What is it about association football – the arrogantly self-appointed “Beautiful Game” – that renders most (though not all) of its fan cultures so ugly?

It’s very simple, actually: The more important something is to any of us, the more passionate we are about that item. And with the high degree of our passion for this thing, there also emerges a high degree of our defending it at all costs, even that of resentment, taunting, hatred, exclusion, violence, death. This pertains to family, clan, tribe, nation – any experienced but also imagined community. This communal or tribal experience grounds our relationship to our beloved sports clubs. But here, too, there is a gradation of affect and self-identification that heightens our love and passion for “ours” and, concomitantly, our hatred and disdain for “theirs.” For reasons that I will explain in my paper, Association Football’s “ours” has developed more potently in societies in which this game has become culturally hegemonic since the late nineteenth century (almost solely in Latin America and Europe, later in much of Africa); than did other sports in these same societies; as well as sports that attained cultural hegemony elsewhere, most notably the North American countries of the United States and Canada; but also places like Australia and New Zealand; as well as India and Pakistan and China and Japan.