Defining and controlling violent fandom in Europe: more than meets the eye

This article situates ‘football hooliganism’ in Europe within a historical and contemporary security knowledge continuum. It adds to recent academic debates on the issue by addressing how shortcomings regarding the academic and legal definition of ‘hooliganism’ and the phenomenon’s complex web of overlapping identities have enabled law enforcers’ dominant definitional power in counter-hooliganism policies. The latent consequences of this arguably speak to the politics of security knowledge and assigned ‘good practices’ which are hegemonically designated by the key definers of the phenomenon. These definitional shortcomings have paved the way for law enforcers’ ever-expanding definitional power not only to frame what football violence ‘is’, but also the ‘good practices’ to address it, these practices’ efficiency and the metrics to determine their efficiency.