In this remarkably candid autobiography, Andy Nicholls, archetypal Scally and former Category C soccer hooligan, recounts his immersion in the hooligan culture of the late 1970s, dealing unflinchingly with the barbaric knifings for which Merseyside hooligans became notorious, the accusations of racism that have long since been levelled at Everton fans, and the 1985 Heysel Disaster. He also relates darkly humorous tales of thieving, ticket touting, bitter rivalries with Manchester United and Liverpool, and his own appearance on the cover of The Sun. Illustrated.
Synopsis
Andy Nicholls is the archetypal Scally: a streetwise Evertonian with a wicked sense of humour and an eye for the main chance. He is also an obsessive soccer fan and, as a Category C hooligan - the highest-rating of the National Football Intelligence Unit - was involved in some of the most notorious clashes of the past 30 years. In this remarkably candid autobiography, he recounts his immersion in the hooligan culture of the late 1970s, at a time when fans from Merseyside pioneered the "casual"...
Other authors on hooliganism
Cass Pennant/Mickey Smith
Want some aggro?
Reviews
Synopsis
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Mile End Mob ruled Upton Park. Long before the days of the ICF, they were the guv'nors of the terraces, striking fear into the other West Ham mobs and fans. Indeed it was the reputation of the Mile End mob that drove the ICF to establish their rule over the terraces in the 1980s. Co-author Micky Smith was in the thick of the action in the 60s and 70s, when there was no mercy for an away fan at Upton Park. He was there at the clashes between the rival skinhead London mobs, the taking of terraces up and down the country and the run-ins with the authorities.
Colin Ward
Steaming in: Journal of a football fan
Reviews
Book Jacket
Countless words on the subject of football hooliganism have been bandied about by politicians, journalists and sociologists. But here is the unvarnished account of life on the terraces in the 1970s and 1980s, the inside story of a fan. Colin Ward's experiences at Arsenal, Chelsea and England matches at home and abroad make astonishing readying, by turns disturbing, horrifying and hilarious. From the terraces at Highbury to Luxembourg, Turin and Istanbul Colin Ward charts the camaraderie and the confrontations, the chauvinism, the hatred and the unexpected friendships between rival fans. Along the way he draws a vivid picture of numerous colourful terrace characters, from Tall Eric with his outrageous designer outfits to the three Chelsea fans who wove tall tales all over Europe.
Though caught up in the excitement of the terrace scene Colin Ward never seeks to glorify violence. However, this is a controversial and provocative book that uniquely captures the spirit of the times and never flinches from the truth. It has become that rarest of gems--a classic of football writing.
Synopsis
An account of life on the terraces in the 1970s and 80s, this book is an inside story of a football fan. Colin Ward's experiences at Arsenal, Chelsea and England matches, at home and abroad and his experiences of camaraderie and confrontations, chavinism, hatred and colourful terrace characters are charted. He is outspoken on drunkenness, racism and unprovoked viciousness and has harsh words to say about the attitude of politicians and the media to football hooliganism.
Hoolifan
Martin King and Martin Knight
The Naughty Nineties
Reviews
Amazon.co.uk Review
Martin King first went to see a football match in the early 1960s at White Hart Lane. Immediately hooked, he soon became an avid Chelsea fan, or as the title of his book suggests, a Hoolifan, as over the years he became one of Chelsea's "top boys", a ringleader in orchestrating the violence on the terraces and city streets which made Chelsea so notorious throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.
This is a tough and compelling account of how, according to King, football violence was and always has been, part of the fabric of male, working-class life. Page after page describes the adventures of King and the Chelsea fans as they follow Chelsea across the country, taking "ends" (the area of the ground usually reserved exclusively for the home team's fans) and engaging in organised fights, often on a terrifying and brutal scale. There are some wonderful sections on the vagaries of football fashion throughout the 70s and 80s and the cameraderie which unites the guild-like groups of fans is evoked with great skill. But King is often too quick to hide behind claims that innocents were never hurt in the violence he actively pursued and that the media has blown the problem out of all proportion. Nevertheless Hoolifan raises some uneasy and still unresolved questions about the nature of football violence. --Jerry Brotton
Synopsis
The story of Martin King and his 30 years of involvement with football hooliganism, particularly as a member of the notorious Chelsea Headhunters. He describes the leading characters, famous fights, planned ambushes and sets hooliganism in its social context.
Michael Francis
Guvnors
Reviews
Amazon.co.uk Review
Synopsis
For fifteen years, Michael Francis and his brothers headed the Guvnors - one of the toughest and most notorious gangs of football hooligans to soil the streets and football terraces of Britain. Now out of prison and willing to break his silence, Francis comes clean and reveals the inside story of his life.
Steve Cowens and Paul Heaton
Blades Business Crew
Reviews
Synopsis
For 20 years, Steve Cowens kept a diary of the violent exploits of The Blades Business Crew - one of the country's most actie hooligan gangs. As leader of the BBC - he visited 91 of the 92 football league grounds - and fought at most of them. In this explosive book, Cowens reveals the links between different hooligan groups around the country, how they communicate and how they organise. He details the confrontations with many of the leading gangs of the 1980s and 1990s, from West Ham and Chelsea to Birmingham, Leeds, Cardiff, Liverpool and Manchester. And for the first time, he describes many of the lesser known but equally active gangs at some of England's smaller clubs. He also tells how Sheffield is a city fiercely divided along football lines and relates the story of the city's bouncer wars' that left many jailed and permanently injured.
Tony Rivers
Soul Crew
Reviews
Synopsis
The Inside Story of Britain's Most Violent Hooligan Gang; The Cardiff Soul Crew are recognised by police intelligence officers as the most violent football hooligan gang currently active in Britain. Their 400-plus members have been involved in mass disorder at matches for more than twenty-five years. Yet they have largely escaped the notoriety of their English counterparts - until now. Two men closely involved with the gang tell its history from its origins through to the present day: their leaders, their fashions, how they organise and who they fight. Soul Crew relates how an infamous clash with Manchester United's Red Army in the mid-Seventies was the impetus for the formation of the mob. A core group of hardcases from the tough Docks area of Cardiff was joined by alienated, unemployed youths from the valleys and former pit villages of South Wales. They took their name from their love of soul music and adopted the 'casual' fashion of designer-label clothes. In time they would fight fierce battles with rivals like the Frontline Crew, the Bushwhackers, the Gooners and the Central Element Soul Crew also reveals for the first time the network of alliances and communications between the leading hooligans around the country: the so-called "Category C" thugs who organise much of the violence. And it tells of their cat-and-mouse relationship with the police spotters who now follow them everywhere From the publishers of the best-selling Guvnors and Blades Business Crew, Soul Crew is the best evocation yet of life running with a soccer mob
Cass Pennant
Congratulations you have just met the ICF
Reviews
Synopsis
A history of the most famous football battles in history, this book presents an unapologetic account of life in the front line of football violence by Cass Pennant, the leader of the notorious Inter City Firm - the ICF - West Ham's gang of football hooligans. The Inteer City Firm were the most notorious firm of football hooligans this country has seen. They were hard, terrifyingly vicious, brilliantly organized, tremendously feared and highly fashionable.
This book examines how groups of young male fans come to be defined and identified as football "hooligans" and challenges the assumption that violence is wholly central to the match-day experience for these supporters. Rather, the creation of identity is at the root of hooliganism, with all the cultural values and rituals, codes of honor and shame, and communal patterns of behavior and consumption that accompany it. The author locates hooliganism historically within the milieu of an industrial working-class culture and examines ideas of performance and ritual encompassed in idealized masculinity.
The book is based on a decade's in-depth study of the "Blades", a group of football fans supporting Sheffield United who are notorious for their hooliganism. It contributes to the debate on football hooliganism by challenging many traditionally-held notions of hooliganism and by providing the first anthropological study of football violence.
End of the Terraces: The Transformation of English Football in the 1990's
Synopsis
In analysing the transformation of English football in the 1990s, this book provides a comprehensive account of football culture in contemporary Britain that not only contributes to the study of the sport but also sheds light on recent changes in British society.
From The Critics
Analyzes the transformation of English football culture in contemporary Britain, shedding light on recent changes in British society. Through examination of the political economy of football since the 1960s and the public debates on reform from the mid-1980s, the author situates the transformation of the sport in the 1990s in the context of the collapse of the Keynesian, post-war settlement and the emergence of a Thatcherite, post-Fordist settlement. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
The Big Money, Beautiful Game: Saving Football from Itself
Synopsis
Kevan Reilly and Paul Dempsey are professional journalists who have both been writing about the soccer revolution since its inception.
Soccer has never been richer. Yet the game's new fount wealth is proving more of a threat than an opportunity. As the rich clubs get richer, the rest face at best obscurity and a worst bankruptcy. Forget romance, think finance. For promotion and relegation read profit center and insolvency. It has been a big and, in many ways, necessary change. But if soccer's bubble bursts, the consequences will affect everyone.
The financial revolution now sweeping through European soccer had to happen. It has breathed new life into a sport that was bedeviled by hooliganism, a slapdash approach to safety and corruption. But as a new order takes control of the sport many claim that the world's most popular sport has leapt out of the frying pan into the fire.
Thanks largely to television there is more money in the game than ever before, but there also seem to be more clubs facing bankruptcy. Even solid sides that appear well equipped for survival can see a small elite of super-rich teams pulling away and threatening to dominate every competition in perpetuity.
Both professionals and fans claim the game's new master. know little about the sport, its romance and traditions, and it unique structure in which even the mightiest depend on the minnows. Instead these interlopers are regarded os smash-and grab merchants after a quick buck with no real concern that they may leave a sporting wasteland behind them.
The book tells a new, accessible story of the 'disappearance' of soccer hooliganism as a social problem into a burgeoning pop culture of accelerated youth styles, literature and post-fandom. As the media future of pay-per-view, digital production and the expansion of the airwaves and cyberspace comes on stream, soccer as the 'people's game' or as 'football hooliganism' is becoming a distant speck on the horizon of twentieth-century history. A 'man's game' is being transformed into a media event for global-but-localised consumption. The resurgence of 'laddism' in the 1990s is one consequence of the 'bourgeoisification' of the game and the popularising of 'soccer into pop' (so that bands like Oasis play their beloved Maine Road stadium and have corporate tie-ups with Manchester City). Fans of both music and soccer are increasingly visibly interchangeable in their mediated spectatorship, look and attitude. 'Low' art is everywhere: soccer and pop are the fields of Bohemian artistic experiment and fashion catwalks. In this book, the author provides a thought-provoking journey into the end of the twentieth-century postmodern culture of youth, pop and sport-as-business.
From The Critics
Booknews
Redhead (law, popular culture, Manchester Metropolitan U.) looks at the way youth culture is being reshaped by media culture in its various aspects at the end of the millennium. He looks at post-fandom, the style conscious shifting allegiances heavily influenced by advertising and popular music, at the globalization and mediatization of sports culture, and at the complicated relations between football and the law reflected in the public obsession with soccer hooliganism at a time when it seemed to be dying away. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Dougie Brimson
Eurotrashed: The Rise and Rise of Europe' Football Hooligans
Reviews
Book Description
Football hooliganism, for so long regarded as The English Disease is rife throughout the European game. Yet whilst the English scene has been well documented, no one has ever put together a book that exposes the extent to which the hooligan problem has come to infect the game elsewhere in Europe.
Until now.
Compiled by best-selling author Dougie Brimson, Eurotrashed examines the truth behind the spread of football violence across the continent and paints a disturbing picture of just how deeply entrenched in the fabric of European football the culture of hooliganism has become.
Synopsis
Hooliganism may often be deemed the "English disease", yet increasingly some of the most violent supporters come not from the UK but from the continent. The banner "Welcome to Hell" that was waved at Manchester United fans when they visited Galatasaray a few yeas ago became horribly true when two Leeds supporters were murdered by Turkish fans in 2000. But this was only one example of the increasing tide of shocking behaviour that was taking place in Italy, Holland, Germany and elsewhere. Dougie Brimson charts the growth of this new trend and explains the reasons behind this wave of violence. He asks what UEFA and the authorities can do to solve the problems and presents some of his own solutions.
Us v Them: Journeys to the World's Greatest Football Derbies - Giles Goodhead
Paperback - 208 pages (6 March, 2003)
Viking; ISBN: 0670913405
Synopsis
Travelling football fanatic Giles Goodhead drags a series of unsuspecting friends and family to experience eight of the world's most intense football derbies. From the noisiest (100,000 furious Barcelona fans simultaneously blowing whistles) to the scariest (trying to scalp a ticket in Istanbul), he describes the thrills of gate-crashing symbolically loaded grudge matches in cities split by football, including Glasgow, Milan, and Buenos Aires. Goodhead's adrenalin-soaked book is a modern commentary on tribalism around the globe.
Terrace Terror Tracing the genesis of the Hull City football hooligan mob from the formative'60s to the present day, with personal recollections and interviews with former gang members, Shuan Torduff, a former member of the Hull City football hooligan gang, recounts the infamous Battle of Dock Street, the Rugby Wars that split the city, the era of the notorious Hull City Psychos, the trips on Mad Eddie's Battle Wagon, and the resurgence of soccer violence at the football club in the 1990s.
Synopsis
It is the Swinging Sixties, a time of Flower Power, student protest and free love. Unless, that is, you live in a two-up, two-down terraced house in England's forgotten city: Hull. There, among the docks and factories, is an eerie Clockwork Orange world of warring street gangs with names like the Monte Carlo Mob, the Gypsyville Skins, the Woodcock Martyrs and the Kempton Fusiliers. Shaun Tordoff grew up amid the skinhead crews of the tough east coast city and joined legions of like-minded youths on the football terraces every Saturday, in their Sta-press jeans, Doc Martens and sheepskin coats. With personal recollections and interviews with former gangs members, he recounts the infamous Battle of Dock Street, the Rugby Wars that split the city between violent supporters of its two rugby league teams, the era of the notorious Hull City Psychos, the trips on Mad Eddie's Battle Wagon, and the resurgence of soccer violence at the football club in the 1990s. More than simply a hooligan memoir, City Psychos evokes a forgotten world of music, clothes and youth culture in one of Britain's biggest urban areas. From the publishers of Guvnors (over 47,000 copies sold), Blades Business Crew and Soul Crew, the number one small publishers' bestseller (Booktrack, April 2002)
