Football studies in England

a bibliographic review of the literature on hooliganism

Abstract

This article presents the bibliographic debate on football studies in England, outlining the main aspects of analysis and interpretation of football violence, a behavioral phenomenon associated with professional sports in the second half of the 20th century. The objective is to present the most important matrices of thought – authors, studies and institutions – that focused on the behavior of groups of fans, inside and outside the stadiums of that country, between the 1960s and the early 2000s. The so-called Leicester School, gathered around Norbert Elias, especially his disciple Eric Dunning, was able to develop the most extensive theoretical framework of historical-sociological explanation for intergroup fights and their “search for excitement”, resulting from the feuds and emulations between supporters of different English clubs. Contemporary to the events analyzed, this article shows that the subfield of studies entitled “hooliganism” in Great Britain originates from the Eliasian interpretive hegemony and marks the reading of the meanings of a “civilizing process” among modern sports audiences, with emphasis on its cyclical periods of “decivilization”. Two moments are then discussed, a “before” – that is, the currents that brought the first analyses to explain hooligan violence in football until the 1970s – and an “afterwards” – researchers who, from the 1990s, sought to revise the paradigms of the Leicester School and formulated a critique of their assumptions in order to overcome them.