The Leicester School of Football Hooliganism: an evaluation

Abstract

For over 20 years, the Leicester School have shaped the theories and research on crowd disturbances at football grounds. This article is an evaluation of the School’s application of the figurational approach to the study of crowd disorder at football grounds. The School draw upon Elias’s work to understand the reaction of the respectable population to crowd disorder. However, in their explanation of hooliganism, the School abandons Elias’s figurational approach in favour of a concept of ‘incorporation’ that is used to identify a ‘rough’ section of the working class who are geographically compacted, educationally underachieving, more likely to be unemployed and low paid. In the last analysis, Dunning and colleagues (Dunning, E., P. Murphy, and J. Williams. The Roots of Football Hooliganism. London: Routledge, 1988.) point to educational failure, limited employment opportunities and high rates of unemployment as central to a process of underclass or ‘rough’ working class formation, and that it is this process of underclass formation, rather than the ‘immanent dynamics of figurations’, that underpins the continuing levels of crowd disorder at football matches.