If the RL v soccer argument above in spud's post is correct it might be along Jungian, group psychic energy/psychology grounds ... just a thought.
I'm pretty familiar with theories on hooliganism - at Canberra Uni, there was a pretty impressive collection of books on football sociology which had a heavy emphasis on the big rivalries in world football (eg/ Celtic-Rangers, Boca-River etc) and of course, the hoolies. There was an evolution of crowd violence in the UK.
Between the late 60s and the early 80s the "violence" was mostly perpetrated by teenagers and blokes in their very early 20s. Behaviour was mostly "running" (charging across terraces at the opposing fans and then backing off within 5m of them, all the while looking like you wanted a punch-up, but as soon as one came, you buggered off again). Running happened in the streets around stadiums in the hours before matches as well. Actual, full-on punch-ups did happen but not nearly as much as any politican or cop would have you believe. It was mostly displays of macho teenage behaviour where no-one was seriously hurt. The exception was Heysel, where the Juve fans were run at by Liverpool across the terracing. They fled backwards against a wall, pushed it over and crushed 39 people dead.
Through the 80s the behaviour of hooligans evolved. It became more intense. This was the era when the hooligan “firms” that Spud mentioned came into existence. As these guys got older they took their violence more seriously. The thrill of running opposition supporters was not enough. They were out to do real harm to other fans. In “Fever Pitch”, Nick Hornby tells of an early 80s match when West Ham's Inner City Firm killed a young Arsenal fan after a match at Highbury. It was a whole new level of violence and the cops came down as hard on it as they could, mostly through infiltrating the gangs [– has anyone else seen the BBC doco where the Irish journo Donal McIntyre infiltrated the Chelsea Headhunters for 6 months?]
The sociologists who interviewed the hooligans found that the reasons for being in these gangs were like “pride in the team”, “pride in the (club’s) community”, “protecting the team/town’s honour against other hooligans” as well as boredom associated with poverty and other nonsense reasons. None of them gave reasons like “It makes me feel like a man”, “fighting is exciting” or “I like being part of a gang” which are probably closer to the truth. I reckon the type of people who enjoy anti-social behaviour are attracted to football hooliganism (and later the organised firms) in the UK, but in OZ, the same types of people found their way into bikie gangs instead.
The Taylor report was also a big factor in the evolution of hooligan behaviour. Without terracing running could no longer occur. With seats, individual people were much easier to pick out of the crowd on CCTV. Smaller crowds are also easier to police. It became too difficult to fight within stadiums, so the fights happened away from the well-policed ground before and after matches.
Actually, the above paragraph best explains why terracing is not allowed back in the big grounds. It should also be noted that the big clubs also have the largest hoolie following (naturally) so it would be a constant threat having those buggers moving in and out of large disorganised crowd on a terrace on match day. It wouldn’t be too difficult a task to find an arrest a hooligan in a 3,000 crowd in a small ground, but far harder in the North Bank or Clock End terraces when Highbury had a 60,000 capacity pre-Taylor report, for example.
Spud, was there a collective attitude amongst RL fans that violence was more of a "soccer thing" and your people tended to avoid it? I'm sure that would be the case with RU (esp as they're all toffs who think it inappropriate to get too passionate about sport at any rate).
but now they've started to have cocaine and it's made them all aggressive again.
