Sports Hooliganism
Sports Hooliganism
Institutional Affiliation
Date
Sports Hooliganism
Background and Overview
The sociologically relevant issue to address in the final project is sports hooliganism. This problem entails belligerent, aggressive, and violence behavior that enthusiasts perpetrate during sports events. Sports hooliganism usually emerge as conflicts and confrontations between gangs of opposing fans, precipitating riots, intimidations, intense rash of violence, fan attacks, physical abuses, and other forms crimes and whims. Cragun et al. (2012) affirms this observation by suggesting that the outcome of sporting events can culminate in riots typical of chaos, destruction of public and private property, and vandalism. Sports hooliganism, particularly in English soccer events, is nothing new. It dates back to the fourteenth century, when games involved villagers kicking the ball into rivals’ churches (Budim, 2018).
Since then it has grown significantly. With sports hooliganism growing at alarming rates, examining it as a sociological problem is essential. Understanding the phenomenon from a sociological lens would be beneficial because the dominant role of subcultures in precipitating sports hooliganism can be comprehended. The sociological aspect of sports hooliganism is that it characterizes deviant subcultures within social structures (Zimniak, 2020). Sociology can also inform the cultural and social assumptions about causal relationships between violence, antisocial behaviors, and hooligan predispositions. Sociology brings to the table a wealth of theoretical models to conceptualize the etiology of sports hooliganism.
Application of Sociological Theories
The two theories covered by Cragun et al. (2012) employed in examining sports hooliganism are the contagion theory and structural-functionalism.
Contagion Theory Application to Sports Hooliganism
According to Cragun et al. (2012), the contagion theory posits that crowds usually exert a hypnotic effect on members that form these groups. This hypnotic influence, coupled with the anonymity afforded by the crowd to belong to the large group drives individuals towards expressing aggressive tendencies and violent behaviors without worrying about condemnation (Harte & Romano, 2021). The outcome is the contagion of the crowd frenzy where people engage in irrational and emotionally charged behaviors that spread over a short time like a pandemic.
Applying this to sports hooliganism, the presence of a few aggression-minded people within a large crowd in sporting events provides the first condition necessary for hooliganism. These ruffians become the source of the hypnotic influence that eventually spread and become contiguous to the rest of the crowed. The anonymity of the huge spectator populations trigger these individuals to start and fuel a rowdy mob behavior that starts as collective unconscious before it overtakes their sense of self, personality, and overall personal responsibility (Harte & Romano, 2021). The end result is sports hooliganism that spreads like a disease from those few individuals to the larger crowd.
Cragun et al. (2012) sustains that his contagion feeds upon itself, culminating in its growth with time. This means that the crowd’s disorderly mob behavior emanates from people coming together rather than as a property of these individuals themselves. Emotions and feelings of irrationality among sports hooligans generate emotionally charged conduct characterized by superiority complexes, anger, resentment, hatred or even fear, culminating in the notion of contagion (Cragun et al., 2012; Harte & Romano, 2021). These aspects of their irrationality is what drives hooligans to vandalism, riots, and other chaotic actions.
Sports Hooliganism within Structural-Functionalism
Structural-functionalism is a sociological framework that views the social institutions, norms, relationships, and roles that constitute society as complex systemic parts of society’s functioning. Within this complex structured system, the functional interrelations of these parts are indispensable in meeting and maintaining society’s social and biological needs and ensuring the continued existence of society’s constituents. Structural-functionalism derives its inspiration principally from Emile Durkheim’s ideas of stability, survival, and solidary (Cragun et al., 2012). According to Durkheim, societies leverage mechanical and organic solidarity to maintain their stability and social cohesion when performing their communal tasks essential in survival over time. From this angle, structural-functionalism is a theory building model that considers society as a complex system with critical parts that collaborate to promote stability and solidarity.
This school of thought explains sports hooliganism from the notion of solidarity. As a dominant theoretical‐methodological paradigm, structural-functionalism helps understand sport as a modern complex subsystem of global society characterized by a strong sense of solidary for one’s team. Within this complex subsystem, fans collaborate in different actions in support for their respect teams, culminating in robust interdependence between these individuals. Via this interdependence, supporters (parts of the social system – sports event) function together to sustain support for the entire team as per Durkheim’s metaphor of an organism: many body parts work together to sustain the whole (Cragun et al., 2012). Consequently, this generates internal cohesion and organic solidary deemed indispensable in holding this system (sport) together.
Structural-functionalism regards social change within this social system as adaptive responses to systemic tensions. So, tensions due to feelings of losing the sport to opponents stimulate social changes manifesting in the form of sports hooliganism as a demonstration of lost system’s stability. In other words, this social change (tensions) affects the overall social equilibrium of the system (sport), as Cragun et al. (2012) suggest, and the adaptive response to this social change is sports hooliganism.
Application of Sociological Concepts
The two sociological constructs applied in examining sports hooliganism are social identity and social structures.
Social Identity
From the structural-functionalism stance, sport is both a cultural and social system and a social institution with complex relations with other institutions via social identity, social change, and other social phenomena (Bazić, 2018). The social identity theory focuses on both the sociological and psychological aspects of group behavior (Cragun et al., 2012). It holds that individuals’ social identities form in three psychological processes: categorization, identification, and comparison. Social categorization encompasses people’s tendencies to perceive themselves and others based on the characteristics of social environments that establish their particular social categories (Cragun et al., 2012). Within the sports hooliganism context, the characteristics defining fans’ social environments are support, emotional energy, collective effervescence, and solidarity for their teams.
Social identification is where individuals identify with groups they perceive themselves to belong to. Here, sports enthusiasts identify their group memberships using team symbols, meaningful rituals, and other group identity elements. Social comparison involves sports fans determining the relative social standing and values of the particular group they identity with to develop a positive self-concept essential in their psychological functioning (Cragun et al., 2012). If by their social categorization, identification, and comparison enthusiasts perceive that conditions in the sports environment encourage notions of inferiority (Dunning et al., 2014), discrimination, belittlement, and other negativities against their social identity, they engage in sports hooliganism. Here, fans might adopt a group frenzy aimed at protecting their social identity, possibly culminating in violence against out-groups.
Social Structures
Research evidence (Rookwood, 2016; Spaaij, 2014) indicates that sports hooliganism is the product or outcome of specific structural conditions. This implies that sports hooliganism emanates from the interplay of social structural, situational, individual, interpersonal, and socio-environmental factors interacting within a specific social structure. Zimniak (2020) affirms the relationship between sports hooliganism and social structure by characterizing this rowdy phenomenon as deviant subculture within broader social structures. Cragun et al. (2012) suggest that the social structure within which phenomena such as sports hooliganism occur comprises a network of statuses connected by related roles.
In organized social structures such as popular sporting activities, these roles capture people’s interactions, collective behaviors, relationships, cultures, and attitudes that shape engagement in those activities. Additionally, social structures define differences in social identity considerations and elements (such as discrimination and superiority) that precipitate sports hooliganism. Lastly, from the structural-functionalism outlook, sports hooliganism is an adaptive response to tensions with the social system (sport) to changes in social solidarity levels, eventually influencing the stability of the associated social structures.
References
Bazić, J. (2018). The social aspects of sport. Physical Education and Sport through the Centuries, 5(1), 49-66. Doi: 10.2478/spes‐2018‐0005.
Budim, A. (2018). Sport Matters: Hooliganism and corruption in football (Doctoral Dissertation, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Department of English Language and Literature).
Cragun, R.T. Cragun, D., & Konieczny, P. (2012). Introduction to sociology. Creative Common Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike v. 3.0. Wikibooks.org.
Dunning, E., Murphy, P. J., & Williams, J. (2014). The roots of football hooliganism (RLE sports studies): An historical and sociological study. Routledge.
Gillard, R., Gouldson, A., Paavola, J., & Van Alstine, J. (2016). Transformational responses to climate change: Beyond a systems perspective of social change in mitigation and adaptation. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 7(2), 251-265. Doi: 10.1002/wcc.384.
Harte, B., & Romano, R. (2021). Violent spectators: Enhanced security as a deterrent against extreme stadium violence. International Journal of Safety and Security in Tourism/Hospitality (IJSSTH), (22), 6.
Rookwood, J. (2016). Managing football hooliganism. In Critical Issues in Global Sport Management (pp. 174-185). Routledge.
Spaaij, R. (2014). Sports crowd violence: An interdisciplinary synthesis. Aggression and violent behavior, 19(2), 146-155. Doi: 10.1016/j.avb.2014.02.002.
Zimniak, R. (2020). The sociological and psychological aspect of football hooliganism. Teisė, 117, 138-151. Doi: 10.15388/Teise.2020.117.10.
