Everyone has seen the images of rioting in Canada and the United States after a city's team has won (or lost) a championship in any given sport. Most recently, Vancouver experienced massive rioting following the Vancouver Canucks' loss to the Boston Bruins in the 2011 Stanley Cup Final. And in 2014, San Francisco experienced significant rioting after the Giants won the World Series against the Kansas City Royals.
In the media however, these incidents are referred to as "civil unrest" and "riots" rather than sports hooliganism. It's strange that the sporting event that has incited the violence is often separated, at least in terms of causality, from the violent incident. The two are inextricably linked, but in our country - and I'm including Canada here (sorry, Canada!) - we still insist that we do not have a sports hooliganism problem. We have "youthful miscreants" and "violent opportunists", but we don't have hooligans. It's not even a semantic difference as most people would not attribute the sports violence in our countries to hooligans. They are, at least to us, two different things. Never mind that images of sports fans brawling with police in San Francisco are nearly identical to images of sports fans brawling with police in Warsaw, we just don't see ourselves as a society having the same sort of issue with sports and violence that exists in other parts of the world. Is it the sport? Are hooligans, traditionally defined, only a soccer thing?
As I wrote in a previous post, maybe the difference is the social, economic, and political loyalties that tend to accompany soccer violence in Europe and other parts of the world. If that's the case though, couldn't the Montreal Canadiens, as essentially Quebec's national team, fit into that definition? Perhaps the issue is with denial more than it is with any substantive difference between the two cultures of sports violence.
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