ABSTRACT
The academic discourses on football hooliganism have attracted scholars from various disciplines and localities. The distinctive, mostly English, theoretical and methodological approaches represent a number of opposing academic factions. There has long existed a tendency to avoid cross-cultural comparisons except in the most general of terms.[ 1 ] The development towards a more internationalized research community, starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a number of international conferences and some non-English research publications on football fan behaviour, partly changed this tendency.[ 2 ] The internationalization of academic research on football hooliganism appears to have gained momentum in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some edited volumes have certainly advanced comparative research into football culture and hooliganism,[ 3 ] and scholars from a variety of countries have published relevant papers in journals such as Soccer and Society, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport and the Sociology of Sport Journal.[ 4 ] Despite these signs of growing cross-cultural comparison, historical and sociological accounts of the level and forms of football hooliganism outside Britain remain relatively scarce. This is certainly true for parts of Eastern Europe and Latin America, but also for some Western European countries. A striking example of the ‘many opinions, few facts’ rhetoric is, arguably, the case of football hooliganism in the Netherlands. Foreign journalists and scholars regularly refer to the ‘organized battles’ of Dutch hooligans as a cause for international concern. In the build-up to Euro 2000, The Guardian reported that, ‘Hooliganism has declined in Britain in recent years, but in the Netherlands it has got worse … After gun battles in Rotterdam, Dutch police fear Orange disorder will wreck the Euro 2000 tournament.’[ 5 ]
