{"id":174589,"date":"2026-07-29T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T14:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174589"},"modified":"2026-07-29T11:36:34","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T15:36:34","slug":"the-theater-of-sport-bill-buford-revisits-among-the-thugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/07\/29\/the-theater-of-sport-bill-buford-revisits-among-the-thugs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Theater of Sport: Bill Buford Revisits Among the Thugs<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Bill Buford with Granta<\/em>, between 1979 and 1985. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

In 1984, Bill Buford, an American literary editor in his late twenties, began devoting his spare time to following \u201cfootball hooligans\u201d\u2014a distinctive tribe of fans known for committing acts of violence and vandalism on match days. English soccer in those days was associated with brutality on the \u201cterraces\u201d (the standing area at stadiums) and in the streets before and after matches. Hooliganism was the so-called British disease, a source of national shame. Buford started going around with the Manchester United \u201cfirm,\u201d or gang, known as the ICJ, or the Inter-City Jibbers. Later, he sought danger at a disco organized by the far-right group the National Front, and while traveling among<\/span><\/i> England’s supporters at the World Cup.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Buford\u2019s time in England had begun at a different social altitude. A Marshall Scholarship sent him from Berkeley to undertake a second B.A. at King’s College Cambridge, a grand establishment associated with members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. Buford fell in with the student journalism society, and worked to turn a failing undergraduate magazine, <\/span><\/i>Granta,<\/em><\/span> into a leading journal of international writing.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

At a glance, Buford\u2019s two identities were chalk and cheese. But in his work overseeing <\/span><\/i>Granta<\/span>, he displayed an appetite for danger, mischief, drama, and grit. The experiences Buford wrote up in <\/span><\/i>Among the Thugs<\/span> coincided with issues of <\/span><\/i>Granta<\/span> that featured a portrait of life on the road with the Rolling Stones in the late sixties (a piece he compared to Michael Herr\u2019s writing on Vietnam), James Fenton\u2019s account of the Snap Revolution in the Philippines, and a new subgenre of American fiction, represented by Raymond Carver and others, which Buford saw as being defined by \u201ca curious, dirty realism about the belly-side of contemporary life.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Buford\u2019s own curiosity took him to Britain\u2019s belly-side during some of its darkest days. They weren\u2019t to last forever\u2014at least not in that form. In 1985, following a stadium disaster in Brussels, partly caused by Liverpool fans, English teams received an indefinite ban on playing in European competitions<\/span><\/i>. <\/i>The most popular British broadsheet, the <\/span><\/i>Sunday Times, <\/span>having<\/span><\/i> recently<\/span><\/i> lamented English soccer\u2019s status as a \u201cscum sport\u201d played in \u201cscum stadiums\u201d and mostly attended by \u201cscum people,\u201d expressed the hope that in five years\u2019 time it could \u201ccease to be a pariah\u201d and turn into \u201ca family sport<\/span><\/i>.<\/span>\u201d Leaving aside the questionable choice of terms, this is more or less what happened. Buford\u2019s account climaxes with a riot in Sardinia, during the 1990 World Cup in Italy\u2014an event widely viewed as the turning point in the fortunes of English soccer. <\/span><\/i>Among the Thugs<\/span>, published in 1991, after six years\u2019 labor, bore ambivalent witness to an era that was finally fading.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

The origin of <\/span>Among the Thugs<\/span><\/i> is recounted in the opening pages. Your first encounter with the phenomenon of soccer \u201chooliganism\u201d came when you were waiting on a station platform in Wales and you saw a train rammed with chanting fans on their way home from a match. When did you start to think that this visceral experience had the makings of a book?<\/span><\/p>\n

BILL BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

It evolved. When I saw that train, I realized that even though football violence had been widely reported in a sensationalistic way, I had no idea of its intensity. Soon afterward, I went to a publishing party\u2014it\u2019s referenced in the book. I was talking to Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa, and I described the scene. They asked if I\u2019d been to a match. As it happened, the only match I\u2019d been to was U.S.A.-Mexico in Mexico City, which the U.S.A. lost 8\u20130. So we all went to a Tottenham Hotspur game\u2014this was at the end of the 1982\u20131983 season\u2014and it just reinforced the delight and the power of the crowd in all its different manifestations.<\/span><\/p>\n

I came away thinking that I\u2019d commission somebody to write it for <\/span>Granta<\/span><\/i>. My first idea completely belly flopped. Adam Mars-Jones had written a piece called \u201cStructural Anthropology,\u201d and it was so witty\u2014I thought, Adam can write about football hooligans. In fact, he would probably have had a hard time being accepted. His education, his delightful Englishness, his sophisticated accent. It was a rough lads\u2019 culture and he would have stood out in a way that would have made it difficult to get access. I had no baggage. I was an American. If anything, people would ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s this American doing here?\u201d I was a natural observer. But that\u2019s later.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I then happened to be having lunch with an editor at the <\/span>Sunday Times <\/span><\/i>in London, Eric Jacobs. An old-school-type geezer, but very supportive of literary endeavors. This was early in 1984. I think I mentioned a Celtic\u2013Rangers match coming up, and he said, \u201cYou should do it. You should write this.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

He gave me some cash for expenses. So I went to the Rangers match. And not long after that I got on a train for the match between Juventus and Manchester United. And that was where I met Mick, who had that memorable line when I introduced myself and said I was a journalist. And he said\u2014what was it?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cAll Americans are wankers \u2026 and all journalists are cunts.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s it. That was him verbatim. Poor sod. He\u2019s dead now.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was only a piece, but in my inevitable way\u2014I\u2019m still afflicted by this today\u2014I felt I needed to go deep, deep, deep to get what was good. I started going to all kinds of matches just to get to know the game, to get to know the crowds. It wasn\u2019t inconvenient. Most of my research was done on Saturdays, so I wasn\u2019t missed in the office.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How did<\/span> you<\/span> envisage<\/span> what you were trying to achieve?<\/span>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

What I recognized on that first train on that Welsh station platform was that what was being reported in the tabloids was so at odds with what it really was. I think that\u2019s largely because nobody went in there to look at it or thought of it as a story.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I began to learn how widespread the crowd violence was. It was almost like it was the thing that everybody wanted to do. I came to think of it as basically a style thing or a fashion thing, in the same way that at different times, especially in Britain, there have been epochs of lad culture, like the Mods and Rockers, riding Vespas or Lambrette. Now they were wearing Lacoste shirts and beating the shit out of each other. Why? Because it was what the lads then did. It was fun. <\/span><\/p>\n

This was the time of Margaret Thatcher\u2014and the assumption was that they were the disenfranchised looking to vent unhappiness or their disgust with the state of things, and were obviously impoverished. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. There certainly were people who were disenfranchised, and there were a few people who were not so stable in the head\u2014no question. But the basic culture was a very confident lads\u2019 culture where most of the people were making money and had money to spend. A lot of them were builders. There were some lawyers. There were painters. There were some drug dealers. There were quite a few crooks. There was my good friend Robert, who was a very accomplished pickpocket and with whom I am in touch today. In fact, I owe him a phone call.<\/span><\/p>\n

But in 1985, there was the Heysel disaster, and the<\/span> Sunday Times<\/span><\/i> wanted the piece. I thought, I\u2019m not ready. I realized that I was really not an instant journalist. So I got an agent and the agent said, \u201cI\u2019ll deal with them. And then what you need to do is make a book proposal and write thirty pages and a description of what you\u2019re going to do next.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You had come to the United Kingdom\u2014to Cambridge\u2014to do some academic work. Did you have literary ambitions?<\/span><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

I got my scholarship as a Shakespearean and I did indulge that\u2014to the extent that, in a year, I saw a hundred Shakespeare productions. I saw a hundred Shakespeare productions and went to two lectures.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what I wanted to be was a writer. I did a little bit of writing for the student magazines. A guy who became one of my best friends, Pete de Bolla, was running a student magazine\u2014<\/span>Granta.<\/span><\/i> At that time, it was calling itself something else. Anyway, Pete wanted to do an issue on \u201cthe theory of the subject.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Referring to the ideas of people like Lacan and Althusser?<\/span><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

Yeah, that was the time. But I had this other idea of these American writers who I\u2019d never read until I got to the UK. When I was studying in the States, I\u2019d just been locked into Shakespeare. I\u2019d learned Latin and worked on an edition of the Sonnets. So I was discovering American fiction in Britain. Some of my fellow Americans there were quite ambitious literary types and they were alluding to writers that I\u2019d never read, like William Gass, William Gaddis, and Susan Sontag.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

How important in the writing of the book is the first person\u2014and not just the first-person observer, but the participant observer, the collusive observer? Part of the story is you becoming part of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

A thug. Yeah. I had no idea about how this first person would develop. I regarded my role as an observer. But my role was to get as close as I possibly could to the experience of violence, because that was what the story was. I didn\u2019t ever want to participate in the violence because, to an extent, I regarded that position as immoral. A proper journalistic position is, you don\u2019t commit the crime.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But I did want to get close, close, close. There\u2019s a scene in the book where Sammy is doing a head count, because they\u2019re about to surprise a train, and he counts me. I felt that was exactly right. I would be close enough that I\u2019d be among the people.<\/span><\/p>\n

I do like the first person as long as my personal experience contributes to understanding the story. I did a piece about sweatshops in New York, and I used the first person because, when I was in Berkeley, I worked as a cutter in a sweatshop. I was making ideologically acceptable outdoor jackets and sleeping bags. I had a long table\u2014like a hundred and eighty feet or something\u2014and I\u2019d trace the patterns and then I\u2019d run back to the end and cut, cut, cut, cut. For me, it was great. I got paid by the piece and I got exercise.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

One shouldn\u2019t extrapolate too much from what was in <\/span>Granta<\/span><\/i>, but if I think about some of the writing that appeared there during the period you started thinking about hooligans, there was Raymond Carver and Richard Ford in the \u201cDirty Realism\u201d issue and the excerpt from Martin Amis\u2019s <\/span>Money<\/span><\/i>\u2014work steeped in illuminating detail about male myopia or hotheadedness. Do you think that has been one of the central pillars of your taste and interest?<\/span><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

If so, in an ancillary way. I think male behavior is perplexing and disruptive and often a good story.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I remember the first time I read Ray\u2019s stories and I thought the poetic simplicity of the prose was completely at odds with the stuff that I\u2019d done in the earliest issues of editing <\/span>Granta<\/span><\/i>, which was postmodernist or post-postmodernist. I was proud to publish William Gass in the first issue we did, because there was a kind of intensity of reflection that I found very compelling. But most of the other stuff, I kind of hated. I hated the self-consciousness. I hated the literary artifact. I hated stories of looking for the author. And then Ray came along and it was so direct and clean and felt. I thought, Wow, this is like drinking clean water after you\u2019ve had nothing but filth. This is like air.<\/span><\/p>\n

I remember somehow I got a bank to sponsor inviting these American writers over\u2014Ray, Toby Wolff, Richard Ford. And there were a lot of male themes in Richard Ford. The evening was mesmerizing. I wasn\u2019t seeking it out. It was just more I was being an editor and found that there was something I was looking for in the writing that I wasn\u2019t getting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

But you were also drawn to what you call literary narrative journalism. What do you mean by that?<\/span><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

Driven by narrative. It was shaped like a literary work, but not for any other arty reasons, just good nonfiction in the tradition of a Peter Matthiessen or some of the gonzo journalists.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Did you find a tradition of serious nonfiction in Britain?<\/span><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, even more serious. A lot of it was then called travel writing. But you had Colin Thubron, Ian Jack is another example, James Fenton is an example. Bruce Chatwin. All those people are doing a kind of narrative writing.<\/span><\/p>\n

In many ways, the guy who became my model was a Pole, Ryszard Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski. I went to see him in Warsaw in \u201989, before the wall came down, and when I walked in the streets with him, everybody knew him. If the hotel was booked up, he\u2019d say, \u201cBut I\u2019m Ryszard Kapu\u015bci\u0144ski.\u201d They\u2019d kick someone out. I did a long interview with him in the magazine, which for me held many important principles, including the fundamental one that characterized his life\u2014that he was the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency and so the only one on the block. <\/span><\/p>\n

Poland was then under the communist regime.\u00a0<\/span>It was before technology and everything else, and he was the only reporter who\u2019d been to Africa, who\u2019d been to Asia, who\u2019d been to a revolution\u2014like a sailor coming back with stories, pure discovery, full of events that other people had never heard\u2014\u201cWell, I saw these strange animals with black and yellow spots and long tongues and they ate food out of high trees.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Did you feel that you were a lone voyager in the hooligan world?<\/span><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, sometimes, and it was a privilege. And a burden. I can cite an example. I was invited to a dinner at Mario Vargas Llosa\u2019s apartment in London. He had all these established literary figures around his table. And I\u2019d come straight from\u2014I don\u2019t know if I\u2019d call it a riot\u2014but a street fight after a Chelsea\u2013Manchester United match. I showed up a little late and very sweaty because in the aftermath of the match, I fell in with the Man United brigade. And they had this strategy of zigzagging around blocks so they could surprise the Chelsea fans. But it was just street violence and I kept getting hit by beer cans. They\u2019d just fly out of nowhere and hit me on the side of the head\u2014fortunately, always the soft part of the beer can. Well, after midway through the dinner, I just said, \u201cI had an interesting afternoon.\u201d And it all came out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was Germaine Greer who stopped me. Sorry, this is very name-heavy, but I was running a literary magazine and I was in this world. Germaine said I was talking about it too much. She said, \u201cYou\u2019re just telling your story. Stop telling your story. Write your story. Every day, get up at six in the morning and I\u2019ll send you breakfast.\u201d She didn\u2019t send breakfast, but I did start getting up by six in the morning.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I remember I was then writing about Juventus and the riots in Turin\u2014a father\u2019s being beaten up with his children, the drama of it and the sound of his being hit and then kicked by rubber-soled sneakers. It was all so vivid, and so violent, that I began having wild, upsetting dreams of these poor Torinesi getting hurt, just before I woke up and went to my keyboard. But that kind of launched the book.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

In a weird way, from the perspective of the reading public, one of the things that you were going off to see and bring back in the form of a book was football. People did not write books about football in Britain in the 1980s, even negative ones really.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

BUFORD<\/span><\/p>\n

I would say I was writing about supporters, and that was met with vitriolic disdain by other journalists. But, having said that, I\u2019m also a big believer deep down in the theater of sport, and I think it needs its Aristotles in the way that tragedy did. It\u2019s fantastic drama. All sport has that. And it\u2019s occurring in front of live audiences in all the continents of the world in many different variations. Being in New York when the Knicks won their championship. I mean, wow, wow, wow. It was so intense. It\u2019s a great form of human expression, our most exciting theater.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Leo Robson is the author of a novel, <\/i>The Boys, and\u00a0a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the\u00a0<\/i>New Yorker, the\u00a0<\/i>New York Times, and\u00a0<\/i>New Left Review.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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