Fights between groups of youths often occurred during football matches organised between neighbouring towns and villages on Shrove Tuesdays and other Holy Days.

[8] Local derby matches would usually have the worst trouble in an era when fans did not often travel to other towns and cities, and roughs sometimes attacked the referees and visiting team's players.

[11] John Moynihan in The Soccer Syndrome describes a stroll around the touchline of an empty Goodison Park (Everton's home stadium) on a summer's day in the 1960s.

"Walking behind the infamous goal, where they built a barrier to stop objects crunching into visiting goalkeepers, there was a strange feeling of hostility remaining as if the regulars had never left.

"[12] The News of the World's Bob Pennington spoke of the "lunatic fringe of support that fastens onto them (Everton), seeking identification in a multi-national port where roots are hard to establish."

[22] Black players became an increasingly frequent feature in the English game during the 1980s, and with hooliganism still widespread, incidents of racial abuse continued on a large scale.

Its members wear no club colours, carry apparently inoffensive weapons like umbrellas or hardened hats and maintain their anonymity by avoiding official supporters' transport.

[28] Certainly it is a long time since followers of the Scottish national team or [Scotland's] great club sides have caused the sickening mayhem which English fans have produced in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Spain and Switzerland in the past three years.

[35] Another incident was soon forthcoming: on 20 September 1986 Leeds United hooligans overturned and immolated a fish and chip van at Odsal Stadium, the temporary home of Bradford City following the fire at Valley Parade the previous year.

[36] On 15 August 1987, thousands of Wolverhampton Wanderers supporters invaded the seaside town of Scarborough for their opening game of their Fourth Division campaign.

Many newspapers also reported that football hooliganism was a major factor in the tragedy, most notably The Sun, whose article entitled "The Truth" sparked a sharp fall in sales of the tabloid on Merseyside, with many newsagents refusing to stock it.

John Barnes, capped 79 times for England, was first racially abused by rival fans, from Luton Town, when he began his professional career at Watford in the early 1980s, regularly being targeted with racist chants and having banana skins hurled at him.

[45] Viv Anderson, who had become England's first black full international in 1978, was also subjected to regular racist abuse during the 1980s when playing for Nottingham Forest and, later, Arsenal.

[48] After England's defeat to Germany in the Euro 96 semi-finals, a large-scale riot took place in Trafalgar Square, with a number of injuries, and a Russian youth was stabbed in Brighton after his attackers mistook him for a German.

[52] According to Colin Blaney in Hotshot: The Story of a Little Red Devil, many of Manchester United's football hooligans turned to serious crime during this period.

[53] In the 2000s English football hooligans often adopted clothing styles associated with the casual subculture, such as items made by Shark and Burberry and Stone Island.

[54] English hooligans began using Internet forums, mobile phones and text messages to set up fights or provoke rival gangs into brawls.

firm) fought with hooligans from the Newcastle Gremlins in a pre-arranged clash near the North Shields Ferry terminal, in what was described as "some of the worst football related fighting ever witnessed in the United Kingdom".

[60][61] The English reputation improved as a result of good behaviour at the 2002 FIFA World Cup and the 2004 UEFA European Football Championship,[62] despite reports of the arrest of 33 England supporters in the latter tournament.

[70] A steward died after serious clashes between firms from Aston Villa and Queens Park Rangers after a League Cup game in September 2004.

Bottles were thrown, bins were set on fire and a horse was punched as mounted officers tried to move crowds back to allow visiting fans to be escorted away.

[86] In his autobiography 'Undesirables', Colin Blaney, a high-ranking member of Manchester United's Inter City Jibbers firm, claimed that one of the main developments of the 2010s was that football hooligans were no longer involved in acquisitive crimes overseas.

Whereas they had once stolen designer clothing from abroad and used international games as an excuse to loot jewelry shops on the continent, the football firms of today solely engage in profit-oriented forms of crime within the UK.

[93][94] Many hooligans of different firms aided right wing protesters and rioters during the 2024 Southport Riots, in response to the stabbing commited at a Taylor Swift themed dance class, in which 3 young girls died.

[104] The Glaswegian clubs clashed at Hampden Park at the 1969 Scottish Cup Final, with 50 arrests reported on the terrace relating to fighting and the throwing of objects onto the pitch.

[110] While the Scotland national team's travelling supporters, the Tartan Army, are generally not violent these days, hooliganism does occur in other areas of Scottish football.

At the 2008 UEFA Cup Final when Rangers reached the final, Rangers fans and the ICF rioted in Manchester with a huge media spotlight[113] The oldest rivalry in Scotland is between Hibernian and Heart of Midlothian and contained a sectarian hatred from the outset as Hibernian were initially an Irish Catholics only club and Hearts represented the Scottish Protestant establishment[114]—however, this aspect of the rivalry is now almost non-existent.

In Scotland, the CCS had a particular hatred towards Aberdeen's ASC, Rangers ICF, Hearts CSF, Falkirk's Fear and Airdrie's Section B.

[120][121][122][123] During Euro '96, the CCS, along with Celtic's CSC, Dundee's Utility, Partick Thistle's NGE, Motherwell's SS, St. Mirren's LSD, and Aberdeen's ASC organised a well publicised fight against Chelsea, Millwall, Rangers, and Airdrie's Section B Hooligans in Trafalgar Square].

Hammam was criticised by the head of the English Police Spotting teams for encouraging the hooligans by saying before the game, "It's better for us to play them at Ninian because the intimidatory factor will be so big ...