by Bill Buford

Reviewed by Andrew Sutherland

Among the Thugs starts somewhat ominously in England with a train full of football supporters (soccer fans) drinking and destroying and wreaking havoc on anything in the way. The author, Bill Buford, is standing at a train station waiting for his train. When it comes in, it is filled with a mob of supporters trashing their surroundings, and he is appalled and amazed, being a foreigner from America, that these people are being so violent, and it gets him interested.

The author's curiosity about crowds and violence takes him to Manchester, England. He has heard that Manchester's football team is supported by notoriously violent and unruly fans, and he wants to witness it for himself. When he gets there, he meets up with some of Manchester's fans and develops a sort of connection with them. He travels with them to many of their team's games and reports on the antics of the supporters. The Manchester team often travels to other countries, and its fans travel with it, creating riots in foreign cities.

The first trip the author made out of the country for football was to Turin, Italy, where he witnessed supporters "go off," a term for when a crowd goes violent and loses all sense of lawfulness. The supporters had no tickets to the game in Italy, but they were admitted anyway because the Italian police didn't want the supporters roaming the streets and destroying property because they couldn't watch the match. The supporters were then outnumbered: 70,000 Italians to 200 English, but they stood their ground. When the game ended, the thoroughly drunk supporters took to the streets and crushed and almost killed anything they saw, including innocent children. But what fascinated me was that this was a typical weekend out for adult English males, and that this violence was normal. For many of these people, this was what they lived for. They lived for the Saturday match with their favorite football team. The rest of the week was spent waiting for the next match.

Part of the book includes a somewhat weird and unrelated section on the National Front political party of England and neo-Nazi football supporters. These supporters are racist, and the author notes that whenever a black football player has the ball, the entire crowd together makes a deep groaning noise until the ball is passed. The book spins away from mob psychology and about neo-Nazis having moshing parties. This takes up a particularly long section before it gets back on track. The following chapter is about how supporters act while they are watching the football matches. Everyone is clumped into a ridiculously small space and squished against each other. When something unusual happens, such as a goal, this clump falls over on itself and jumps up and down, leaving plenty of opportunity for someone to get injured. But this is what everyone does every Saturday, and this is socially accepted.

The author then rejoins the Manchester supporters and joins their crowds, observing from the inside what it feels like to be part of a mob. He notices how easily the mood of a mob can be changed and how everyone loses their law-abiding conscience and does what everyone else does. He describes how supporters raid the cities their team is playing in and, after drinking an inordinate amount of alcohol, do some very unintelligent things. The mobs break windows, steal even more alcohol, beat up civilians, dent cars, and cuss out everyone they see.

Leaders of mobs are addressed next, and the author meets some of Manchester's leading hooligans, some of whom have gone so far as to kill someone while in their mob frenzy. He meets Sammy, a violent criminal who leads the mob in its various criminal activities. He was chosen by the mob as the leader and he directs where to go and when to attack...and they listen. Sammy could tell the mob to jump off a cliff and they would follow without question.

The author gets distracted again when he meets DJ, a rich photographer who gets put in jail for counterfeiting money. DJ is not really relevant to the story and I'm not sure why the author spent a good forty pages talking about him. But the book gets interesting again when it talks about small gangs of supporters who are extremely violent. It talks about a young male named John Johnstone who murdered someone with the help of six friends during a particularly violent night in which he and his gangs beat up about ten people. The author starts a subscription to a newspaper clipping service that clips out articles on mob violence, and the media attention amazes him. He gets hundreds of clippings per month, and it starts to sicken him. The author starts to lose interest in researching the subject of crowd violence.

For a while, he feels saturated by the amount of information about crowd violence, and doesn't want anything to do with it. But then the 1990 World Cup comes around and so does the colossal media coverage of the crowds that showed up to support their teams. Seven thousand police showed up to control the crowds of about 4,000 hard-core English supporters who were likely to cause trouble at the games. Alcohol was banned from being sold the day of the game, but that didn't stop the four thousand English supporters who got bashed up by the police after going on a rampage. This rampage consisted of running through Italian streets and breaking windows, stealing food, and beating up police. Determined to distance himself from the rest of horde, the author foolishly runs ahead of everyone and is caught at the top of a hill by a huge battalion of police that think he is the leader of the mob and is severely beaten and shown no mercy. And with that, the author concludes his research and decides that he is done putting himself in harms way.

This book was excellent for me because it focused on my topic and it answered a lot of the questions I had about the behavior of violent mobs. Everything was very vividly described and detailed, giving me a sense of being there with the mob. My cousin who visited and happened to know about this book recommended it to me, and I couldn't have been luckier. I definitely would recommend it even if you didnít think you were interested in crowd violence.