Off-pitch: The dark side of American soccer fan culture

For the stunted American male, frust­rated with the changing demographics of the country and gripped by the belief that his days on top are coming to an end, there may be no form of porno­graphy more satisfying than watching a bunch of hard-drinking, pub-singing soccer fans with thick brogues beat the hell out of one another. The scene is almost always the same: Singing men in red advance upon singing men in blue. When they meet in the center of the frame, red shoves blue, fingers are pointed and then, inevitably, a green beer bottle flies across the screen and explodes on red’s head. The lines of singing men collapse into a squirming, punching mass and by the time the police trot up, usually dressed to the hilt in riot gear, both red and blue have gone scurrying away, leaving a few behind sitting on the ground in a bloody stupor.

The host city — and usually the city's blacks and Muslims — pay the price for the ensuing rampage. In June, Russian and English hooligans fought in Marseille, France, before an opening-round match of the Euro 2016 championships. A group of English fans confronted some of the city's Muslim citizens, chanting, "ISIS, where are you?" In February of last year, when the Champions League match between Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain was held in Paris, Chelsea supporters shoved a black man off the Metro and chanted: "We're racist! We're racist! And that's the way we like it!" There is nothing subtle or nuanced or even interesting about these displays of bigotry — this is the context that animates the endlessly popular fighting-soccer-hooligan videos on YouTube; this is what's muttered in the stands between the rousing songs.

This summer, I attended a Seattle Sounders game with a soccer-fanatic friend of mine. Seattle has become one of the main breeding grounds for Europhilic American soccer culture, boasting the highest attendance numbers in Major League Soccer and the Emerald City Supporters (E.C.S.), one of the largest, rowdiest supporter organizations in the country. I was surprised to see small signs in the stands declaring that anyone who said anything racist would be removed from the stadium. Many stadiums in Europe carry such signage for obvious reasons, but why would they be needed in a supposedly progressive city on the West Coast of the United States?

At first, the scene at CenturyLink Field felt a bit tame. In the alleyway that led to the stadium, hundreds of Sounders fans dressed in the team’s neon green and blue milled around a line of steaming hot-dog carts. They looked like the sorts of people you might find at a corporate family-appreciation night — dads in preworn baseball caps and sensible shoes locked in quiet conversation with their mop-haired sons.

There are two American soccer cultures: white and Latino

Then, about a half-hour before kickoff, E.C.S. arrived to the beating of drums. They marched a few hundred deep up the alleyway, holding banners and scarves above their heads. Some wore bandannas over their faces; some held up flares of green smoke; the vast majority were white. In throaty unison, they sang: “Take ’em all, Take ’em all, put ’em up against a wall and shoot ’em! Short and tall, watch ’em fall. Come on boys, take ’em all!” Each phrase was sung with a disorienting British lilt.

This fan culture has developed during each of American soccer's ephemeral spikes in popularity, which start during a World Cup summer and fizzle out by the time quarterbacks report to training camp. But all those attempts to bring the world's game to the States have left a residue. Fans meet in the stands, decide to get organized (or "organised") and then go about studying the rituals of their European counterparts, whether on trips abroad or, increasingly, through YouTube voyeurism. The E.C.S. march is taken from European traditions. Many of the songs, which often involve some reference to drinking, come from England. "Tifo" — a choreographed display involving gigantic cloth banners painted by volunteers from the Emerald City Supporters that are unfurled before every home match — comes from Italy.

The selective borrowing cannot be a matter of simple naïveté on the part of American fans. The ugly incident in Marseille this summer was widely reported by the international media, and it was only the latest iteration of a lengthy and well-documented history of racism among European soccer supporters. In his 1990 book "Among the Thugs," Bill Buford followed around a group of Manchester United supporters, completely immersing himself in their rituals. He drank with them and followed along as they incited mayhem, trying to discover the origins of their rowdiness. In one memorable scene, Buford takes an American friend to a match. When the supporters start grunting every time a black player touches the ball, the friend asks Buford about it. "It's because a black player has the ball," Buford explains. "They are making an ape sound because a black player has the ball." Later in the book, when Buford attends a meeting of the National Front, a whites-only far-right party, in a bar in Southeast England, he is confronted by a barmaid who tells him that the bar had a proud record of never serving a "black or Paki."

“I had not expected to hear racism expressed so explicitly by people working behind the bar of a pub — one owned by a brewery that was itself a public company,” Buford writes. “The fact was I hadn’t expected to hear racism expressed so explicitly by people I had only just met, regardless of where they worked.” “Among the Thugs” is an incisively told, gripping account of years spent with violent men, but Buford’s occasional surprise at the racism he encountered never quite sat right with me. I wondered about the herculean denial required to ignore what was plainly in front of him.

In Seattle, I saw glimpses of the same denial. A march of mostly white men and women through the streets of Seattle singing “put ’em up against a wall and shoot ’em” is absurd on its face (oddly enough, the lyrics of the original song by Cock Sparrer, an English band from the Oi! punk scene, derisively refer to “Americans in dark glasses”). But when these lyrics are sung in pubs in England or at National Front meetings like the one Buford attended, it also raises the question: Who, exactly, is “?’em?”

Americans are cosplaying working-class traditions

There is another sort of elision happening, one that's more disturbing than middle-class Americans' cosplaying working-class traditions from the Continent. The spread of Europhilic American soccer culture excludes much of the population of American soccer fans, a healthy portion of whom are Latin American immigrants. When the Mexican national team toured the United States last year, it drew in an average of 59,000 fans, roughly two-thirds more than the crowds that watch the United States men's national team. Broadcasts of Liga MX, the top club league in Mexico, regularly dwarf the ratings of Major League Soccer and the English Premier League. And yet, for the most part, M.L.S., the United States Soccer Federation and even the apparel and sports-drink companies that market to American soccer youth have drawn a line between whose attention is worth pursuing and whose is not.

There are now two separate American soccer cultures: one white, the other Latino. And while some of the Europhilia can be attributed to the relative newness of American soccer fandom (traditions, I suppose, have to start somewhere), it's worth asking why soccer fans in a country with millions of immigrants from soccer-crazed countries in Central and South America would look so longingly toward Western Europe, or why the American media's coverage of soccer culture, however scant, focuses on soccer bars in gentrified Brooklyn and fan organizations in majority-white cities like Portland, Ore., and Seattle.

This divide has limited the appeal and growth of the sport in the States. In the broadcast before the quarterfinal match in the Copa América soccer tournament between Mexico and Chile in June, Alexi Lalas, the former U.S.M.N.T. defender who turned shaggy red hair and a thick goatee into a personal branding moment in the 1994 World Cup, talked disapprovingly about the crowds of Mexican-American fans who had shown up at sites across the country to root for El Tri, Mexico's men's national team. Lalas explained that while his ancestry was Greek, if the United States played Greece in anything, there would be no question that his allegiance would lie with the red, white and blue. "There's only one national team," Lalas said.

If Alexi Lalas wants to know why so many Mexican-Americans choose not to root for the United States, he doesn't need to look much farther than the crowds who gather in M.L.S. stadiums and bars and sing songs inspired by groups who shove black men off subway trains and travel to foreign cities to taunt Muslim immigrants. There is nothing wrong about borrowing what you love, but it should be called what it is — a dream of an ultimately monochromatic gathering in which thousands of white men can brawl (but safely and without guns!) in the streets and drunkenly sing Phil Collins melodies in pubs, lending a hooligan snarl to a white, suburban culture.

The New York Times Magazine