Football ''Hooliganism'', Policing and the War on the ''English Disease''

Abstract

The jacket photographs of this book depict its central argument with rare precision. The main picture features a shirtless, England fan being arrested by a number of heavily armoured, foreign police. The muscular, shaven-headed and tattooed Englishman is being restrained by the police who appear as menacing cyborgs in black helmets and body armour. A trickle of blood runs down the left pectoral of the England fan and, with his head tilted to the left, the photograph references the famous painting of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by the Pollaiuolo brothers. While popular and some academic accounts of hooliganism have tended to blame the naked English fan, like the one in the cover picture, Stott and Pearson prioritize the role of inter-group dynamics between travelling fans and police in precipitating disorder; they want readers to ‘leave behind the idea that major riots are simply the product of hooligans travelling abroad to create mayhem ’ (p. 328). Far from being the perpetrator, the England fan is more often than not the suffering victim of police heavy-handedness and, even, brutality. The violent disorder which has been a feature of European football since the 1970s is a product of the clumsy collision of two competing forms of hyper-

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