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In the big yellow press newspapers in England, we can find a lot of articles about violent incidents at football matches caused by Hooligans. The headlines are written in bold letters and they are very dramatic such as "Murder on a soccer train" or something similar. There is often the question what the media has to do with the problem of football violence, but there are some facts and theories that are quite interesting. To find out more about this problem, we have to take a closer look on the history of the reporting and how the style has changed:
Press boxes were first installed at football matches in the 1890s, although the reporting has started much earlier. History also shows that incidents before the First World War were quite common, however the style of reporting was different than nowadays. This means that most reports had only a little comment on incidents and the main report was about the game and the results itself.
During the inter-war years, the style of reporting started to change, because newspapers gave more space to advertising and so the stories had to be more sensational, but the roots of today's style of reporting can be found in the mid 1950s, where the public had a big fear over rising juvenile crime and about youth violence in general.
The press needed such stories and the football field was the perfect place to find them.
By the mid-1960s, with the World Cup in England coming closer, the press wrote about how the hooligans could ruin the tournament. The World Cup passed without incident but the moral panic about hooligans continued to increase.
In the 1970s the media was calling out for a harder punishment of violent fans with headlines such as "Cage the Animals" or "Smash these thugs".
During the 1980´s the tragedy of the Heysel-Stadium led the press and the mass media to report heavily about every incident and still does today.
Patrick Murphy and his colleagues at Leicester make the theories about what the media has to do with hooliganism. They came to the conclusion that over coverage of a problem can have the effect of worsening it and they explain it like that: If the society gets to believe that a phenomenon (such as football violence) is threatening and growing, it can be led to panic about it. This often cries out for tougher punishments and measures of control. This creates a situation of confrontation, where more people than originally involved are drawn into it. This is what they call the "spiral effect" which exists since the 1960s.
Very often the predictive style of the newspapers with headlines such as "Scandal of Soccer ´s Savages-Warming up for the new season" give reason for the alert of fans. In 1967, a Chelsea fan that was arrested said in his defence that he had read in a local newspaper that the other supporters were going to cause trouble. Also a lot of supporters think that if they read in the newspaper that there would be extra police, it makes the coming match more interesting. Journalists are also claimed that they pay football supporters to pose for photographs in their articles.
Furthermore, the press have played a role in decisions over policy making to deal with the problem of hooliganism, with very short-sighted measures. These measures have shifted the violence from the terraces onto the streets and towns outside the football grounds.
It also influences directly the view of the fan itself, if there is something reported about the violence, because some see it as an honour to be in the newspaper and some clubs start competitions, which one is the most notorious.
Another aspect where we can see that the media affects and influences the fans is the situation in Denmark or in Scotland where the popular press were a support to the Danish Roligans and the fantastic reputation that they had achieved in the international press. While the Danish press supported positive trend, fantasy humour and pride, the English press helped to intensify violence among English supporters by focusing on violent incidents and the shame they felt for their land.
In Austria the hooligans lost the coverage of the press and the number of incidents decreased.
I think that these aspects are very interesting to consider as also a part of the hooligan problem, because the media has a big influence on the peoples mind and behaviour.
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