American Sports Writers and “Unruly Rooters”: The Significance of Orderly Spectating

Abstract

On Sunday June 17, 1990, under the special logo and the bold headline Brits on Rampage Again, Barry Wilner of the Associated Press described how police had to use tear gas to disperse a group of about 1,000 English just before the England vs. Netherlands World Cup game.1 The article typifies American writers' fascination with what Wilner called soccer's unruly rooters during the 1990 World Cup. The juxtaposition of headlines (World Cup/Brits on Rampage) implies a firm relationship between soccer, violence, and English fans, while the emphasis Brits on Rampage Again identifies a context already firmly established in the minds of American readers. American reporters in fact constantly asserted a relationship between soccer and spectator violence. They were often drawn to statistics of violence. A running tally was kept in most newspapers of fans arrested, deported, and hospitalized, and several articles were devoted to the riots that broke out in England following their semi-final defeat by Germany and to the violent celebrations that broke out in Germany following their World Cup victory. The control and self-control of fans at sporting arenas is a vital metaphor for social order in Western cultures. Experiences and descriptions of sport spectating encode the social significances of orderly and disorderly conduct; they express, organize, and make comprehensible a society's disciplinary practices. This is particularly true of the United States, where managed and orderly sport spectacles tacitly confront widespread fears of social anarchy and urban violence, constructing codes of disciplined spectatorship that are all the more powerful for being invisibly maintained. American journalists who observed spectators of World Cup matches found these largely-unarticulated codes transgressed and exposed by fans who participated in the sports event with what seemed baffling unrestraint. Hooliganism forced writers to confront the meanings of American spectator decorums and, usually, to reconfirm their propriety. But there was another side to soccer fans and even to soccer hooligans, for their provocative and often joyous breaching of American spectator codes also called the legitimacy of those codes into question. The example of soccer fans showed by contrast what the American experience of sports lacked in terms of passion and what I shall call