Sports fans across borders: America from Mars, Europe from Venus.

Markovits, Andrei S.

There is ample evidence that sports have performed an enlightening function in human history--that precisely by dint of their inherently competitive and agonistic nature, they foster a profound meritocracy and cosmopolitanism that few other venues in social life have. By virtue of these integrative qualities, sports enhance intercultural tolerance and understanding. However, just like in most realms of human activity, so too in sports do cosmopolitanism and inclusiveness meet with resistance by forces that the philosopher and cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah has so aptly termed "counter-cosmopolitanism." Newcomers, immigrants, and "alien" languages and cultures are met with ridicule, hostility, and even violent reactions by entrenched forces and institutions. Since cultural changes inevitably imply some threat to established identities, such changes exact tensions and defensive responses. This is evident in sports since adversity, opposition, contest, and thus conflict are their most essential markers. By their very nature in demanding winners and losers, sports feature a zero-sum essence that extols tensions, rewards the victors, and punishes the vanquished.

Counter-cosmopolitanism's ugliest expression is resilient racism and random violence against "others." However, the quantity and quality of such counter-cosmopolitan activities varies over time and space.

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This article argues that at least over the past tour to five decades, there has existed perhaps no greater difference between US and European hegemonic sports culture (i.e. sports that attract a mass following well beyond its actual producers and most immediate fans) than in the expression of counter-cosmopolitanism. Briefly put, while racism, xenophobia, and--above all--regularized fan violence, often on a massive scale, have accompanied and marred European soccer for decades, few, if any, similar occurrences have accompanied the most popular US spectator sports. This fact constitutes an interesting puzzle precisely because US society, by virtually any available measure, is much more violent than its European counterpart.

Contrasts between Fan Cultures

To be sure, US sports featured many "European" traits in their history. They were bastions of the most ugly racism and counter-cosmopolitanism both among players and spectators prior to their gradual incorporation of African Americans and Latinos from the late 1940s to the 1960s. But by reaching a critical mass in the quantity--and more importantly, the quality--of players of the "Big Three" American spectator sports of baseball, football, and basketball during these decades, and by the civil rights movement's gains and the general discourse of empathy that changed what constitutes acceptable language and behavior toward the disempowered in general and racial minorities in particular, overtly racist taunts accompanied by violent acts against players and viewers in the United States' major sports venues have all but disappeared and lack any kind of legitimacy in contemporary sports.

This, alas, is not the case in Europe's most popular sport, that of Association Football, better known in the United States by the term "soccer," a mid-nineteenth century English student slang abbreviation of the cumbersome "Association." Starting in the early 1970s in the United Kingdom and spreading across the continent during the last four decades--precisely when racism and counter-cosmopolitanism became taboo in US sports venues--soccer grounds (and almost exclusively those in contrast to other sports venues featuring rugby, cricket, basketball, or any other team sport) have become the last bastion in contemporary Europe in which the worst kind of racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic--i.e. counter-cosmopolitan--language and behavior have not only been tolerated, but actually extolled. But it is not the activities of a committed counter-cosmopolitan minority in European venues that differentiates the European case from its US counterpart; rather, it is what the majority on each continent tolerates as acceptable discourse and behavior. And here the contemporary gulf between the two continents is massive.

In contrast to Europe, violence is a very marginal occurrence in present-day US sports culture, and open racism is practically taboo and socially sanctioned in the stands and among players. While discrimination and racism undoubtedly remain major issues in US sports and society, overt racism has for all intents and purposes been banned from contemporary US sports. In fact, any of the racist remarks and gestures that remain commonplace in many European stadiums (even where fan violence has been contained, if not eliminated over the last few years, as in the United Kingdom), have virtually disappeared from all major league and college-level sports venues in the United States. Moreover, the rare cases of US fan violence have had a different substance and tone from their counterparts in Europe, where violence among football supporters often has a well-designed and premeditated characteristic, most certainly among the various teams' most hard-core followers and fans. Thus, violence at US sports venues rarely constitutes a premeditated, organized activity, implemented by a small group of well-trained street fighters whose primary perhaps sole, purpose is to engage in fights and cause havoc rather than watch the game. But the greatest difference between the US and European stadium culture rests not so much in the sporadic and uncharacteristic violence of the former and the premeditated and routine violence of the latter, but in the fact that overt racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic language have become taboo in US venues and among US fans, whereas it remains well tolerated, even extolled, among European soccer spectators. It is this fact, more than the actual violence, which renders the misbehavior by a minority on both continents acceptable in Europe and unacceptable in North America.

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Violence in US Sports

Social scientists Philip Good-hart and Christopher Chataway observed that in the United States, "so often characterized as a land bubbling with violence, sporting hooliganism, apart from racial disturbances, seems to be largely unknown." By far the most prevalent forms of violence in connection with any sports in the United States belong to the category best described as "celebratory violence" or "celebratory riots." Typically, this involves unruly, and often inebriated, fans celebrating their team's victory by rioting in the streets, burning cars, igniting garbage cans, and fighting the police. Interestingly, it is exclusively fans of the winning teams that engage in such behavior, never those of the losing teams-- such cases include fans' behavior following the Tigers' World Series triumph in Detroit in October 1984, the hometown Red Sox's triumph over the New York Yankees in the World Series in October 2004, and Ohio State's victory over archrival Michigan in November 2002 in Columbus, after which Ohio State fans stormed the field.

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In each of these cases, the victories released pent-up frustration by the winners' fans. The Boston Red Sox had not only won their series in a manner never achieved by any sports team in the history of major league baseball, professional football, and basketball (down three games to none in a best-of-seven series and winning it by triumphing in four must-win games in a row), but they did so against the very team that was their relentless tormentor and nemesis since 1918, the last time the Red Sox had won the World Series. Ohio State had been dominated by Michigan throughout much of the 1990s, and the Buckeyes had just concluded an entire "Beat Michigan week" on campus that preceded the game and catapulted students into a frenzy. But even in these instances, one needs to differentiate between the "celebratory riots" that occurred immediately following these victories, largely in and around the venues themselves, and subsequent physical assaults and lootings that were only tangentially connected to the sports events.

"Celebratory violence" at US venues occurs spontaneously and in an improvised, ad-hoc fashion. Above all, these riots are not directed against the fans of the opposing teams, as much as they are random acts of destruction against whatever constitutes their immediate surroundings. In perhaps the greatest contrast to its European counterparts, these US instances of fan violence have not been accompanied by racial hatred, overt racism, or anti-Semitism. Jeering the New York Yankees and deriding the Michigan Wolverines with vulgar language might not be pretty, but it constitutes a different category than spewing hatred and venom against Jews, blacks, and other nonwhite minorities as has remained commonplace in Europe's stadiums since the 1970s. Jerry M. Lewis, expert on fan violence in North American sports, argues that for North America, and particularly the United States, the data on fan violence at the collegiate and professional levels of competition indicate that the typical rioter is an inebriated, young, white male celebrating a victory after a championship or an important game or match.

It is noteworthy that European-style, spectator-led violence never emerged at US sport venues and events. Why has this been the case? Why has fan violence largely been absent from US team sports, when by any measure the United States suffers from a much higher level of violence in virtually every other aspect of its society than do most countries in Europe?

Geographic Explanations

The United States is a country of continental proportions. Massive distances inhibit travel to accompany one's team for an away game. In addition, there is less of a tradition in following one's team across the country for a regular season or even a play-off game than in Europe. Only year-end bowl games in college football, traditionally played on neutral sites, and the March Madness tournament in men's college basketball (also played in neutral arenas strewn across the land) witness US sports fans traveling in large numbers to follow their teams. Rivalry games (or derbies, to use British parlance) constitute exceptions to the US norm. Indeed, these emotionally charged encounters sometimes create fan violence before and after the games in bars and streets near the stadiums, occasionally even during the games themselves, particularly in the bleacher seats. These altercations are invariably quelled quickly by surrounding spectators and authorities. With the exception of the rivalry games, however, US sports venues feature few visible "enemies" or outsiders. This drastically reduces the chance of clashes between large groups of opposing fans. By contrast, European soccer matches are more local affairs, and there is a tradition of clubs traveling with a large coterie of fans even to distant games. Geographic proximity in team sports breeds rivalries, which in turn foster contempt and hatred that then increase the likelihood of violence.

Many European cities have traditionally featured a bevy of clubs in close proximity, which intensifies rivalry and mutual hatred: Vienna once furnished ten soccer clubs in Austria's top-level league of 12 teams well into the 1960s and continues to have three or four to this day; Budapest has had six; Bucharest, Istanbul, and Moscow each have four; London still boasts five clubs in the English Premier League's 2010-11 season; and many cities have at least two. Because US sports teams began as businesses with their owners explicitly disallowing the establishment of any rivals in their territory, no cities other than New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have more than one team per sport. In those rare cases where cities have multiple teams per sport, they originated in different leagues (as in baseball) and came to lead parallel though rarely overlapping existences. Or, they arose at vastly disparate time periods (as in basketball and hockey), which also mitigated rivalries. Still, the intense mutual dislike on the part of Giants and Dodgers fans in baseball, as Sadly witnessed by the senseless and brutal maiming of a Giants fan by Dodgers fans in the parking lot of Dodgers Stadium in Chavez Ravine following the season opener between these two bitter rivals in April 2011, hails precisely from their proximate histories in New York City, where they played each other repeatedly in the very same league. The bad blood between New York Rangers fans and their counterpart supporters of the New York Islanders and the New Jersey Devils in ice hockey also attests to the ubiquitous phenomenon in all competitive team sports that proximity breeds competition and hatred, not respect and harmony. Distance may not foster affection, but it most certainly decreases the acerbity of conflict. And the larger distances of US spaces--sports and geography--contribute to a less-violent atmosphere in American sports compared to their European counterparts.

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In contrast to European clubs, many of which to this day sport strong political identities, sports teams in the United States--tellingly called franchises--possess virtually none of this. In Europe, clubs have often been close to political parties or movements, which in turn reflect often bitter social, economic, religious, ethnic, and linguistic cleavages. Thus, any contest, even a football match, between a team representing one subculture confronting its rival identified with another, becomes a de facto showdown between these two antagonistic "pillars."

Crucially, US sports have virtually no national dimension to them. There are no national baseball, basketball, football, and hockey teams that represent the country on a regular basis in contests with neighboring countries. Americans are not familiar with the emotionally charged identification with a national team commensurate to what the Brazilians experience for their "selecao," Germans for their "nationalmannschaft," Italians for their "squaddra azzurra" or Argentinians for their "albiceleste." Of course, there are "Team USAs" participating in quadrennial global competitions such as world championships and the Olympics, but these are far away, few in number, and have virtually no relevance for Americans' emotional investment in their sports and teams. US sports and the accompanying emotions are completely inner-directed and insular, in that they exist in an inter-city and intra-country environment in which international dimensions are secondary at best.

Furthermore, in contrast to the emotional investment in soccer's dominant monoculture in Europe, the multiplicity of US hegemonic sports culture tends to spread a fan's emotional involvement over three, possibly four, teams, thus easing the pain and frustration accompanying a lost game or an entire season. If, as a New Englander, one is (very likely) a passionate Red Sox fan, and a season goes badly, there are always the New England Patriots, the Celtics, and the Bruins to hope for. The same pertains to other US cities and regions in which a multiplicity of teams representing the "big four" sports share the fans' emotional capital, thereby lowering passions and fanaticism. This is less the case in sparsely populated areas with no major professional teams, where a single college or even high-school team assumes a fan base of quasi-European proportions. Indeed, being a Cornhusker fan in Nebraska is more similar in its intensity and commitment to being a European soccer club's supporter than that of a US professional team.

While sports as a whole are much more popular and prevalent in US than European culture, the distinct history of soccer's club and national team cultures in Europe have, as a rule, created deeper ties and long-term local attachments by communities with "their" clubs than exists between US franchises and their fans. For one thing, US professional sports teams have regularly moved from location to location, even from league to league--unthinkable in the European context.

Class and Diversity

Professional leagues, club authorities, and owners in US sports have increasingly assumed major responsibility in violence prevention and commonly play an active role in an effective, spectator-friendly security system that comprises programs to eliminate hostility among fans--in contrast to their counterparts in European soccer, at least until recently. The constant modernization of the venues in the United States, a priori in better condition than their European counterparts, and the reshaping of the sports themselves that renders a stadium visit a more congenial experience to the general public, coincides with the search for new solutions to minimize fan violence in the United States. With excessive alcohol consumption posing the biggest problem in terms of fan violence and unruliness, many arenas have come to stop the sale of beer either in its entirety or after a certain period in the game, such as the seventh inning in baseball.

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If violence does occur among fans of the North American Big Four, it is not articulated in racist language and activities. This is not to say that racism has disappeared from US sports, let alone among spectators, culture, and society--far from it. Rather, overt racist taunts have become unacceptable in the vernacular of US sports in the major leagues and on the college level. The reason for this lies in the effort that the nation has made, as Orlando Patterson wrote in a 2009 New York Review of Books article, in both sports and other realms of public life, in redressing its history of racism.

This is much less the case with "classism." Thus, in sports, various "classist" taunts continue unabated; nor have misogynist slurs disappeared, though they too have become rarer as the number of women as athletes, spectators, and viewers has consistently increased since the 1980s. Any offensive language, let alone action, directed toward a collective that is perceived to be disempowered and/or a minority--blacks, Latinos, or women--has been effectively banned from US sports at the top level, though less so on their lower rungs.

Racist songs, slogans, and banners, let alone Nazi salutes--that have become commonplace in Europe's football stadiums--are unthinkable in contemporary US sports. It is not only because the authorities would not allow such behavior and punish it promptly and severely; but, more importantly, because the fans would never countenance it. Such massive change in language and behavior in the contemporary United States--including its male-dominated sports culture--is one of the many success stories that the civilizing agents of the 1960s and early 1970s wrought to enhance inclusiveness and consequently augment the country's democratic cosmopolitanism.

Moreover, size matters. When there were very few black players on the sports fields and in the stands, racist language and behavior flourished. The same pertains to Latinos, when only a few of them plied their trade in baseball's major leagues in the 1950s and 1960s. But with the proliferation of both among the ranks of top-level players--to the point where African Americans comprise nearly 80 percent of all NBA players and close to 70 percent of the NFL's, and when Latinos exceed 30 percent of major league baseball players---racism fades into the background by necessity.

Lastly, in notable contrast to Europe, in which most countries until recently had few, if any, sizable nonwhite populations, it was US sports that played a vanguard role in the progress toward racial equality and color-blindness in the country. Beginning with Jackie Robinson integrating baseball in 1947 by joining the roster of the National League's Brooklyn Dodgers, the changes toward more inclusion and diversity in the US sports world regularly preceded and facilitated similarly inclusive changes in other cultural, social, and political spheres. Such inclusive reforms in sports were necessitated not by the enlightened and egalitarian inclination of its practitioners, but rather by the inherently meritocratic, competitive, result-oriented, and profit-seeking nature of major-league professional team sports, where winning wasn't everything but the only thing. The stardom of African Americans in the sports world surely helped expand the social acceptance of blacks in mainstream US society and culture and thus constituted at least a helpful stepping stone to Barack Obama's presidency.

Though racial discrimination in US sports has certainly not disappeared--the paucity of black team owners, front-office leadership, coaches, as well as managers corroborates this point--the environment for racism has become socially taboo. Black athletes, as well as some coaches and managers, have achieved so much that it is now much harder for the exclusionary counter-cosmopolitans, who have most certainly not disappeared from US society and sport, to spew their racist venom openly. Above all, their surroundings no longer countenance it. The remaining pernicious racial divide in the contemporary- United States pertains much more to our private than our public lives.

Just as in matters of diversity and racial integration in sports, so, too, has the United States been ahead of Europe in terms of the presence of women as spectators at major sporting events. With the presence of women hovering around 40 percent of spectatorship in US stadiums, and reaching 50 percent in college sports, the threat of violence has been substantially reduced. More important still, women and families constituting a significant percentage of spectators in US sports has raised the threshold of shame for exhibiting violent behavior and voicing racially offensive language in sports venues. The role of women as civilizing agents, as active carriers of cosmopolitan thought and behavior, of curtailing men from behaving badly, should not be underestimated as a major contributor to the reduction of violence at sports events.

There is one remaining fault line that neither the United States nor Europe has been able to reduce, let alone eliminate, from its respective hegemonic sports cultures: homophobia. Not only are homophobe taunts by spectators still acceptable on both sides of the Atlantic, more important still is the fact that virtually no active player of any stature in any of these sports has admitted to being gay.

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The Power of Sports

The comparative study of sports-related racism and violence confirms and reinforces the broader argument that hegemonic sports constitute an important force within popular culture and facilitate cosmopolitan change. Compared to other social spheres, hegemonic sports provide relatively easy access to (and for) immigrants and ethnic minorities in the global age. In the long run, ethnic minorities are able to enhance their visibility and gain respect and social recognition through sports in increasingly multiethnic postindustrial societies. Despite the continued threat by counter-cosmopolitans in societies in which immigrant sports heroes have acquired considerable standing over time, sports' merit-based cosmopolitanism has furthered progressive developments in culture, society, and politics.

ANDREI S. MARKOVITS is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the Unibook called Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture.