FOOTBALL HOOLIGANISM - Steve Frosdick and Peter Marsh

Football has been associated with violence ever since it's early beginnings in thirteenth century england.
Throughout the seventeenth century we find report of several hundred football players destroying drainage ditches and causing mayhem in the town. By the eighteenth century the game took a more overt political significance. A match in Kettering, for example , consisting of 500 hundred men per side was a scarcely disguised food riot in which the object was to loot a local grain store.
Walvin (1994) reported that 'In 1829, a French man who saw a football match in Derby asked "If this is what they call football, then what do they call fighting?".