ABSTRACT
Basketball, ice hockey, American football, rugby and even pastoral English cricket have all produced recent manifestations of sports crowd hooliganism. Sociologists from the University of Leicester in England responded to these early accounts by pointing out that the violence and hooliganism at English soccer was hardly new. Marketing people around European soccer have publicly envied the successes of North American sport in marginalising especially sports stadium hooliganism. The English have perhaps tried hardest to follow key aspects of the neoliberal American sporting model, and with some success. But it is no easy matter to shape a late-modern, pacified and partisan spectator sport for the late 20th century, one that is both inclusive and responsive to the range of motivations and expectations which different types of spectators of different ages and social backgrounds bring to attending collective sporting events.
