Why happens fan violence?

Everyone in the world is a fan of someone or loves someone too much.  The interest or deep thought about someone either it is sport person or sports or actor or leader or business man etc. sometime rise the issues of fan violence.  Generally it has been seen that the fans sometime become very violence if the result of any game or anything is not in favour of the fans.  For example, In United States and Canada the introduction of the soccer game and also increase in the professionalism of the players, the Britain fan can cause the problem in North America because Britain people are more attached to this game, if in the stadium something does not go in favour of the Britain Team.  So fan violence is not a predefined incident but it is accidental.  Another example is of a soccer match on October 1977, in between Glasgow Rangers and Aston Villa, but after some time (53 minutes) the match got stop because Ranger supporters crowded on the pitch as soon as Aston Villa got a lead of 2-0.  So these are some examples which show about the fan violence. Although there have been formed some fan violence protesting teams in almost all countries and these teams take action during the sports or general meeting of the leaders.  Some standards also have been prepared to measure the fan violence based on the attitude and behaviour of the people. The main aim of the report is to analyses the fan violence because of different factors and situations that happens and creates the cause of fan violence.

Someone can’t be sure that why and when this violence will happen.  The fan violence can be happen at any moment when the followers or fans of some specific group it might be politics, sports, country and person etc. think that something is gone wrong or there is some problem to their following. So there are no specific rules of fan violence to happen. There are some more factors like emotionality, interest; professionalization and internalization which effect the match environment can lead to the fan violence. For example on 11 October 1977, in a match between Glasgow Rangers and Aston Villa, there was a meaningful and friendly match but after 53 minutes it was observed that the supporters of the Rangers reached to the pitch by breaching the security line because the Aston villa got lead in this match by 2-0.  It got started fighting in the mid pitch between the fans of both teams and referee Derek civil called both the team off and police came in to the pitch with the dogs to investigate the issue and to ask for peace between the fans. Lots of people got injured in this fan violence between the both team fans and ambulance was called for the health delivery and care of the wounded fans.  In this fan violence there were almost 99 people who got arrest and more than 20 were injured.  So this is just an example how fan violence happens.

Now the question comes out to the mind is that this fan violence is a social problem or a moral panic. The answer is bit typical as the fans belong to society as well as they create moral panic too, so what is the exact problem then. But still the answer can be given through some analysis and research on the fan violence and its causes and effects in society.  On one side it can be said that fan violence is a social problem because it happens due to the society as there are number of societies who belong to some team or have interest to a particular team.  Fan violence also can be understand as the moral panic too, because some people unnecessarily create moral panic due to communications, bad behaviour and after drinking, abuse. But in the world the main violence is due to the sports and related activities not from others. The sports fan violence gets more attention and issues in respect to the others. The media also helps to describe or spread the sports violence than others. In year 2001, a National News paper Beaton mentioned that displays of disaffection by fans alarm baseball.  This news paper describes that fan violence may increase if the baseball team didn’t performed well in the match. This is for a national where fans belong to the specific national baseball team.  In a article, it was described that the fans of Minnesota Twins caused problem for a other Yankee player in New York. The fans of Yankee threw coins, plastic beer bottles, hot dogs and golf balls because the player disappointed to the fans in game. On the same the reaction was from the head of the Baseball league that there should be any displeasure because the player did well and this is not a situation of the disappointment. The head mentioned that he had been in the same baseball world series and it cannot be said as the bad performance.

So this can be observe from the above statement that fans do not like the bad performance or if some player does against their expectation, and finally causes the problems to the player, authority of the sports, fans and societies. This means that the societies are also affected by this fan violence. Some people in the societies have lots of faith to the particular group or team or individual, if their expectations or interest goes down fan violence in the societies happens.  Fans who attend athletic events appear boisterous and animated, but seldom engage in physical confrontation with others. In countries with a more notable history of fan violence (e.g., Britain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium), fan violence occurs in about 10% of soccer matches.

For example, on July 4, 1996 the thousands of Chicago fans gathered at OK Corral and started shouted and threatened to the players and their fellow spectators and the fans fired bullets too on the players and their followers. This happened because Cubs scored against the Phillies because the fans didn’t like the score of Cubes on other team. The visiting Cubs team in this situation lost both games at Chicago in West Side Grounds.  Thus it can be said that fan violence is in cases, social problem as well as moral panic as it hurts in both ways.  Fan violence is a critical issue and cannot be controlled easily as there is no source of the fan violence and there is no fixed rule of the fan violence, it may happen any time anywhere, no one knows.