In Europe their soccer clubs have segments known as ‘ultras’ which are fanatical fans that sit in their own section and try to intimidate the players and fans of opposing teams. This is often interlocked with nationalism, violence, and racism with football hooliganism. Sort of like fascism in a microcosm within the soccer world.
Despite the US being a massive sports country, we don’t really have any equivalent. Why do you guys think that is?
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>This is often interlocked with nationalism, violence, and racism with football hooliganism.
This sort of behavior is unwelcome here.
That’s it. That’s the answer.
>nationalism, violence, and racism, hooliganism.
We would want these things because?
That’s not something you should be bragging about. Seems really strange to point out these things and try pulling them into some sort of positive light.
On another note going to see the Phillies play the Mets in Philadelphia I remember lots of fans heckling their players. Especially those who were warming up in the bullpen.
We don’t look favorably on being an asshole in public.
I have no clue.
In the USA sports are seen as a family activity, pro sports athletes are considered role models and have to adhere to code of conduct clause in their contracts.
school sports are considered a learning experience for the youth [leadership, time management, goal setting, team work, dealing with disappointment, physical health]
The better question is, why is “violence, and racism with football hooliganism” tolerated in Europe. That sounds terrible.
The way we do seating would be a big one- assigned seats and the lack of terraces mean there’s few places for hooligans to set up and get going. Even if they bought a block of tickets, they’d be seated with little charging space and identifiable by seat number. (Which would make a ban easier.)
We also don’t usually have home and away sections. (College football does have a “student section”, but that’s not the same thing.)
There are also fewer teams. Like, (and I’m only picking them because of personal experience) Millwall isn’t the only team in London for example. Most major league sports only have one affiliate per city. There simply wouldn’t be a lot of local rivalries, so different teams could attract “ultra” fans to fight eachother.
(Even in the rare case that we have, say, a Subway Series in MLB, there’s no reason to have one bar be for one team’s fans and another for the other, colors bans, etc)
Incidentally, the singing of the national anthem before a game was introduced in baseball specifically to offset groups of proto-hooligans in the 1800s. (The idea was to remind everyone present that they were all American, first.)
In the US we generally view intimidation, violence, and racism as bad things.
Do you want an honest answer? Because franchises make more money when they have a welcoming, family-friendly atmosphere. Look at the valuation of US teams versus European soccer clubs.
The answer is always money.
We have the first part of your paragraph in college sports called student sections. After that what you’re talking about is highly frowned upon
NFL clubs are culturally very differently from our European football clubs (soccer). It’s not unusual for a team in the NFL to relocate to another city, which just wouldn’t happen in soccer because the clubs are interwoven with the fabric of their local community. Soccer was always a working class game and I don’t know if there is any real scientific evidence for it, but I think violence is less frowned upon among lower social classes. We also have far more teams whereas the NFL doesn’t even have a big team for every state (now that would probably not work out so well competition wise, but it’s just to illustrate that there a lot more soccer clubs per area). NFL seems like more of a middle class game to me and the ticket prices to a game are far more expensive than a game to my local club. Soccer has only really begun commercialisation around the 90s, I would say whereas NFL was way ahead of us. That probably helped clean up the sport in a way. So when Feyenoord, who play in Rotterdam, plays Ajax, who are from Amsterdam, it’s basically Rotterdam vs. Amsterdam and people will get really tribal and violent about that game. That’s just how I view it guess as a European. I have a season ticket for my club and I’m really glad we don’t have much of an ultra presence.
Because we have lots of different sports, so the assholes get diluted by the casuals and by the interconnected seasons.
Europe has one sport.
Honest answer: that kind of behavior among European fans isn’t actually about football. Football is just the competition that has been picked to stand in for a lot of class and national politics. Within countries, some of the biggest rivalries can be traced back more than a hundred years and have more to do with class clashes, local politics, or some random shit that happened in the late 1800s between two villages. Huge rivalries between countries should be obvious and are also nationalistic/political.
We don’t have nearly as much of that crap attached to sports in the US. For one, most of the regular matches of our big sports are between American teams (maybe Canadian for hockey). LA and Denver never went to war. New Orleans never invaded Atlanta (except maybe for Freaknik). For another, class issues aren’t played out in our sports on a grand level. It’s just not how we handle that stuff.
Also, side note, when it’s possible for anyone and everyone in a riot to be carrying a gun, hooligan violence is less popular.
The kind of racism and violence that’s normalized in European football doesn’t fly in the US in any public space, full stop.
But also, anybody who thinks sports in the US are just a unifier and don’t have rabid fans should probably watch some college football, because that’s where the real passion in American sports is.
College sports…
I do want to say that there are also many left-leaning ultras groups as well, and that while hooligans and ultras are often intertwined, sometimes hooligans are not associated with ultras and sometimes even target the ultras of their own club.
Hooligans are often tied to gangs and all the football match does is provide a set date for the gangs to meet.
Secondly, American cities don’t hate each other the same way European cities/countries hate each other. When LA plays San Francisco there is no real historical hatred there. “Boo you guys pay 4400 a month for an apartment instead of 3800 a month and have slightly more progressive than we do” isn’t really the same. The San Francisco Giants fanbase isn’t linked to criminal organisations that clash with criminal organisations linked to the Los Angeles Angels of Orange County Anaheim fanbase who treat the match as a battle by proxy.
Secondly, something about American live sports culture is just really tame. We don’t have ultras in Japan either, but a Japanese baseball game’s atmosphere and dedication have very different vibes from American ones. From my experience college football is about as good as it gets when it comes to atmosphere in USA. I went to uni in the States and have been to some college football games between USC and UCLA, and a Rose Bowl, and even then the crowd just seems to be really lacking in the level of engagement that I was used to when it comes to sports.
If I got that worked up about the Chicago Bears I never would have made it to middle age.
Well, we have more than one sport, which helps.
Some do. But whereas you Euros are so insane that you will burn down a football/soccer stadium just because you don’t like the black guy on the other team or because your star player got Red Carded, here in the states we just toss beer bottles and the occasional battery at Santa.
I don’t have a better answer than what others have already posted, but why would we want that here? It sounds like a bunch of assholes ruining the game for everyone else. Game day is supposed to be fun.
I’ve been attending Detroit Tigers baseball games with my family since I was very small. I’m hoping to take my own niece and nephew to a game soon. It’s a great family experience. It’s not uncommon to sit in the stands next to people in the opposing team’s gear. There might be some teasing and a bit of gloating from the winner’s fans, but that’s about it. A group of nationalistic hooligans would completely destroy the atmosphere, and I’m amazed that other clubs/stadiums allow it.
For a couple reasons
1 – We don’t put up with it
2 – our sports teams tend to be in large cities
3 – our cities have a lot of internal migration and are fairly spread out
4 – attending sporting events is very expensive in the US
5 – we have other outlets for that sort of thing
In short, European soccer is intrinsically linked to regional identity in a way that just doesn’t make sense in the US. For most pro sporting events, the average attendee is an older professional (often with their family) and probably didn’t grow up in the city where the game is taking place.
Bob the dentist from Ohio who moved to Raleigh for work really doesn’t care about the rivalry between Charlotte and Atlanta when he’s taking his kids to go see a pro football game. He just wants to have a fun Sunday with his kids.
Suzy the physical therapist from New Jersey who went to college down south and now lives in Savannah really doesn’t care about the rivalry between Clemson and Georgia Tech. Her and her friends from school are just up for the weekend as an informal reunion. They all have friends who went to both schools anyway.
For the odd game where the rivalry is still there, tickets are so expensive anyway that it really puts a damper on the shenanigans. You don’t spend $500 on a ticket just to go start a fight.
This isn’t to say that there’s never fights, but most of the people in attendance aren’t going to put up with it. Rivalry is fun in the proper context but at the end of the game people don’t want to put up with riots.
I think one of the reasons you don’t see this in the US revolves around proximity. We don’t have the same culture of home and away crowds, because its not as easy to get to a game as it is in most of the european counties where you see this behaviour. I don’t buy the holier than thou comments that Americans just aren’t assholes – we are. But, you can’t just pop over to the opposing stadium, get drunk, get in a fight, and be home in time for dinner.
Interesting enough, Japan, especially in Tokyo, has a great home and away environment that is extremely peaceful. Maybe you should ask them.
In America, we bottle up all such urges, and wait patiently until our team wins a championship. Then we unleash all that emotion in a celebration that trashes our city.
>This is often interlocked with nationalism, violence, and racism with football hooliganism. Sort of like fascism in a microcosm within the soccer world.
I do want to chime in and say that while the most infamous football ultras tend to be extreme right wingers, there is also a very big group of left wing/anti-fascist ultras. Usually the most vehement rival clubs tend to have their respective ultras with opposite political views.
In addition to what everyone else has said, guns are a major issue here.
The U.S. has to have a lower threshold for violence because far too many people have easy access to a firearm. Guns means that rivalries could too easily escalate into mass casualty events if more violent atmospheres were allowed in U.S. sports.
Keeping sporting events family friendly reduces the potential for deadly violence and incentivizes the leagues to remove fans that exhibit any violence, which in turn cements the leagues as being family friendly, which means that the leagues won’t tolerate violence, which … it’s a positive feedback loop, essentially.
Pro and Division 1 college football can be pretty brutal. Pitt vs WVU can be dangerous. Philadelphia Eagles home games can be dangerous to opposing fans.
You’ve obviously never been to Philadelphia.
Many of us are recent immigrants so we don’t have as long of a history AND we had segregated leagues instead. In the place of where we would have had this violent fanatical discrimination, we just had it in our society. I mean black people and many other immigrants were lynched and the Scapegoats of crimes. Why that never transpired into sports probably because almost all of the teams come from NY MA or Chicago and “Negro” leagues were completely seperate until the Negro and white leagues wre fully integrated. Players were discriminated against and unfairly paid. But, to your point, national teams never got districts or cities mad enough to be violent towards other cities. Maybe, maybe on the highschool level in the 50s but nowhere near what you’re talking about
We don’t have the violent hooligans
We save our entirely undeserved loyal fanaticism for politicians
American sports bring in a lot more money so there tends to be a lot of effort in sports to give it a squeaky clean image. It’s kinda hard to convince a family of 4 to go to a game if people are going to be fighting among the crowd. More money means more security to quickly kick out and ban fans that are being a nuisance. Lastly tickets to US sports have become pretty expensive, and has become more luxury for people w/ a lot of excess money. People w/ more to lose tend not to exhibit hooligan behavior in my opinion.
My guess is that we’re a relatively young country and we mostly play against other parts of the same country.
Whereas in Europe there’s hundreds of years of international rivalries and tensions that might spill over into sports fans’ attitudes towards other areas/countries” teams.
> This is often interlocked with nationalism, violence, and racism with football hooliganism.
I guess Americans interested in behaving like this turn to political fandom instead… looking at all the MAGA/Qanon types