ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, football hooliganism has come to be regarded as one of Britain’s more serious ‘social problems’. It has been the subject of an enduring moral panic and has recurrently drawn forth demands from the media, politicians and a variety of self-appointed ‘moral entrepreneurs’ for ‘tough action’. A number of attempts have also been made to explain it but, so far, popular ‘theories’ on the subject have tended to outnumber their academic counterparts. In fact, despite a widespread feeling in official and media circles that football hooliganism has been ‘over-researched’, it is probably fair to say that the rigorous academic explanations so far on offer boil down to only three: the social psychological explanation of Marsh, Rosser and Harré (1978), and the sociological explanations of Taylor (1971)1 and Clarke (1978).
