with fictional entertainment violence in itself. From this perspective, it seems justified to claim that today’s hooliganism is based on the discovery that the experience of real violence surpasses what fictional violence can offer.

What football firms produce is the experience of real violence. And it is a question of production that requires planning and organization. Yet, at the same time, it is aimed at reaching a point at which everything, as Buford writes in the book, ”breaks loose” and turns into chaos, which makes it difficult many times to distinguish between what is planned and what is more spontaneous in nature. There is also the euphoric experience, but one that is difficult to grasp, in what Buford described as ”breaking loose”, which he himself experienced and described as a state of elation, where the senses are heightened, the adrenalin is pumping and time goes in slow motion.

In light of today’s experience economy, football hooliganism represents the experience economy of the street. As such, it can be described as a for-and-against culture reacting to the focus on experience that permeates today’s consumption of goods and services. It simultaneously gives expression to this focus on experience and destroys its boundaries. And it does it in a way that – we can hope – will always lie outside the scope of the experience economy and where fictional violence turns into real violence.

The experience economy of the street embodied by football hooliganism appears to be reality’s model for the fictional violence depicted in the film Fight Club, where violence is presented as the only path to an intensified feeling of life for young men – or to a ”near-life experience”, as the film’s schizophrenic protagonist expresses it in one of the film’s key scenes. It is hardly a coincidence that reality’s Fight Club is at home, above all, in the world of football, with its emotional intensity, rivalries, and the masses that are attracted to this. Nor is it a coincidence that this Fight Club has developed hand in hand with football consolidating its position as the flagship sport of the experience economy.