Even by the standards of Argentina, where people like to joke that soccer is less a pastime than a pathology, a recent surge of fan violence has been exceptional.
In the past two weeks, local stadiums have erupted in mass fights -- some of them all-out brawls injuring dozens of fans -- an average of every other day.
Politicians are vowing reforms, and most fans and league officials are blaming the violence on organized hooligan groups known as barrabravas, which are increasingly labeled as out-of-control mafias eroding the integrity of the sport.
On Tuesday afternoon, as police fired rubber bullets into a crowd to separate warring fans in a Buenos Aires suburb, a congressional committee was grilling the president of River Plate, one of South America's most famous soccer clubs, about the violence that has resulted in the closure of its 65,000-seat stadium for five games.
Among the incidents in question was a gun-and-knife fight Feb. 11 among members of a River Plate hooligan gang that sent picnicking families fleeing the stadium.[...]
According to local security officials, the gangs -- which began in Argentina in the 1950s -- have begun exporting their methods. Javier Alberto Castrilli, an official with Argentina's Interior Ministry who is in charge of soccer security, said the barrabravas' influence has spread in the past five years across South America and into Mexico.
"Here in South America, in countries where five years ago you'd never be able to imagine that so much soccer-related violence could exist . . . organization among barrabravas has reached very highly developed levels," Castrilli, a former World Cup referee, said in an interview Tuesday. "Groups abroad are copying the chants, the songs and even the flags that got their start here in Argentina."
We are delighted to be absolved of the outrageous slander that we are anti-European.
6 comments:
Brit has a great film clip about soccer players and fans making us proud of our fellow anglospherites.
erp:
That clip was from a rugby match, not soccer. They have a very different fan base and I'm not sure the latter would engender the same pride.
monix, thanks for the heads up. I actually just took my cue from the players' uniforms. In any case, they did make us proud.
It is my understanding that after some rancorous behavior in the past now when we play a Canadian team in hockey or baseball, the players and fans are respectful and even join in on singing the respective national anthems.
Our nice clean American game of basketball seems to be going down the same drain as Argentine football.
Thuggishness is a disease that any urban population of underemployed males with too much time and too little supervision is prone to catching, it seems. Sports seems to be the catalyst mainly because it is such a male dominated activity.
In the old days universal conscription took care of this. Having a colonial outpost on the other side of the planet helped too.
erp:
It does say rugby in the first line of the post, but the clue should have been the size and bulk of the players. Soccer players need to be lean and agile. Rugby players need to be brick s***houses.
Also, in soccer, Ireland play as two teams: Northern Ireland and Eire. They only unite for rugby.
brit, please make allowances for my extreme age. The word, rugby went into my head and came out soccer.
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