The Rise of Hooliganism in Sport Events

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Sport - Sport Economics, Sport Management, grade: 2,7, Sport Academy Cologne (Sportmanagement), course: Sport Event Management, language: English, abstract: Hooliganism is growing alarmingly at sport events, especially during football matches. This phenomenon has its roots in medieval times. Different peoples waged fights against each other when a kind of ball was in the near trying to show power. Later it is distinguished between disorder and disaster describing kinds of incidents during games. As a result, additional costs for the population and sport clubs are generated and sustainably affect public expenditures.

The population is exposed to the danger of destruction, violence and aggression before, during and after the games. Internalising these negative effects, more means of the tax payer are used to pay policemen operating hours. Regarding the German football seasons of the first and second league in 2007/2008 and 2011/2012 there has been an increase of 32 % in terms of working hours. Furthermore sport clubs recruit stewards having other rights than policemen. These employees are allowed to stick to the stadium¿s house rules and may throw people out although they have not broken the law. More and more stadiums tend to install new, high developed cameras, namely CCTV, to monitor the spectators.

Socalled smart cards help to identify people very fast and the sport clubs know who enters the stadium. Without incorporating and implementing an adequate strategy, state and sport clubs hardly succeed in weakening or controlling hooliganism.