It is wonderful and fantastic when you are sitting inside in a fotballstadium in England (or Scotland) together with 40 – 50 000 other supporters and just listen to the atmosphere when a great player which just rolled the ball over the white line and in to the net. You can’t imagine something more spectacular than this. But all this has a prize. Big amounts of money are rolling in this large game. Many supporters spends most of there many on supporter effects, seasons tickets, travels to follow their teams. You can’t find a person in GB who doesn’t have a favourite fotballteam. In Scotland is it a little bit special. If you live in Glasgow is it your religious conviction that decides if you are supporting Glasgow rangers (Protestant) or Celtic (Catholic). Your father is catholic and support Celtic and you want to support Rangers he will probably make you disinherited. And then you have the Brazilian supporters. Almost all of them (95%) love or have good relation to it. And then you have the greatest football stadium in the world. The Brazilian national team have also been ranked to the first place in the FIFA seeding for a several years now and they have also been world champion in in the football world cup four times. The whole south-America loves football. But a sad true is that some are too fanatic. The Colombian national team player Andres Escobar was shot and killed by the local mafiaboss was damned on him. All he had done was that he had made an own goal in the world cup in USA ’94. With that goal was Colombia without any chances to get longer in the world cup.

If the referee judges against the home playing team in the South America, he will probably need police protection in some days after the match. In North America, especially USA and Canada there isn’t so much “European soccer ” hysterics. Other sports like Baseball, basketball and of course American football are more loved. The average Americans and Canadians are in an opinion that European soccer simply is boring against more “American” sports. But in Mexico is football more popular. This soccer scenario is more like the south American conditioning. In Asia they don’t have too much left for football. In China have the government spend a lot of money and resources to get the standard on the players and the Chinese league on a higher level without any further progresses. The Chinese people didn’t rather like soccer game. In Japan, Malaysia and South Korea is football as a game a falling trend after a moderate success in the beginning of the 90’s. East-Asian football is too boring for the East-Asian people. Their national football teams are also of and poor standard. In the world cup in France ’98 did Japan and South Korea ended last. Let us hope it will be better “footballcondotions” in this countries (Japan and South Korea) when they are the hosts for the WC 2002. And when we already are talking about world cup. The two main candidate, Germany and England, are having a big fight about which of they who should host the WC 2006. The German says that England has a big problem with their hooligans and therefore should Germany host WC 2006 and not England. And England has a big hooligan problem, bigger than Germanys. But there isn’t only England that has a big problem regarding hooligans but also countries like Holland, Argentina, Sweden and Italy has much or a moderate problem with football hooligans. In the during of the 60’s and the 70’s has especially the tribune stand violence grown. The violence has been more and more brutal and a few persons has also get been killed during the game. This happens almost only in South-America, in the big stadiums where you have to stand up. When you mix great feelings about favourite team, South American temperaments, perfunctory controls of weapons (knifes, guns, distress flare and claviformed things) and drugs like alcohol and narcotic stuff, you get a very dangerousness conditions where you have to expect nasty things like vandalism, drunkenness, personal injuries and also situations when peoples are killing other people. But the most of the noise, in Europe and South America, happens outside the stadium before and after the match. In many cases is it the game itself an anticlimax where nothing happens and the supporters are in a locket position where they can’t get out of the stadium during the match and kept away and guarded from the rival supporters. So they “take the fight” after the match.

The hooligan was getting more and more attentions in the press, among people most and politicians. The focus was raised when innocent people was getting hurt and big material damages for great values where wrecked. The whole scenario was beginning to be representented as a society problem. The most fanatic supporters (those who made most bad noise and hullabaloo) got the description or apposite “hooligans”. This word has been taken up too many other languages (like Norwegian) and it always describes a violent group of football supporters. The mostly of all “hooligans” are young unemployed men who let their feelings and aggression come in to play. It is both a fact and a myth. You probably find young unemployed men who smash some shop windows when their team has lost an important mach, but he doesn’t go under the name “hooligan”. The real hooligans are the people who doesn’t go to a football match to see the game, no these people are only out after to raise hell and fight against other “supporter” groups. These groups do also use to have fascistics, racialism, ultra-nationalist and/or Nazism sympathies. These groups contains for the most of young unemployed men who find it hard to get a place in this society that fit them. In hooligan gang do they usually get what they miss in a normal life namely like-minded, a good status (if you mark himself out whit doing things the other members think is “cool”/things they don’t dare to do on their self), excitement and fame. These groups have many sign of equation with new-nazistics groups. The same elements are clearly shown in these groups.

A gangleader in a hooligan group have an agreement with the other playing teams hooligan gang to fight against each other, usually through the Internet, IRC, and e-mail. Or the one group ask their opponents to a good fight in connection with the football match, on a place nearby in the actions (the match) centre. This happens mostly in Holland and Great Britain. For a time ago did a real big and bad fight against Feyenord’s supporters and Ajax’s supporters take place one an outlying road in Holland. The police had no presentiment about this event and the fight was getting aloud to stay in hours before the police could intervene and stop the fighting scenario but came to late. One dead and many people with life-threatening injuries. These attract attention from everywhere in Europe and sat Holland really on the chart on witch countries that had a serious problem with hooligans. But the Dutch police have worked really hard and serious on this problem and this work has showed good results. But if it hadn’t been for the reason that Holland are hosting the European football cup together with Belgium in June year 2000 I don’t think the Dutch police and the Dutch government had laid down so much resources in that problem if it had been for the EC 2000. This “thing” came really inconvenient for Holland and they wonted to get rid of this “absurdity” as quick as it could get. The police and the teams are working close together to make an end on this problem. The team management set up cameras to shot possible noise and identify those who start it in such a way that those who frequent are making trouble get banned from every stadium in that specific country. The porters do also get photography of these troublemakers. A big expense for the footballteam is also all police force they need to make it calm and steady in the game. And they (police) aren’t free when it’s talking about these things. Polices resources are short and they cannot afford to send 20- 150 policemen with cars, dogs etc. So the team have too spend the most of the cost’s it amount to have a ambulatory police force to look after trouble in a match. Some footballclubs can’t afford it and this is where the hooligan environment can grow.

Sources: All this came particularly from my head but I have taken inspiration from news supplies I have find on the Internet. It was very hard to find stuff about this subject. I find many small info supplies and I remebered it and made this text with it. I should also add to that this text are made with Word 2000. This is a great program that also partially correct my grammatic wich isn’t one of the best... Thomas Fjeld Kristensen