Mock War, Shading to Real : Soccer Is Held in a Passionate Crush
Los Angeles is not known as a place that breeds passionate sports fans. Just compare our orderly celebration of last fall’s World Series championship with the one in Detroit in 1984, in which 1 person died, 80 were injured and 34 were arrested. From this distance, it is easy for us to scorn the lunatic passion that drove thousands of ticketless Liverpool fans to storm the gates last week at Sheffield’s Hillsborough stadium, resulting in the fatal crushing of 95 fans and critical injury to scores more. England’s worst-ever sporting tragedy is the latest in a series where uncontrollable crowds proved a mismatch for antiquated stadiums.
Common thinking links life-threatening spectatorship with filling the dull, empty lives of the underclass, yet the death list in Sheffield included a successful businessman and an electronics engineer. In my own empirical study of soccer fans in Brazil, the “marginal man” theory never panned out. Soccer was center stage and integrated, mainstream men displayed far more fanaticism toward their teams than did those on society’s periphery.
To understand the deep roots of passion for one’s team and the world’s most popular game, we need to understand organizational differences between sport in this country and abroad. First, we diffuse our energies among several professional sports, no one of which dominates the limelight throughout the year. But in most countries, football--what we call soccer--is the only professional team sport.
Second, our competitions are between privately owned clubs representing big cities, and most major cities have at best one major league team per sport. Soccer clubs abroad are nonprofit, run by affluent, influential directors who donate their time and supported by the fans who pay membership dues (clubs sponsor many social events and focus the social life of many communities), organize raffles and other fund-raising drives, as well as pay at the gate.
Major cities typically have four or more clubs in the top division while small towns have a lower-division team. To protect this multi-team system, soccer authorities prohibit live televising of most domestic games. To see the game and support your team, you must attend, as did your father and grandfather before you.
Sports contests can symbolically represent any of the groups that claim people’s loyalties, but they will arouse the strongest passions where they are linked with our primordial groups, those groups into which we are born, whether they center on religion, race, ethnicity or locale. The multi-team system that is the norm in the soccer world divides a city’s loyalties along these sentimental lines.
A few of the most notorious rivalries in the soccer world illustrate the point: In Lima there is racial rivalry between Alianza Lima (blacks and mestizos) and Universitario Lima (white Creole); in Buenos Aires there is ethnic rivalry between Boca Juniors (Italians) and River Plate (English and Spanish); in Rio de Janeiro there is class rivalry between Flamengo (working class) and Fluminense (elite); in Glasgow there is religious rivalry between the Celtics (Roman Catholic) and the Rangers (Protestant).
Picture a football game between the Bloods and Crips, the two largest Los Angeles gangs, each team supported by a few hundred fans from their territories. You wouldn’t attend, no matter how good the spectacle promised to be, because the hostilities are so intense that playing together would be impossible while violence would be a certainty. The distance between mock war and real war is not that great. Where animosities run deep, ritual conflict may easily lose its game character and serve as a catalyst for riots and disorder.
The most engrossing contests dramatize conflicts just real enough to enhance the spectacle, and those are most often intracity or regional contests. The best local example is the special intensity of a UCLA-USC football game--called the “Battle of L.A.”--relative to matches involving either school versus a distant rival. The century-old rivalries in England are more intense but not so intense that they preclude play.
There are several policies being considered to prevent other soccer tragedies in England. The proposal to register club members and ban convicted hooligans is not expected to pass, at least until stadiums can be modernized to handle the surging crowds. Interim solutions to alleviate the excess demand for the limited tickets could include more live television broadcasts of important games. Soccer authorities have resisted the lure of larger TV revenues because of fears that smaller clubs would suffer a fatal attendance loss, as did the minor-league teams of small-town America after major-league baseball games were broadcast. They fear that even the big clubs would suffer diminished gate revenues. But the American experience of increased attendance through promotion of sports on television would in all likelihood hold true across the ocean.
The passionate commitment to team and game are there and require an outlet. When lives are at stake all solutions must be considered.
