Zawaya

Eliminating violence in sports starts with understanding its causes

By: Messaoud Allel

The phenomenon of violence in stadiums is taking serious proportions. It has grown in such a way that it became impossible to rein in radical supporters with deterrent penalties and awareness campaigns.

There are several reasons behind the spread of the “choice” of chaos and violence among supporters in the stands, when their favorite team loses. Athletes and officials have tried to analyze this phenomenon and suggest remedy solutions to it, and some even pointed fingers at each other and held each other responsible for this violence, because the phenomenon has been spreading in a scary way, thus extending “insecurity” off stadiums to affect citizens and their properties in the streets, including men, women, children, elderly people, and even those not related to sports or to football in particular.

Awareness campaigns that aimed at educating supporters and reducing violence have not come to fruition, making it more than necessary to urgently set deterrent sanctions. Officials chose to hold sports clubs responsible for the implications of their reckless supporters’ behavior, after having given them at first the opportunity to control their supporters, through the establishment of fan clubs, but the initiative was born dead, because the members of these fan clubs themselves became with time the first to fuel violence.

And surprisingly enough, fining clubs and banning hooligan supporters from entering stadiums as a punitive measure did not alter the behavior of those supporters, and did not make them reflect on their actions at all, since the same unfortunate scenes are reproduced in the stadiums at the first slip of their favorite team.

Whatever solutions we propose, they will not help because the problem is too deep to be limited to the scope of “awareness or deterrence”. The problem of violence in sports is associated primarily with educational, cultural, social and even political factors.

No matter how different the views are on who caused the spread of “sports violence”, and on how to address and fight it, the most important issue is to detect its causes in the first place. It is also undeniable that the social, economic, and cultural factors cast their shadows on the behaviors of those who attend stadiums.

Various factors can be noticed at this level: Most fans are young, profanity spreads in every game, supporters of the same team throw stones and objects at each other or at the opponents’ supporters, some of the attendees of sport events hold drugs and white weapons, chaos and panic are extended to citizens off field, regional and racist expressions are used. This leads us to clearly see that the problem does not lie in superfluous enthusiasm, but was rather born in a milieu away from the sports field, and was fueled by the difficult social conditions of those young people and the lack of a civil sense of responsibility and sufficient awareness to rein in their behaviors, thus making infection transmission to stadiums and sport utilities, and its aggravation within that scope, just a “foregone conclusion”.