To many people, the act of football hooliganism is seen as unruly and often law breaking behavior that needs to be handled in some way or another. In the past decades, football clubs and organizations have been putting efforts in on the prevention of football hooliganism. These preventative practices these organizations implement, reveal that successful prevention depends on the efforts of a variety of institutions and agents. They also highlight the importance of continuous, locally grounded commitment to the prevention of football hooliganism.

Police are often criticized for their brutal type of enforcement whenever a hooliganism problem seems to arise in a soccer match. Riots often caused by two rival football firms are usually ended by the violence from another group, the police. Police take a reactive form of policing that combat the hooliganism only once it arises as a problem, but in the 1980’s a shift in policing tactics occurred. Instead of taking a reactive enforcement pattern, the police had developed a more proactive form of policing. By using intelligence gathered through the means of co-departmental cooperation between different countries, football hooliganism patterns can be studied and predicted. This proactive type of policing is still in a trial and error phase, but more and more riots are being prevented.

Other efforts made to prevent the hooliganism violence before and after a football match is the cooperation between local governments and football clubs, otherwise known as fan projects. Different countries have slight variations on how they dictate their fan projects, but the gist of a fan project is the improving of relations between the football hooligans and the football organization that they are supporting and the police. For example, German football attempts to prevent football hooliganism by improving the relations between fans, clubs and police. While in the Netherlands, fan projects aim to improve the relations between clubs and militant fan groups, and the social skills and career opportunities of convicted hooligans. Whether in Germany or in the Netherlands, organizations and governments are making more proactive efforts in lessening the violence caused by hooligans in different countries.

The heart of the problem of football hooliganism lies at the football club’s historical lack of interest in preventing or reducing football hooliganism. Football clubs often would give away free tickets and arrange travel for hooligans in order to further support the club. A good example of this behavior can be seen from the actions of FC Barcelona, a Spanish football club. FC Barcelona was known for their hooliganistic violence, and the organizations lack of reaction to the violence, but in 2003 things changed for the football club. Due to the election of a stringent new manager, Joan Laporta, he implemented a new zero tolerance policy to hooliganism violence. FC Barcelona now makes it a point to react to fans violence by working on club/fan relations and informing the hooligans that there will be a lifetime ban of games if any one is caught inciting violence during games.

The good practices highlighted in this blog indicate that the prevention of football hooliganism depends on the efforts of a variety of institutions and agents. If there is no relationship building and active enforcement in accordance to hooliganism violence there will be no improvement on the violence during games. The main goal for football clubs and police deportments is the lower the football violence and the only way to do so is the continuous responses to problems that arise.

References:

"Psychology and Crime News / Football hooliganism: comparing self-awareness and social identity theory explanations." Psychology and Crime News / A place to collate information of interest in a forensic psychological context. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Aug. 2010. .

http://www.cafyd.com/HistDeporte/htm/pdf/4-16.pdf