Football hooliganism as a transnational phenomenon: Past and present analysis: A critique – More specificity and less generality

Despite the ongoing globalization of football culture and societies at large, there remain important cross-national and cross-local variations in the level and forms of football hooliganism. These dissimilarities thwart efforts to conceptualize and explain football hooliganism as a homogeneous phenomenon and, more specifically, seriously limit the applicability of dominant sociological theories on the subject. The author illustrates his argument with an examination of international research literature and empirical data on the social composition of one Spanish and one Dutch hooligan group. He argues that comparative research into football hooliganism should move beyond general explanations in terms of societal fault lines and towards a more detailed analysis of hooligans' subcultural identities and social interactions.