The Naughty Nineties

Martin King finds that although football hooligans are now a minority their maturity, experience and dedication are higher than ever. The style and character of the mobs has changed, the firms are smaller, more dangerous and highly organised. The soccer thug may have been locked out of the stadium, but he's pacing the waste ground outside.

---

Football has reinvented itself. As television money has poured into the game, the traditional working-class fans have poured out - not by choice, but by economic necessity. According to those in charge of the game the football hooligan has at last been eliminated from the landscape. But how true is this much-vaunted claim? Martin King, author of Hoolifan, brings his story up to date in The Naughty Nineties. Ironically, he finds that football hooligans now really are in the minority but they are far more dangerous and committed than ever before.