A thug in any language

DURING the past week, I have heard the word for "hooligan" in French, Spanish and Italian; and, quite conveniently, it translates as "hooligan" in each.

There are other approximations, pointed out a French journalist, but none is quite as resonant. "It sounds better in English," he told me.

"Like 'football', 'hooligan' is something you gave to the world." The lesson arrived as I found myself caught up in a hooligan media jamboree. For my sins, I had inadvertently become a pan-European Hooligan Correspondent after filing a post-Marseille piece for The Guardian from the soccer thugs' inner sanctum. My article brought calls from radio stations, newspapers and TV companies from across the Continent. Suddenly I became the centre of a curious piece of sociological research: I discovered that, though every country in Europe knows all about the English Hooligan, every country is fascinated for a different reason. Irish journalists were particularly interested in our thugs' choice of drink. During an interview with Today FM, a Dublin-based radio station, I got a chance to tell my Guinness anecdote. Once, in the company of a bunch of hooligans, I made the mistake of ordering a pint of the Irish stout. "What's that?" snarled one, before advising me to "drink lager when you're with the boys. You don't want us to think you're a Papist, do you?" The researcher at French national radio, concerned at the spread of far-Right ideology at English football stadiums, did not, I fear, appreciate my observation that the English even those of a hooligan stripe - tend not actually to vote for fascists. (Unlike, say, the good folk of Marseille.) The nice man from Radio Barcelona wanted to know what the thugs' mothers thought of their boys' behaviour. To be fair, the majority of interviewers did distinguish clearly between the "brainless, senseless sacks of beer" ( the French daily paper, Libration) and the rest of us. But they still don't quite understand where we put our bowler hats before we go on the rampage.

Copyright 1998
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