While admitting “the worst excesses have been driven out over the past 15 years”, the Guardian’s Rob Bagchi considers “the nostalgia some fans feel for those days when it (hooliganism) was rife”. “Read any of the hundreds of websites devoted to the subject and they are littered with affection for afternoons when the writers were ‘mob-handed’, getting ‘the buzz’, ‘having it toe-to-toe’ and ‘running’ the opposition,” observes Bagchi, a writer all-too aware such fight-blogs were predated by a mini-explosion of football violence paperbacks. During a prior tenure at the dearly departed Charing Cross bookshop Sportspages, Bagchi considered such tomes “hoolie porn”.
At first there weren’t enough titles to satisfy demand and several punters sought refuge in the dry sociological examinations of the phenomenon. But following the remarkable success of the prolific Brimson brothers in the mid-90s, virtually every publisher began to pimp “hoolie porn” to this vast market. At first the hooligan “firms” obeyed the omerta of any organised gang but, one by one, they went for the money and now no self-respecting firm, and it has always been about “respect” in their eyes, does not have a tome that glorifies their history.
One cynical sales rep used to hawk each new offering by saying “another one for the knuckle-draggers”, but the type of customer who commonly bought the books would have amazed him. Those in search of a regular fix of voyeuristic pleasure were pretty nondescript blokes in suits, far removed from the strutting peacocks in Stone Island knitwear he envisaged.
The most refreshing attitude would come from the Germans and Scandinavians who would wait for you to open the shop on Saturday mornings, having got a coach across Europe to come to a London match. They would seek no discretion, rolling through the door in eager anticipation, asking: “Do you have book about Bushwackers? Zulus? Gremlins?”
We often had to disappoint such specific requests but now they can get their kicks from an array of books, films and television programmes. The latter, a speciality of the actor Danny Dyer, who adopts the walk of a haemorrhoid-stricken orangutan, focus on the “proper naughty” reminiscences of veterans of the scene, often recounted with a rheumy-eyed glow.