If you’ve not seen any footage of some England fans in Amsterdam and want to feel despair and disgust in equal measure, watch this… (twitter vids of the Amsterdam "fans")
If you just can’t face it on a Monday morning, you already know what it’s like. You’ve seen it before. England fans pour beer over a passing boat in Amsterdam, all lined up on a bridge with England flags, before somebody tosses a bike into the canal. And oh, they are all so pleased with themselves, arms aloft, laughing at the misfortune of others, too selfish to feel any empathy for the distress and discomfort they are causing, instead wallowing in that distress. They feel great. They are Eng-ger-lund.
But it’s not right to call them England fans, they’re just English and they merely use the football as an excuse to gather somewhere abroad and behave terribly. There is no defence of this at all. None. They stain our national identity. And maybe that’s why they do it. When you’re nothing, being something, even if that something is offensive and vile to decent people, is an achievement.
Other countries have hooligans who cause trouble, such as some of the Italian Ultras, but usually they do so only in their own country, which is bad enough, obviously. But when Italian fans come to London on Tuesday, I’d wager we won’t see a crowd of them pouring beer off Westminster bridge onto passing boats, nor doing that ‘come on then’ gesture with their arms. The whole ‘going abroad and causing trouble’ thing is a very English tradition going back about 1000 years. We have to bring it to an end.
I say English because it isn’t even a British thing any more. The Scots and Irish football fans are welcomed, feted even, wherever they go on foreign soil (if not within the UK – I say this as a man who was recently trapped on a train with Rangers supporters who thought singing and swearing at high volume was an appropriate way to behave on public transport, again, regardless of anyone else) But abroad, it’s the English that are loathed and when you see how some behave, it is not surprising.
I saw people on Twitter relishing the day these people come up against their violent Russian counterparts in Moscow and take a hellish beating. I understand that sentiment, but two wrongs don’t make a right and it is worth bearing in mind that there would be plenty of collateral damage in such a situation, which would affect, hurt and upset innocent people.
Of course, this is absolutely nothing to do with football per se, it is a problem in wider society which finds an expression in a football context. And let us not be shy of saying it is a very, very male problem. Look at those videos and see how many women are involved. Men do this. Very few women do. It is a specifically male culture.
We see it every weekend, in every town. A certain type of bloke behaving horribly, getting shit-faced drunk, fighting, vomiting and making havoc.
Go to any A & E on a Saturday night and they’re often overwhelmed with the consequences of this bad behaviour. These are the same people we saw in Amsterdam. Full of macho bravado, self congratulatory arrogance and driven on by an unquestioning herd mentality.
The question is why? Why are they like that? None of us are angels, but many of us don’t even want to disturb someone on the train with noise leaking from our headphones; we lower our voice when on the phone because we don’t want to intrude on other people’s peaceful journey. The very idea of being in a baying mob is utterly anathema.
So how did we end up like this and others ended up throwing a bike with a child’s seat attached into a canal? The distance between the value systems that these two behaviour patterns exhibit is a cultural and moral gulf.
It’s easy to just assign such behaviour to being drunk, but I really don’t think that is an explanation. Many of us get drunk a lot, but don’t go around in a big group of other men menacing people and being destructive. Many of us have zero desire to stand on foreign soil behind a massive flag asserting that “we are Eng-ger-lund”. Those who do, I feel, have other issues going on.
You have a choice not to behave like that. There’s absolutely nothing inevitable about it. So where does it all come from? I believe its roots are in a specific sort of aggressive, insensitive, masculine culture that is ever-present in and around football and life in general.
It is the alpha male, negative, ‘banter’ way of life which gets off on humiliating people and finds pain funny. It wears insensitivity as a badge of honour. It doesn’t care who it offends, feeling that if you’re offended, then you’re some sort of liberal hand-wringing bedwetter, who bloody well needs offending. It is also connected to the culture of right-wing politics, which sees any denial of the primacy of some largely fictional national identity, created from a largely fictional notion of nationhood, as an affront to their civil liberties.
Some academic analysis also ties this behaviour to becoming emotionally numb via regular use of violent pornography. When you drench your synapses with this heinous stuff, you stop feeling anything, so throwing a bike into a canal is simply nothing to you. You don’t think of the consequences for the parent and child, what impact it might have in their life and how upsetting it would be. No. You just do it on impulse, for effect, to be loved in the moment by your fellow idiots. Perhaps in doing so, filling up your usually empty loving cup.
And when we strip it back further, maybe this is exactly why they do it. This is why they go to Spain in the summer and get into fights in Magaluf. It’s all a way to make themselves feel something, a way to break the emotional numbness, a way to try and give their meaningless existence some point.
When unreconstructed men feel like they are the tiniest of cogs in a huge machine and what they say and do in their everyday lives has no import or meaning, when they feel that traditional masculinity is being supplanted by a newly confident and forward-looking feminism, they are left with no territory upon which to plant their flag. But if they gather together and go on tour with Eng-ger-lund, you can pretend the old narrow male patriarchal way of life still rules.
When we put our disgust and contempt for this behaviour to one side, we are still left with actual humans, and we need to understand not just why this is happening but what we can do to stop it.
Clearly, there isn’t just one big lever to pull to cure this, but I’m sure some of it is rooted in mental health, which in itself is a multi-layered issue. No-one who is content and in a good place wants to cause such distress to others if they can avoid it, let alone glory in it. So that needs addressing. The ongoing emotional and cultural brutalisation of men by other men must be considered unacceptable, so that we don’t create more blokes who are some sort of ticking time bomb of fury, just waiting to go off. Hand in hand with that is becoming more emotionally literate and sensitive. Being a hard man is not something to be proud of. This is all learned behaviour, the product of the same society that makes honest, nice and decent people too. Not being an absolute bastard really isn’t that difficult, is it? Change can happen.
Cauterising the mental wounds which provoke bad behaviour and lifestyle choices could, in time, re-route a destructive personality. I think it is happening, at least slowly, and what we saw in Amsterdam on Friday are the dying pains of an old way of life, an old way of thinking, and an old way of being.
But if all else fails, well, there’s always the Russians.
John Nicholson
