When We Were Hooligans

CULTURE

On Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs

By Norman Nelson · July 9, 2026 · 8 min read

Once every four years, even the most neutered subject of the nominally democratic West is permitted to believe again in national character.

Erling Haaland becomes not just a large blond man but a Viking berserker. Blue-eyed, honest Harry Kane is transformed into a Victorian Royal Navy captain taking soundings off Cape Horn. A thirty-one-year old Teuton like Joshua Kimmich tracking a fantastically quick African teenager suggests strange and compelling counter-histories.

And the French? Well…

The chief pleasure of the World Cup is this clash of national identities. Its chief complication is that the richest post-industrial nations of Northern Europe no longer field teams that correspond to historical identities. So long as Africans can outrun Saxons this will continue. It makes the suspension of disbelief more demanding. But I am new to soccer fandom, and willing to put in the work.

I used to watch hockey. In Canada, where I grew up, hockey was the nexus of national identity, which still felt very real. But that feeling has weakened. The Stanley Cup is lifted in Las Vegas, Tampa, or Carolina by Canadian stars who went south for better weather, lower taxes, and less daily abuse from the press. These southern US fandoms, who have no organic hockey culture, cheer for laundry.

Could soccer cease to be compelling for this same reason? Was it better before?

Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs is an American writer’s account of English soccer hooliganism in the late 1980s, when the crowd around the game had become one of Britain’s national embarrassments. It is a glimpse into the before-times; before FIFA-ization, before the greater bulk of migration. Who were these thugs? Were they ‘our guys’? ‘The boys’? Men of virility and power who had to be pathologized and destroyed by seething liberal women bent on their castration?

The disappointing answer is that the ancestral Englishman, released from form, did not become a knight. He became an idiot.

Reading the first section of the book, I instinctually felt defensive. Buford, I feared, was giving us a tour of exaggeratedly drunken, stupid miscreants—a freak show, in other words. In an early episode in Turin, a character is shown to drink probably 50 pints over the span of ten pages. Other supporters piss on one another in the stands—which reminded me how my New York friends spoke about the early Trump rallies they attended, which the press then portrayed as similarly deranged and horrific. I expected Buford to force some sociological empathy out of these people for their economic plight. Maybe this was just a 1980s gathering of the juggalos, with more scare mongering about the far-right? But I kept reading.

That Buford himself seemed to be constantly drunk during the events he reported further eroded my trust.

“The circumstances surrounding this story had become intrusive and significant and… if unacknowledged, his account of the events that follow would be grossly incomplete. And his circumstances were these: the reporter was very, very drunk.”

I might accuse him of turning an evening at the National Front Disco (these were actually real and not just a clever turn of phrase by Stephen Patrick Morrissey?) into something maximally liable to horrify mainstream sensibilities. Powerful figures in expensive suits lurk around the periphery of the room, organizing and directing the psychotic and drug-addled skinheads slamming into one another on the dance floor. They were plotting, scheming, and organizing in the shadows. Watch out!

“Did the kid outside the National Front disco actually bash your head into a lamp post and laugh like the joker, or were you just trying to capture a vibe?” I might ask. Buford might respond, honestly—“I think it happened. I was wasted.”

But Buford was mostly just having fun, which makes me like him more. He enjoyed the violence, and that honesty is what sets the book apart.

The “supporters” often speak as if violence is an unfortunate misunderstanding. Nobody quite condones it. Nobody, officially, has come for that. They are there for the match, for the drink, for the lads, because what else is there to do? And yet everything is oriented toward escalating confrontation. They get wasted, smash things, take to the streets and fight. They move through foreign streets in formations that spontaneously become little battalions. Leaders emerge. Scouts return with information.

The language becomes military. A city is not visited but “taken.” A square is occupied. A pub is held. There are knives, bottles, and other instruments. People are stabbed and killed. One man sucks the eyeball out of a police officer’s head and bites through the optic nerve before going out with his wife for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Buford is useful because he does not pretend the appeal is only sociological. He writes that violence offers “an experience of absolute completeness,” and the line is shameful because one understands it. The promise is that one shove, one thrown bottle, one insult will release everyone from the burden of pretending. One person crosses the boundary, and then the crowd can tell itself it has merely followed events. It only takes one person to make it go off.

I have felt the urge to behave like an animal in a crowd myself, from my spine to my testicles. I have even been the catalyst. I remember a high school party on the water in West Vancouver. A massive freshly built mansion. A freshman girl host, seeking popularity. The guys got out of control. The girls were complicit, as they too wanted to humiliate this younger girl. I remember smashing crockery on the floor of her kitchen until there was nothing more to smash. At some point, later, her mother returned to the house. I was on their deck above them, somehow, with some idiots, and a spray hose, and I had the idea to hose the woman.

I remember, wincingly, her facial expression. She was straining to be “cool,” to hold it together, to figure out how to reclaim her house. But normality was so much overridden, so perverted, that this made her more pathetic and contemptible. I don’t know how I stayed out of the drunk tank that night.

Another time that still shames me: now in my late 20s, I was at a wedding. It was that moment just past the ceremony when everyone is having drinks, waiting for the reception. We were standing when I had this explicit urge to push someone, a total stranger, into the pool. I confessed the urge to my wife, who told me not to do it. But every second in this overly stiff atmosphere, where people hadn’t “let their hair down” yet, more and more affirmed my urge, to the point where I felt I had no choice. I hip checked a stranger in a black suit into the shallow end of the pool. I wanted, in that moment, to upend the social order.

Which is to say, I don’t feel inclined to celebrate or indulge these actions. They were stupid and destructive. Likewise the supporters have no real reason to be doing what they were doing, which has this ad-hoc irrational justification in patriotism, machismo, and the like.

“These fools,” he writes, of a mob chanting England while kettled by police in Sardinia, “despised at home, ridiculed in the press, incapable of being contained by any act of impulsive legislation that the government had devised, wanted an England to defend. They wanted a nation to belong to and fight for, even if the fight was this absurd piece of street theater with the local Italian police.”

The book ends not with a theory of hooliganism but with exhaustion. Buford observes a young hooligan throwing bottles through residential windows in a town square.

“I was exhausted, but it was more than a physical tiredness: the fear was gone and the animal excitement and the nerves, and I was left with nothing more than the act of observing this little shit,” Buford writes. “Why was he of interest? What was there to say but: I have now observed a little shit.”

This is the right ending: Buford moves on.

Soccer is now more popular than ever. We are on to the quarter finals of this massively successful World Cup, and we have heard almost nothing about hooligans or violence. I confess I was concerned for the English team when I saw their hotel being pelted with fireworks by Mexican supporters before the round of 16 match. And several women worried on X about Mexicans’ hostility towards English fans “going beyond sport.” But the Three Lions prevailed, and nothing really happened. Some content has come out of the English supporters at this game. Beer was thrown on them. You can see a man gesturing at them with a throat-cutting motion. But they seemed unconcerned. It would have been almost inconceivable for the travelling supporters of England to have stoked violence of their own, not because they are morally improved men, necessarily, but because the whole apparatus around them has changed.

Hooliganism probably was not reasoned out of the little shits. It was managed, nudged away, priced up, filmed, banned, prosecuted, and bored to death through policies like assigned seating, travel bans, cleaner stadiums, and the conversion of football into a family product.

Fathers can now take their sons to a football game without wondering whether they will be bricked in a train station. Only an idiot would pine for this loss.