6 - Beasts in the Stands: Fandom, Sport, and SF

Summary

At a football (soccer) match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in 1989 that has come to be known as the ‘Hillsborough Disaster,’ police ordered that a gate be opened to a fenced-in area of the stadium that was already full and fans from outside flooded in, crushing those already inside. In 2016, twenty-seven years after the event in question, an inquest finally found that the police were grossly negligent in the deaths of ninety-six fans. Across social media people poured out their support for what they saw as justice, and news sources followed suit, CNN calling the Disaster a ‘tragedy that transcended sport’ (Young). While the decision offered closure to many, it also effectively whitewashed the widespread initial reactions to the incident. The Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel reminds us that ‘On Monday 17 April [1989] while press coverage remained mixed, the assumed culpability of Liverpool fans was central to many reports’ (343). While there were some dissenting views (e.g. Simon Barnes writing in The Times that it was the fault of clubs ‘cramming’ in as many fans in as they could), the more popular line of reasoning was exemplified by the Evening Standard's Peter McKay, who suggested ‘the catastrophe was caused first and foremost by violent enthusiasm for soccer, in this case the tribal passions of Liverpool supporters,’ supporters who ‘literally killed themselves and others to be at the game.’ This victim blaming already borders on monster creation, suggesting the ‘tribal’ barbarity of the fans, but Jacques Georges, the president of the UEFA (Union of European Football Associations), said it even more clearly: ‘One had the impression that they [the fans] were beasts waiting to charge into the arena.’ According to these reports, the Disaster was the culmination of the violent nature of sport—the monstrous and beastly danger of the athlete—loosed upon the fans by the fans.

This is the charge so often repeated in sport criticism of hegemonic masculinity, a toxic masculinity that signals the violence and privilege of the athlete and encourages it in those who consume this violent spectacle. Fans have always been implicated in this monstrosity— as the last chapter showed, even early Christian apologists such as Tertullian exhorted against the vanity of those who would enjoy athletic competitions.