"Among The Thugs"

We've just finished reading "Among The Thugs," Bill Buford's remarkable and page-turning book about crowd violence during the dark days of English and European football/soccer hooliganism in the 1980's. The book is a work of non-fiction, but reads like a highly personal piece of well-researched first-person journalism.

Buford befriended some of the most notorious of the hardcore members of the various team "firms," including that of the Manchester United football club. The author witnessed countless acts of crowd violence at soccer matches across the U.K. and Europe while living in London in the late 1970s and through the '80s . Buford was himself beaten severely by Italian police when thousands of English supporters went on a rampage outside a World Cup match in 1990. The book is a meditation on the nature of crowds, psychology and culture. It's absolutely fascinating, yet disturbing.

"Among The Thugs" was written and published in the early '90s at a time when English football hooliganism inside the top-league stadiums was gradually being eradicated following the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 people were killed in the standing-area terrace of a stadium.

Since then, police crackdowns on violent football fans, better surveillance and policing, the introduction all-seating areas and the removal of all-standing terraces in British stadiums, among other things, has all but extinguished crowd violence at matches and made attending games in the U.K. now a far safer experience than it was when Buford wrote "Among The Thugs."

Posted by Thurston Ali at March 15, 2007 11:37 PM