Bill Buford

Among the Thugs stands next The Hell's Angels as an unflinching look at a violent male subculture, in this case the classic English football hooligan of the 1980s. Buford was an American living in England. What he depicts as an idle curiosity about a strange feature of English culture, much sensationalized by the press, became a multiyear sociological study.

It is an undeniable fact that by all conventional measures, attending a football game in England is a terrible way to spend a Saturday show more afternoon. Bad weather, hours walking and standing on cement terraces, and being crushed in narrow passageways and too-small cages by a drunk, chanting, mass of the lads. There's also a chance of random violence at the hands of supporters of the other team, of the police, or the crowd itself. And then there's the minor problems of no parking, poor transit, and sanitary facilities consisting of 'pee on the people lower than you'. But somehow, thousands if not millions of English headed out to the grounds every Saturday. Football gives the week meaning. In a series of short narrative essays about his experiences across England and the continent, with all sorts of fringe members of "the Firm", Buford explores what that meaning is.

Buford's first topic is the crowd itself, human individuality compressed into the herd, submerged in the crush, the chanting, the mass of movements. The crowd is the the base of everything else in football, an animal energy that is the true draw, not the action on the pitch. Crowds are fickle things, always an outsider to the body politic. The crowd demands a leader, but one cannot just declare themselves the leader of the crowd, you must be chosen.

The second theme is violence. The crowd is a means to an end, and "when it goes off", as signaled by someone throwing a trash bin through a window, the crowd becomes animated in mass violence, from throwing stones at riot police, to mass property destruction and semi-random knifings. If being part of a crowd is transforming, being part of a violent mob is ecstatic: Buford describes feeling like he could fly, the electric thrill of chasing and being chased, and he was a journalist maintaining his distance from the event.

The third theme is racism. The lads are proud to be English, happy to tell you they don't much care for non-white people or foreigners, and delighted to go to another country and be as beastly as possible to the inhabitants. Buford attends a National Front white power disco, a profoundly weird homoerotic punk-rock rave, of shirtless skinheads men jumping up and down in a mass and rubbing each other's heads while their girlfriends look on. While the football firms are gleefully racist, and white power foot soldiers football fanatics, there's not a true alliance between the two, because the mid-80s leadership of the National Front are a bunch of dweebs afraid of the raw physicality of the crowd.

And of course there's the minor stuff, life "on the jib" to get as much stolen beer and illegal rides out of football as possible. After all, who can compel payment from a crowd? There's the ambiguous relationship between hooligans, the press, and law enforcement. There's the Hillsborough disaster, and crowd control reform. There's the international hustling of 'DJ', a counterfeiter and aspiring photographer from a privileged background.

But ultimately, this book is about The Lads and their mythos. Buford observes that in England, it is just not done for members of the literati to talk about the working class, and so no one will admit that the true "English working class" has vanished. I quote in full.

"It is still possible, I suppose, to belong to a phrase-the working class—a piece of language that serves to reinforce certain social customs and a way of talking and that obscures the fact that the only thing hiding behind it is a highly mannered suburban society stripped of culture and sophistication and living only for its affectations: a bloated code of maleness, an exaggerated, embarrassing patriotism, a violent nationalism, an array of bankrupt antisocial habits. This bored, empty, decadent generation consists of nothing more than what it appears to be. It is a lad culture without mystery, so deadened that it uses violence to wake itself up. It pricks itself so that it has feeling, burns its flesh so that it has smell."

Yeah. You feel that?

Go Manchester United! show less

5/5

Stupidly violent and undeniably engaging.
Among the Thugs is a memoir drawn from three to four years of Bill Buford’s life, during which he embedded himself within a community of Manchester United supporters to better understand the epidemic of football-related violence that gripped the UK in the 1980s.

Much of the book zeroes in on a handful of matches and meet-ups Buford attended, often those that turned violent or 'went off' as the lads commonly describe it. This structure sometimes show more makes Among the Thugs feel more like a collection of long-form articles than a cohesive, unified narrative. That said, Buford’s writing is consistently sharp: sarcastic, dryly humorous, and often entertaining. At times, though, he strays from observer to moral commentator, which occasionally left a bad taste in my mouth. Sometimes it’s justified; other times it feels needlessly judgmental. Still, there’s no denying Buford’s talent. His prose is varied, creative, and immersive. Several passages hit especially hard and have lodged themselves into my brain. I often felt hard pressed to put it down.

From a sociological or theoretical standpoint, Buford offers limited commentary. There’s virtually no discussion of class at all. However, he puts forward a few key arguments. First, he pushes back against theorists who treat crowds as alien or “other”—as something twisted and separate from the rest of society. Buford insists that the capacity for crowd behavior and violence lies within all of us. Second, he argues that hooliganism wasn’t necessarily rooted in economic despair or cultural decay. Instead, he sees it as a substitute for the vices other generations embraced: gambling, drugs, partying, etc. Through personal anecdotes, Buford compellingly conveys the adrenaline rush of crowd violence, the focus, the euphoria, the liberation of shedding individual identity. Given that, is it really surprising so many young men were drawn to it?

He also refutes the idea that violence in these crowds was typically incited by charismatic leaders. In his view, the decision to cross the line into chaos requires collective agreement. Accordingly, he rejects the theory that groups like the National Front orchestrated much of the violence. Rather, the NF simply latched onto whatever nationalism, patriotism, or xenophobia was already present among individuals.

Unfortunately, Among the Thugs ends on a bit of a whimper. Buford is transparent about his fatigue—he feels he’s learned all there is to learn—and that weariness bleeds into the final pages. I found myself wishing for a stronger theoretical conclusion. Still, the final act, in which Buford is brutally beaten by Italian police in Sardinia, feels oddly fitting, a mirror to United supporters doing the exact same thing to Italian youths at the beginning of the book. After hundreds of pages of building tension, it was an important release. Buford concludes with a sobering reflection: that it’s all so stupid. The sports culture, the thugs, the violence, the media, the police—it’s all an unfortunate mess.

What makes Buford’s conclusions feel earned, though, is the depth and duration of his immersion. It’s a fine line between a book like this and something like Nickel and Dimed, where it felt like the author play acted for a few months in low-paying service jobs and felt license to complain about a life that was not her own. Buford, on the other hand, spent years inside this culture. Watching, listening, participating, and frequently putting himself in danger. While I can’t fully explain why, I trust him. His reflections might not be exhaustive and I may not necessarily agree with him in every aspect, but they feel honest and grounded in experience rather than performance.

This might be the most Ballardian piece of nonfiction I’ve ever read. Incredibly memorable. Despite some nitpicks, Among the Thugs genuinely sets itself apart from the crowd. show less

Dreary and dull, nearly the entire issue is devoted to Germany's problems post unification. I think at the time, late 1992, the U.K. was watching with horror as Germany showed signs of rising nationalism and violence to foreigners, and appeared to be welcoming a neo-Nazi movement.
The few articles not focused on Germany--first-hand accounts of the Gulf War bombing of Baghdad and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia--are much more enlightening. Amazing the horrors humans inflict on each other.

A particularly strong issue of Granta buoyed by great historical essays, historical fiction, reporting, and a long, humanist story by Alan Gurganus. There's really only a couple of pieces that didn't engage me, along with this issue's recurring photography entry -- another in a long line of dreary photo essays of European villagers.

In a sort of synchronicity, the celebrated war reporter Martha Gellhorn writes of her experiences in Panama in the months after Operation Just Cause, an American show more invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of that nation in late 1989. The "just cause" was to remove the military dictator Noriega, but it was primarily to stabilize American interests in the highly strategic Panama Canal region. One can't help seeing parallels to the current Russian Invasion of Ukraine. I'm not saying Putin is justified in his invasion, just saying that similar actions have been taken by our own country and the determination of who are the "good guys" is usually defined by the winner. show less