Among the Thugs Reprint Edition

One of the few books I have read that is impossible to put down. Buford has created a book-length study not only of soccer hooliganism, but of the lure of groupthink.

The book is humorous and fascinating and tragic at the same time.

I will not try to repeat the thoughts of the other reviewers, but I will point out what I consider the most noteworthy aspect of the story. As Buford got sucked further into the world of soccer, he found himself attracted to the lure of the herd mentality. He briefly took pride when the thug leaders included him in their plans and activities. He found himself acting more antisocial at home after being in the ruckus at a soccer match. He could feel the entire stadium breathing and gasping as one due to the cramped conditions.

This book provides more than simply Buford's observations of soccer violence. We see also Buford's own journey into and out of the world of the thugs as he tried to put it all into context. This book is essential for anyone who cares to understand mass movements and the motivations for so much of our behavior, regardless of whether one cares about soccer.

If you are not sure that you would enjoy a book that involves soccer, first try watching any one of the online documentaries about any soccer riot/tragedy over the past forty years. It is very easy to get up to speed.

Exceptionally good book. If you're only looking for sensationalized recounts of fights between football firms, you might not like this book. There are some amazing descriptions of the fights and riots, but it's not the central theme of the book. It's more of a sociological/psychological look at the inner workings of the working class football fans in England. Bill Buford is a masterful writer and he deeply embedded himself into the scene. He has a remarkable way of describing what he witnessed as well as the openness to admit that he was often sucked into moments that he never would have imagined getting in to. I breezed through this book in a matter of days because I simply didn't want to put it down. It reminds me of the Green Street Hooligans movie with a lot more introspection and analysis. A+

What kind of crazy bastard deliberately puts himself into the middle of rioting crowds in order to learn about them? Bill Buford does.

I am in awe of his bravery and his foolishness.

As I write this, weeks of "protests" against police brutality having been going on in nearby cities. They start out as peaceful marches, and then eventually result in blocked freeways, destroyed property, and looting. The narrative is always that a few bad apples have coopted the protests and used them for cover to commit crimes.

But now, having read this book, I wonder, is that really what is happening?

Buford discovers something amazing: Being part of a lawless crowd is a high better than most drugs, an intensely euphoric experience.

And, beyond that, there really is not much more in the way of meaning or explanation for what a violent crowd does.

Buford, in addition to being nuts, is a supremely talented writer. I found myself being entertained and appalled by his descriptions, and I liked how he structured his book.

It is a great book, and I don't know that anyone else could or would have written anything like it.

Buford has written a very good book. The description on the back claims that he has done so with “the raw personal engagement of a Hunter S. Thompson” and there are, indeed, sections of the book in which raw personal engagement is the driver of the account. But the comparison with Thompson is unfair to Buford, who uses himself in his narrative in a more restrained and more effective way, i.e., to support his main points rather than to supersede them. If any New Journalism comparison were apt, it would be to Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer.

The book has a clear arc. At the beginning Buford is an outsider in every sense of the word: he stands on a railroad platform as a train overtaken by “supporters” stops only to kick a few people out. The singing and debauchery are contained within the railroad cars; the scene is as mysterious as it is shocking. Determined to learn more, the reporter goes to his first football match, but finds that, even inside the cages at the Tottenham ground, he is still an outsider. Then he meets Mick, a hard-drinking, brawling Manchester United supporter. The rest of the book follows Buford as he makes his way deeper into the Manchester “firm.” He travels with them to Turin, where he is belittled as a fooking journalist and sees (or participates in?) in his first riot. Eventually he is accepted.

But by the end of the book Buford has referred to his “fellows” as “a bunch of little s***s” and has broken off from the main group in the middle of a riot. Disgusted at the crowd he was so recently a part of, he is beaten by Italian police.

Buford uses his narrative to avoid the greatest weakness of post-modern writing: its nearly religious aversion to the value judgment. There was a moment when I feared for the quality of the book. On page 182 Buford begins a historiography of crowd psychology and physiology. He trots out theories and drops names – Clarendon, Gabriel Tarde, Alexander Hamilton, Hipplyte Taine, Scipio Sighele, Plato, Thomas Carlyle, Gustave LeBon, Gibbon, Hitler, and Freud – spends several pages on a photograph from Yugoslavia, and waxes poetic about the crowd consciousness, for a moment concluding that its key component is nothingness, simplicity, “nihilistic purity.” He lists this together with religious ecstasy, sexual excess, inflicting and feeling pain, and drugs as the best examples of the “incineration of self-consciousness,” the “transcendence of our sense of the personal.” But the last words, which I've already mentioned, are “Nothingness in its beauty, its simplicity, its nihilistic purity.”

I had to put the book down upon reading and re-reading this section. All of a sudden the well-chosen photograph of the thug on the cover didn't seem so ugly. How could it when compared to the idea that the “incineration of self-consciousness” is so easily associated with “nothingness,” with “nihilistic purity”? This assertion of the “transcendence of the personal” actually – and very clearly – denied the existence of anything but the personal. Had Buford delved more deeply into Plato and less deeply into Freud, he might have been reminded that the transcendence of the personal also takes place in conversation (friendship), politics, and especially philosophy. If he had not skipped from Plato straight to thoroughly modern examples like Gibbon and Hamilton, he might not have implied that religious ecstasy is nihilistic in nature.

And in the end, Buford may well have done these things. In fact, he may have added his own nonviolent, non-sexually excessive, non-drug induced “incineration of self-consciousness.”

Toward the height of the riot at the end of the book, Buford steps out of the crowd in one direction and observes one who has done the same in the opposite direction. A young Englishman is breaking things. His time not breaking things is spent looking for things to break. Something in Buford snaps. The lad is a little s***, and nothing more. Then he sees an Italian man rushing his family to the relative safety of their home, struggling to get a stroller up the steps and behind the metal screen of his shop. This man, because he is not called one, is not a little s***.

After Buford transcends himself and becomes human again, he wants nothing more than to be rid of the crowd. He sprints ahead of them, right into a trap set by Italian police. As the mob retreats, trying to stuff themselves through a tiny gate, Buford sulks behind two cars and assumes a fetal position, bringing up his arms to protect his head. The police will follow the crowd, he reasons. But not all of them do, and our intrepid narrator is beaten very badly by policemen who cannot have been apprised of his sudden change of heart. He was a member of a rioting crowd, and has paid for the “transcendence” of his humanity by being treated inhumanely. A fair price, I suppose.

The wisest of the thinkers Buford references in the book seem to have been right. The crowd is a wild animal, a pack of wolves, the scum that boils up the surface of the cauldron of a city, even a bunch of little s***s. I don't believe that grammarians have invented a suitable opposite of personification. But that opposite of personification is what a crowd does to itself, and therefore what the great thinkers – and, more immediately, the civil authorities – do to the crowd. To be in a crowd is exhilarating, as Buford learns early on, as the mustachioed man in that picture from Yugoslavia learned in that moment. But there is no good “transcendence of the personal” or “incineration of the self-consciousness” that happens in a crowd: each of those things is requisite to an abandonment of humanity. Not to pass moral judgment on crowds as such is to remain neutral on the very idea of human exceptionalism.

I was very happy that Buford could drum up the courage, finally, to see things as they are.

Simple story. An American journalist living in Britain decides to chronicle soccer hooliganism by becoming part of it. How much a part we are never quite told, but he certainly is there when it happens and he certainly enjoys it. What he learns is something that has been learned many times before. A mob is mindless, but only in the way that it separates the people in in from their minds.