ABSTRACT
Soccer is played and watched with passion throughout the world. While English soccer supporters tend to hold the headlines, incidents involving crowd disorder seem to occur wherever the game is played and patronised. In continental Europe, particularly in the North, forms of spectator violence similar to the English experience are on the increase. In the last few years in the Soviet Union and China popular disturbances at soccer matches have led to punitive government intervention (Williams, 1986). Likewise, Latin America has a long history of soccer-centred civil unrest. In the emergent countries of black Africa the development of the game has been hindered by tribal rivalries manifesting themselves through violent confrontation in and around soccer stadia (Monnington, 1986). While examples of soccer violence can be found throughout the world the forms it takes and the conditions which generate it tend to vary from region to region and from culture to culture. To verify this proposition we can look to Northern Irleand where patterns of football support and soccer hooliganism are bound up with the same social and political conditions which continue to fuel the province's sectarian divisions (Sugden and Bairner, 1986).
