Sports Hooliganism Comes Down to a Fear of Death - Issue 39: Sport
▻http://nautil.us/issue/39/sport/sports-hooliganism-comes-down-to-a-fear-of-death
The soccer match hadn’t even started when the cops showed up. On the streets of Marseille, France, the officers—helmeted, shields in hands, batons on belts—charged through a crowd to break up a thicket of English and Russian fans who were hurling bottles, threats, and insults at each other. Some fans were bare-chested, caked with dried blood, screaming at the top of their lungs. Others clutched plastic cups of beer while trying to avoid the clouds of tear gas. The scene broke up when a knot of fans left for the hospital to have injuries treated, or in handcuffs with a cop at their side. The brawl happened in June at the beginning of the Euro 2016 soccer tournament. But the annals of extreme fan behavior are Biblical in scope. Fans in Constantinople in A.D. 532 spent a week violently (...)