Football Violence

'Been watching Football Factory International lately after D sent me the link to a 10 minuet clip about the famous match between Belgrade and Zagreb, which some claim was one of the sparks contributing to the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990's. It's a brutal video, and heart breaking too.

I moved on to watch as much of the series as I can find on youtube.com and found episodes on Poland, Turkey, and Russia. All violent and crazy, but at the end of the one on Russia, one of Danny Dyre's comments struck me. He said that for Russian, hooliganism, with its strict code of honor, had become a place of equality for many people. According to the show, the make up of these firm's is as diverse as Fight Club: lawyers, machinists, cleaners, shop keepers, etc. It makes sense that a country with massive inequality would latch onto those few things that provide equality.

In the firm's a cleaner can mash up a lawyer and fear no consequences. He might even earn the respect of the lawyer, who, in the civil world, would pay him no heed. These firms are not even breaking laws or endangering the public, as all the fights are pre-arranged, consensual, and outside of the stadiums. They are even claiming Russian heritage, preserving a tradition of bare knuckle fighting.

But is this an acceptable argument? Should this be allowed to continue as an outlet for the frustrations of everyday life? What does that say about a society? Or is violence inherent, and thus we should let it manifest in these, less harmful ways?

But then what of the Dynamo Zagreb V's Red Star Belgrade? The hooligan fight that helped start war, and whose participants were among the first to join up and go to the front lines. If this is the end result, then nothing can justify allowing a hooligan culture to continue. One of the fighters in the Russian firm from Spartak Moscow said this was what it meant to be Russian, it was his sense of national identity, and it was rooted in violence.