Abstract

This section presents a translation of a classic contribution from the School of Leicester, Spectator Violence at Football Matches: Towards a Sociological Explanation, an article preceding the much more famous text The roots of football hooliganism. An Historical and Sociological Study, a book that consecrated Dunning and colleagues on an international level. More specifically, the work presented here addresses the concepts of aggresive masculine style and ordered segmentation, whose meanings are central in the configurationalist reflection of sociology of sport and, albeit with different declensions, in the various analyses that focus on the behavior patterns of the English working class. This classic text is contextualized by an introduction focusing on Eric Dunning’s configurationism and on hooliganism as prospected by Patrick Murphy and John Williams.