The Representation of National and International Football-Related Conflicts in the British Press: From Hooliganism to Terrorism

This chapter aims at analysing how the British press, in particular tabloids, have depicted football-related violence over a period of more than fifty years. Beginning with a description of the way the press portrayed some of the episodes of hooliganism in the twentieth century, the chapter discusses whether the approach of the press to footballrelated violence in the twenty-first century has actually changed in comparison to the previous one. The goal is to assess whether the changes which have affected the way football is generally portrayed by the media and experienced by the masses (which connect to broader and more profound transformations at global level), are mirrored in the representations conjured up by the British tabloids. In order to do so, after an initial section which analyses the way the press portrayed phenomena of hooliganism in the twentieth century as guerrilla and war-like situations, the chapter discusses the way the World Cup of 2018 was represented, focusing in particular on the conflicts that threatened the success of the tournament in its initial stages. This event appeared, in fact, particularly interesting, due to the threats made by the Islamic State (IS) to the tournament, which enabled the terroristic menace to find its way into the world of football too. As such, the more ‘domestic violence’ with which the press had to deal during the twentieth century assumes international and more dramatic overtones during the twenty-first. The final goal is thus to see whether the British tabloids adopted different strategies in their depiction of terrorists and hooligans or whether the latter are compared, if not equated, to the former. To this purpose, a corpus of newspaper headlines and articles dealing with the topic of football-related violence was selected. Some of these articles refer to the period often defined as the ‘Dark Ages’ of hooliganism, coinciding with the decades between the mid 1960s and the 1990s. Others, mainly analysed in the second part of the chapter, refer to the online versions of the same newspapers or other internet sources, which appeared on the web during the first eighteen years of the twenty-first century. Although the sources are usually tabloids or their online versions, quality papers are cited too, if only occasionally, mainly as a means to ascertain whether the way hooligans/terrorists are portrayed by the two different types of newspapers share similarities. Although the focus of the selected headlines is the violence which has often surrounded football, the corpus itself (as well as the chapter in its entirety), addresses two main issues: the way the British press has perceived, represented and, at least partially, constructed the violence perpetrated by British hooligans within the United Kingdom and abroad in the last few decades, and the violence Islamic terrorists threatened to perpetrate on the occasion of Russia 2018. This decision was made in order to facilitate a comparison between the approach of the British press to the local and the international conflictual scene; the past and the present; domestic and global violence.