Sports inspire passion that can lead to violence. Photo by PanARMENIAN_Photo via Flickr.

Coming from private school, I was taught that rugby is a sport for hooligans played by gentlemen, whereas football is a sport for gentlemen played by hooligans.  In the defence of posh boys everywhere, there is a solid international case for this, most recently seen in the riots after the football at Port Said in Egypt last Wednesday, where 74 people were killed in an event allegedly masterminded by the winning side Al-Masry’s extremists, the Ultras. In 2001 there were 127 fatalities at a football stadium riot in Ghana, and overcrowding at a 1996 football match in Guatemala caused at least 83 deaths.

Additionally, if you take to heart everything you read in the papers, as well as everything you’re not allowed to say because of super injunctions, you could well be led to believe that football players are in fact as un-gentlemanly as the above saying suggests – perhaps particularly in France.  But what is it about football (and if we’re not going to be accused of being elitist, sport in general) that inspires men to behave in this un-gentlemanly way?

I say men because it is often men who play sport, watch sport, and get passionately excited about league tables.  I’ve seen arguments between (male) Welsh and English rugby fans that involved not one but two sets of statistics going to as many as four decimal places.  Sure, there are plenty of women who are crazy about sport too, but it’s not a defining character of femininity or female group bonding like it can be for men.  It’s also often individual sports such as tennis or athletics where women have the highest sporting profiles.

In contrast, it’s often team sports such as football that are linked to the highest levels of hooliganism – with darts being the obvious exception.  With regard to gender equality in sport, there’s a school of thought that believes that there shouldn’t be male/female division at all – rather than the men’s 100m and the women’s 100m, just have the 100m, with the fastest people over 100m regardless of gender.  Seems fair, but as it currently stands, this would just turn the men’s 100m into the 100m.

This is because men are faster than women.  Obviously, Jessica Ennis would beat Mike McShane over any distance, but the fastest men in the world are faster than the fastest women in the world.  It’s just a biological fact.  Sporting women recognise this too; to return to tennis, at one time the male player ranked 1000th in the world offered to play Serena Williams, ranked number one at the time, and she refused, apparently due to the fear that she would lose.

Perhaps, then, men’s biological capacity for sport is linked to a biological capacity for hooliganism.  Anyone who has ever watched or played in a particularly vicious game of hockey will know that the line between sport and violence is in places a little thin, and it’s traditionally male-dominated sports such as boxing and rugby where it’s thinnest of all.  Those watching a football match are caught up in the adrenaline involved in the playing, but don’t have a way of releasing it in a stadium seat.  Perhaps the fact that men the world over are designed to bond over physical activity is what causes such violent outbursts after fixtures – the spectators have been involved mentally, but lack a way of engaging with “the other side” physically…at least until after the match.