Who Has A Hooligan Problem? (*nudge, nudge*, United States)

Another good one from The Guardian here.

In the United States we tend not to think of ourselves as having a sports hooliganism problem. We also tend to sensationalize what hooliganism looks like, or at least the frequency of hooligan related events, in other parts of the world. The above linked article from The Guardian turns the table on American readers and presents an alarming list of sports related incidents of violence that had occurred in the months before the article's publication.

Full disclosure: I found myself wanting to see a difference between many of the acts of violence listed in the article given the relatively small numbers involved compared to the traditional dust up we all envision when thinking about European soccer violence. The good news is there is a difference. The bad news is that it arguably makes our country's relationship with sports and violence much, much worse than the relationship with sports and violence that exists in Europe.

With concern to football hooliganism as it exists in Europe, we're usually talking about large crowds, essentially gangs, that exist on the fanatical end of the sport fan's spectrum. We've got gangs here too, it's just that our gangs tend not to attach themselves to professional sports franchises. The violence that is listed in The Guardian article is of that hard-to-explain, 1v1, what-the-hell were you thinking variety and much of it centers around what we see as traditional, peaceable American sports like baseball...and youth sports. We tend to separate grotesque acts of violence from the sporting event at which they occur. One Little League dad beats another nearly to death at a game. Is it sports related violence? Or just one maladjusted miscreant snapping at an odd time and place? If we don't have a problem with sports and violence in this country, it has mostly to do with how we define the violence and less to do with the fact that the problem doesn't exist.