After a football supporter hit completely against expectations, the interpretation carousel was working overtime again. You couldn’t lift a tile without fan violence being indicated underneath. This was unworthy of football, everyone agreed. One interpreter said it was a problem for Feyenoord. Still others blamed young people, or bad apples, or corona and, of course, the “sniffed guys”, which is unnecessarily hurtful to hard drug users. The sniffers I know of, when sniffed through, become paranoid and don’t leave their house at all.
“They are ruining it for the club!” said Willem van Hanegem, among many others, as if aggressive people in the stands have nothing to do with the clubs. If you asked the hooligan where he belongs, he would probably show you a limb-wide tattoo with a club name. I was already halfway through the next podcast when I noticed it was from 2019. The youths whom the interpreter on duty pointed out as guilty were now adults and new apples had gone bad for the rotten apples. There was even a general among the current interpreters who said that football should remain fun and that you should be able to go there with your children. There were interpreters who talked about incidents, as if fan violence is not a global tradition of war and weft. You could fill a bus with interpreters who said that England did tackle the problem. You could then immediately send them, with the children, to a risk match in the Premier League.
The KNVB announced to suspend matches with every frill that was thrown on the field. There must have been a field sweeper who thought: great, I’m free this weekend. He received a phone call: “Where are you?”
“At home”.
“This field doesn’t sweep itself, does it?”
“If something falls on it, the game is stopped. Was the game stopped? No, so.” As a thank you for not enforcing the brand-new rules, some teenagers were beaten up in Eindhoven.
Maybe men’s football should start embracing its fan violence. Accept that it belongs. Don’t pretend every time it’s ‘others’ or ‘not supporters’ or ‘supporters with quotes’. It is part of it that a stadium is swallowed up by fireworks smoke, that the playing city is shattered and even that players leave the field with injuries inflicted by fans. It is also part of the fact that politicians are becoming dismayed, that the web administrator of the KNVB has to upload another statement and that writers of articles have to write articles about supporter violence again.
Violence, homophobia and racism are the other side of the coin called men’s football. Supporter violence is an inseparable part of this football, just as a hangover is an inevitable part of alcohol consumption and animal suffering is part of it if you eat animals or take their mother’s milk and take away their babies. The alcoholic does not say at the next bar visit: the hangover is unworthy of my drinking. The animal eater does not think about the next snack: this animal suffering is unworthy of my taste pleasure. Similarly, men’s football and fan violence are two sides of the same coin and are therefore exactly worthy of each other.
Caroline Trujillo is a writer.