An ‘unsettling policy of confrontation’

It has been said: “Football is a game played for gentlemen by hooligans.”

However, is has long been obvious that, in fact, football is a game played by hooligans for hooligans, as well as properly behaved folk.

Last weekend, the Egyptian authorities suspended indefinitely all football matches in the country when over 20 fans were killed after police fired tear gas to disperse a crowd fighting to enter a Cairo stadium.

Fans said to be without tickets from the Zamalek club’s support group, Ultras White Knights had formed a mob trying to crash into the stadium through a narrow fenced-in gate.

When the tear gas descended on the unruly throng, fans were desperate to escape, stampeding and crushing victims. Some died of suffocation due to inhalation of the acrid gas.

Suspension has been reimposed only shortly after being lifted. Matches were barred in 2012 after 74 Ahly fans died when attacked after a game at Port Said by supporters of the winning Al Masry team.

In 1974, a crush at a Zamalek game against a Czech side killed at least 48 people.

Earlier this month at the African Cup of Nations, Ghanaian fans were driven from their seats in the stands onto the pitch by missiles thrown by rivals from Equatorial Guinea, the host country.

Tear gas was used to disperse the Guineans when it was discovered that they sought to ambush the Ghanaians as they left the stadium.

Equatorial Guinea was fined $100,000 for failing to control the crowd.

Football hooliganism, once called the “English disease”, has spread to the whole wide world.

The phenomenon can be traced back as far as 14th century England, when King Edward II banned the game, then involving rival villages, fearing associated violence could lead to unrest or even treason.

The pattern of modern-day hooliganism appears to have been created in the 1880s, when gangs of supporters attacked opposing supporters and players or, when exiting grounds, laid waste to entire neighbourhoods.

One of the worst football disasters took place in 1989 at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, where 96 Liverpool fans were crushed at a match when police allowed too many people to enter the stadium and a throng of fans built up outside the venue, a situation similar to that in Cairo last Sunday.

For several decades, hooliganism has afflicted the small island state of Cyprus, where I live, and normally involves clashes between supporters of the republic’s main teams or between fans and police.

According to Wikipedia, at least other 20 countries in Europe, three in Latin America, two in North America, 10 in Asia, 13 in Africa and Australia have been infected with the “English disease”.

Britain, however, has largely eradicated it by profiling and excluding violent fans and clubs, improving crowd control measures and redesigning stadiums.

What is it about football, in particular, that provokes fans to violence?

Sociologists argue that football hooliganism is a type of “ritualised male violence”.

This is found especially in football because it is the most popular and widely played sport on earth, attracting an estimated 3.3 to 3.5 billion fans in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australasia.

Fans form deep emotional attachments to teams.

“Fanhood” gives individuals a sense of identity and status that waxes and wanes according to the fortunes of their teams. Therefore, when their teams lose, fans feel diminished and seek to retaliate against the fans and players of victorious rivals.

States have boosted public interest in football by broadcasting games on radio and television and conducting extensive interviews with commentators and players.

Promoters strengthened fans’ attachments to teams by creating a football subculture by establishing boosters’ clubs and providing flags, banners, T-shirts and other items that tie fans to specific teams.

These clubs also ensure that fans are present at games away from home base.

In many countries, both democracies and autocracies, attachment to football has become a substitute for political empowerment and football hooliganism a means to protest against entrenched elites and the lack of socio-economic mobility.

Football hooliganism has also been politicised at the local level.

In some European countries and Russia, fans verbally abuse non-white players. In some, hooliganism has been rooted in extreme nationalism and right-wing politics, and in others, hooliganism has been an expression of the struggle for freedom.

In Egypt, organised fans played honourable roles in the 2011 uprising that toppled president for 30 years Hosni Mubarak. 

Ultras Ahlawy, fans of the country’s leading Al Ahly team, founded in 1907 during British rule, and its main rival Ultras White Knights, loyal to Zamalek, established in 1911, became stars of the 2011 uprising.

Al Ahly was originally a club were students’ unions met to organise protests against colonialism. This club emerged as Egypt’s most successful, with some 50 million fans across this region and Africa.

Zamalek was created as a club admitting people from all levels of society.

Ultras Ahlawy and Ultras White Knights took part in the demonstrations that erupted on January 25, 2011, in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and across the country. Subsequently, ultras provided muscle when demonstrators were being attacked by riot police and plainclothes security men.

Ultras manned the barricades thrown up around Tahrir Square to prevent pro-Mubarak thugs from entering the square. They routed Mubarak supporters on the night of February 2, 2011, in the engagement dubbed the “Battle of the Camel”.

During this four-hour skirmish, men on horseback and camels entered Tahrir Square in a bid to drive away those vowing to camp there until Mubarak stood down.

In December 2012, ultras defended secular revolutionaries when attacked by stave-wielding and gun-toting Muslim Brotherhood toughs outside the presidential palace during a protest against Brotherhood veteran president Mohamed Morsi’s assumption of near total power.

Since his ouster in 2013, the ultras have apparently reverted to their unsettling policy of confrontation at a time Egypt has been facing near constant violence from Brotherhood cadres and supporters, as well as from jihadist groups, including Daesh, attacking troops, police and civilians in northern Sinai.