ABSTRACT
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s football attendance became a communal activity for working-class men and women, enriched by strong social networks and shared collective experiences. Football spectators gathered in multiple venues across Britain on the weekends to participate in customary activities that promoted specific values of locality, community and territoriality. Groups of violent youths that emerged from these informal social networks engaged in an increasingly large number of raucous and threatening activities throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. These disruptions ranged from cursing and taunting policemen to organized violent encounters between groups of opposing fans. Police reports afford the opportunity to examine not only the forms of disorder that spectators initiated, but also how the police framed their actions and responded to them. Using these sources, this chapter aims to contextualize British football violence and provide a background to the expansion of state control over this national sport. While providing a brief summary of broad historical transitions and social trends can be difficult, it will first provide social, economic and cultural contextual background. The second section recounts the forms of violence and disorder that British fans participated in, and the varied and conflicted responses towards their increasing incidence among many types of fans. This introduction to British football violence provides a background to the responses by the public, government agencies and local police authorities that will be examined in later chapters.
