ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, the problem of football hooliganism has come to be widely considered in Europe, indeed the world at large, as solely or mainly an English ‘disease’. Up until the early 1980s, there was, indeed, considerable justification for such a view. More particularly, the reputation for having the worst-behaved football fans in Europe, if not indeed the world, was gained by the English primarily as a result of the fact that, from about 1974 onwards, English fans following both their clubs and the national side were the principal instigators of a series of violent and vandalistic football-related incidents in continental countries.1 As is well known, this series culminated in 1985 with the deaths of thirty-nine people, most of them Italians, at the JuventusLiverpool European Cup Final in Brussels when a wall collapsed following a charge by Liverpool fans against Juventus fans who were occupying the same unsegregated terrace. As a result, English club sides-though not the national team-were banned by UEFA (the Union of European Football Associations) from European competition sine die. At the time of writing, the ban has still not been rescinded.
