Among the Thugs

Many of you footie fans have long heard or have already read Bill Buford's Among the Thugs, a journalistic look at the hooligan culture of football fans in the eighties. While some of these characters and methods seem foreign to soccer fans today, especially us Yanks, this book details the phenomena surrounding why young English males lived for violence filled Saturdays.

Buford can be extremely compelling in describing his personal experience infiltrating and becoming one of the "thugs" that make up the primal and surprisingly "normal" group of young males that make up the firms surrounding their teams. From following along with Manchester United fans to Turin, to experiencing the basest elements of crowd behavior at a Cambridge United match, Buford not only paints convincing images of the culture, but also uses himself as a guinea pig in pinpointing the appeal of normally anti-social behavior, sometimes bordering on the bacchanial.

Buford, a Yank who grew up in California and attended UC Berkeley and the University of Cambridge, found himself in an interesting time to be in Britain, before the Cool Brittania of Brit-pop and the prawn sandwiches and luxury boxes of the modern Premiership. Along with founding a revived version of Granta, the journalist also served as fiction editor to The New Yorker and continues to contribute to the weekly.

Give this book a try, and be shocked and disgusted, as you try to understand the forces that cause civilized men to behave like animals.

George Jochnowitz review

Blinkered America is already among the thugs [Guardian Unlimited]

-bl