Mediated Thugs: Re-reading Stuart Hall’s Work on Football Hooliganism

Amidst the countless and seminal contributions by Stuart Hall to discourses around race, representation, politics and identity, it is easy to overlook the equally countless essays about ‘minor’ fields in which he covered a broad range of related topics. One of these texts is an article about football hooliganism from 1978, entitled “The Treatment of ‘Football Hooliganism’ in the Press” from a volume edited by Hall and his colleagues Roger Ingham, John Clarke, Peter Marsh and Jim Donovan. The collection of essays is based on a conference held that previous year at the University of Southampton about football fans and violence, a topic that had become a major concern in the British public and that in consequence became a mainstay for research in the field of sociology. As this is Hall’s only text dealing with violence around football, the essay fills only a minor niche in his oeuvre. Within the field of hooligan studies, however, his contribution to the discipline is still seen as an important addition