Football’s Violent Traditions. In England, in particular, there has long been a tradition of football violence and hooliganism which some might associate with yobbish behaviour generally and others with team tribalism and yet others with social deprivation and a symptom of overcrowding generally.  Doubtless these and other factors played and, to a lesser extent, still play a part in the perpetuation of this peculiar situation, but there were reasons enough, particularly in the late 1960s and 1970s, why football should be blighted with inter-tribal violence between supporters of opposing teams, the absence of seating on the terraces being a contributory feature if only because it permitted greater freedom of movement, paradoxically, within already crowded areas of bi-partisan support, enabling supporters of opposing teams to taunt one another and even clash or hurl objects in the general direction of the other team’s fans.  These days seating throughout grounds greatly reduces the chances of anything like that happening, though supporters can still clash – as they did before – outside the ground or in a variety of locations to and from the ground.  But, whatever the exact circumstances of this blight on English football, you have to remember that the game itself is English and therefore of a state-hegemonic/church-subordinate axial character which stands in an antithetical relationship to rugby, pretty much, I contend, as parliamentarianism/Puritanism to Monarchism/Anglicanism on a phenomenal-to-noumenal basis that would translate, in my overall philosophical paradigm, as southeast and northwest intercardinal points of the axis in question.  Therefore there was always, within association football, a liberal-humanist dimension that was vulnerable, particularly before the collapse of the Soviet Union and of communism in Eastern Europe, i.e. not least in the late ‘sixties through to the late ‘eighties, to proletarian humanist overtones and even aspirations of a character, commensurate with working-class allegiances, that would have led to a marked social-democratic bias in certain of the fans and perhaps in the perception of certain teams, especially those which played in red, and conversely of a nazi-type reaction to any such ‘bolshevistic’ orientation which, whether especially to be associated with teams that played in blue or not, would have been sufficient pretext, even if other factors hadn’t come into play, for crowd animosities and even outright violence between large gangs of opposing supporters whose perception of the opposition support would have fallen into either extreme left- or right-wing categories, depending on both team colour and league status, not to mention geopolitical traditions and presumptions.  Therefore much of this soccer violence, though partly susceptible to what happened on the field of play, would have stemmed from a bi-polar antagonism between extreme-left and extreme-right state-absolutist factionalism within a game which, then as now, was essentially liberal in character, if at the time with stronger democratic-socialist overtones.  It was not this so much as the perception of social-democratic radicalism in relation to the more pervasive existence, at that time, of Communism that played no small part, I believe, in igniting the fires of animosity which spread throughout English and, indeed, British football as the nazi-style reaction to this perceived aspiration on the part of certain fans and/or teams took its weekly toll on the game of football and effectively brought it into social disrepute, making the terms ‘hooliganism’ and ‘violence’ more or less synonymous with football to the detriment of the average, non-radical supporter.  Things have substantially changed since those dark days, thank goodness, and that is due, in no small part, to the dramatic changes in politics generally which have made social-democratic aspirations a thing of the past and accordingly invalidated the justification for any extreme-right-wing backlash to what was always, even within the axis in question, a flawed and deeply misguided predilection.