The author of this article seems to badly misinterpret Americans’ quasi-obsession with “soccer hooligans”. In order to set the record straight, here are the real reasons we cultural troglodytes like to make snide comments about the hooligans:

1. “Hooligan” is a very silly word. Not quite as silly, perhaps, as “rapscallion” or “scalawag”, but still pretty damn silly. As the late, lamented Bill Hicks once pointed out, “hooligan” evokes nothing so much as a pasty, stringy-haired guy in an Eton jacket and penny loafers without socks mincing around, knocking over dustbins in Shaftsbury and lightly smacking people in the back of the head and then running away. Which all makes it pretty amusing to talk about “soccer hooligans” in hushed, almost reverent tones.

2. Cognitive dissonance. This requires a slightly longer explanation. The author of the Guardian article goes on and on about violence at football games (well, actually, mostly just semi-apocryphal violent acts at Eagles games, but that’s another story), but let’s face it: football is a very violent sport. The entire premise of the game is the following: find 22 of the biggest, fastest, strongest men you can. Suit each of them up in 15 pounds of battle armor. Put them all on the same field while instructing half of them that their entire objective is to hit a (typically smaller) opponent absolutely as hard as possible 60 or 70 times over the course of the next three hours. Honestly, it would be pretty surprising if the spectators didn’t engage in the occasional fistfight (the Guardian also mentions hockey, which is perhaps the only sport on the planet whose ostensible objective isn’t fighting in which the officials will courteously stop play and stand around watching whenever two of the participants decide to exchange punches; in other words, it might be even more violent than football). The premise of soccer, on the other hand, is to put a bunch of skinny, long-haired guys on the same field to prance around and react like a gazelle on the receiving end of a double load of buckshot whenever the opposition approaches within 2 feet. Which makes the notion of lunatic violence among the spectators roughly as absurd, contextually, as a riot at a John Tesh concert or the realism of West Side Story. → On a probably unrelated note, I’ve often thought that a hip-hop remake of West Side Story would be either brilliant or hilarious. Either way, I think it needs to happen The point is that those of us on this side of the Atlantic aren’t so much gleefully appalled by soccer violence (as the Guardian seems to suggest) as puzzled by the quaintness of it all. Put it this way: the phrase “rugby hooligan” would never penetrate the American lexicon (which is, admittedly, ironic, since rugby is, relative to soccer, an aristocratic pursuit).

3. Internationalization. Violent as American sports fans may or may not be, they are not known for taking their act abroad (in part because we don’t care about non-American sports, but still). On the other hand, the British government routinely takes away the passports of notorious hooligans whenever the World Cup or other big international tournaments roll around in a desperate (and, inevitably, unsuccessful) attempt to prevent rampaging, drunken Englishmen from descending on whatever unfortunate town has to host an England game. On the plus side, host cities seem to be getting smarter: recently they’ve been resorting to semi-radical tactics to get the English to chill out.

4. Smug Europeans. This is, of course, the clichéd answer, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Europeans love to pretend that violence and racism are uniquely American problems that they’ve transcended with their enlightened social policies. When examples arise to demonstrate that this is the purest schadenfreude (seriously: swastika flags?), it’s hard to restrain from pointing them out. Admittedly, Turkish soccer violence is almost certainly worse than the British variety, but it’s easy to see why we pick on the Brits: (a) The Brits take their show on the road better than anyone (see 3. above); (b) Britain is, at this stage in history, the cultural armpit of Europe, which means that British smugness is especially grating.

Hope that clears everything up.