Among the Thugs

(by Bill Buford)

I definitely groaned when I saw that this book was my non-fiction book club’s choice for June—I wasn’t sure I wanted to read about English football hooligans in the 1980s. But as it turned out, I actually liked this one. Buford’s writing is very good, and I like how the structure and mood of the book matches the way Buford’s feelings towards the football supporters with whom he surrounds himself change over the years. Early in the book, Buford is curious: he wants to spend time with football supporters, to see if they’re really as bad as all that. He goes to matches, goes to pubs, tells us about people being drunk and disorderly. And then he sees the violence, and after that the football supporters drop the pretense that there is no violence. Now Buford is interested in the specifics of that violence and its appeal, and also in how crowds, specifically, become violent entities. But by the 1990 World Cup at the end of the book, he’s just over it: by this point he’s decided that what he’s been observing for years now is nothing more than a “bored, empty, decadent generation” with “a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits.” “I have never […] seen something so stupid in my life,” a Finnish journalist says, after a spectacularly violent clash between the English football supporters and the Italian police in which Buford himself ends up being violently beaten, and Buford agrees.