Football hooliganism , also known as soccer hooliganism , [ 1 ] football rioting or soccer rioting , constitutes violence and other destructive behaviors perpetrated by spectators at association football events. Conflict may arise at any point, before, during or after matches and occasionally outside of game situations. In extreme cases, hooligans, police and bystanders have been killed, and riot police have intervened.
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.
Hooliganism can create a high level of violence at football matches. Outside of the physical violence, the behavior of these fans is extremely in-orderly and leads to conflict breaking out. In some cases, hooliganism involves extreme ideological pathways such as Neo-Nazism or white supremacism. They engage in behavior that risks them being arrested before the match, denied admittance to the stadium, ejected from the stadium during the match or banned from attending future matches.
Hooligan groups often associate themselves with, and congregate in, a specific section called an end in England of their team's stadium, and sometimes they include the section's name in the name of their group. These are Supporters' groups with the primary objective of fanatically supporting the club through chants, flags, displays and organizing trips to away games. Due their fanaticism, many of those groups frequently become embroiled with hooliganism, but do not have the explicit objective of causing violence.
The type of violence committed by hooligans can come in a number of forms: starting fires, unarmed and armed fighting, hateful speech, [ 9 ] and occasionally even violent acts committed against the players such as throwing bottles or bananas to physically harm or racially attack players.
