The negative side of football is presented by hooliganism. Despite the fact that the British government and also the media accepted it as a serious issue only in the 1960s, hooligan behavior at sports has a long history. ‘Roughs’ were regularly denounced as starting trouble at football fields even from the start of the professional game at the end from the nineteenth century. Numerous clubs which were located in particularly tough areas had many confrontations regarding the behavior of the spectators. Within the game’s earliest days, local ‘derby’ matches usually were the center of crowd disorder, even if no visiting fans attended the overall game because home ‘roughs’ weren’t shy to intimidate referees as well as the players in the visiting team, sometimes chasing them out of town!
Between the First and the Second World War a big change appeared and football generally became more ‘respectable’ and crowd problems diminished but did not disappear. Only in the first many years of the 1960s the media concentrated on football and began to report more frequently acts of hooliganism at matches. Simultaneously, within the British society there is an over-all moral crisis concerning the behavior of teenagers caused by an increase in the number of cases of juvenile crime. In this atmosphere, football became more and more identified as a venue where fistfights and other types of disturbing activities regularly occurred. Around this period, football hooliganism in England began to change and undertake a more structured aspect that is linked to the phenomenon today.