Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Football hooliganism
Summary
Football hooliganism, also known as soccer hooliganism, football rioting or soccer rioting constitutes violence and other destructive behaviours perpetrated by spectators at association football events. Football hooliganism normally involves conflict between gangs, in English known as football firms (derived from the British slang for a criminal gang), formed to intimidate and attack supporters of other teams. Other English-language terms commonly used in connection with hooligan firms include "army", "boys", "bods", "casuals", and "crew". Certain clubs have long-standing rivalries with other clubs and hooliganism associated with matches between them (sometimes called local derbies) is likely to be more severe.
Conflict may take place before, during or after matches. Participants often select locations away from stadiums to avoid arrest by the police, but conflict can also erupt spontaneously inside the stadium or in the surrounding streets. In extreme cases, hooligans, police, and bystanders have been killed, and riot police have intervened. Hooligan-led violence has been called "aggro" (short for "aggression") and "bovver" (the Cockney pronunciation of "bother", i.e. trouble).
Hooligans who have the time and money may follow national teams to away matches and engage in hooligan behaviour against the hooligans of the home team. They may also become involved in disorder involving the general public. While national-level firms do not exist in the form of club-level firms, hooligans supporting the national team may use a collective name indicating their allegiance.
Football hooliganism involves a wide range of behaviour, including:
taunting, often with racial slurs, ethnic slurs or hate speech
spitting
unarmed fighting
use of laser pens to disorient players of the opposing team
throwing of objects on to the pitch, either in an attempt to harm players, fans and officials or as a gesture of insult.
throwing of objects at opposing supporters, including stones, bricks, coins, flares, fireworks and Molotov cocktails.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.