Britain’s obsession with 2000s football hooligan movies
It’s clear that interest in particular movies comes in waves, but in Britain during the 2000s, there seemed to be a subgenre that dominated the country’s cultural attention. An obsession with the football hooligan film dominated the era, defined by a series of cinematic works that delved into the dark underworld of football whilst providing a ubiquitously British sense of social commentary.
With its roots in Alan Clarke’s 1989 The Firm, the football hooligan film explores the identity, camaraderie and violent behaviour of the most diehard football fans, with such individuals providing countless news lines in the subculture’s heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. By the time the 2000s swung around, football hooliganism had largely died down in comparison to the previous decades, so 21st-century movies with such behaviour at their cores were primarily glorifying in nature.
In Britain, it’s fair to say that football is far more than a sport; it’s a way of life, almost akin to a religion, with its most devout followers going to great lengths to prove their allegiance to their respective clubs. In 2004, Nick Lowe’s film The Football Factory, starring Danny Dyer and Neil Maskell, arrived and detailed the way that the most violent fictional Chelsea fans make football hooliganism their entire identity.
Just a year later, one of the genre’s most prominent films arrived in the shape of Lexi Alexander’s Green Street, which saw Elijah Wood play an American student who becomes wrapped up in the world of West Ham United’s toughest hooligan firm. West Ham would again be the subject of a hooligan movie when Julian Gilbey released Rise of the Footsoldier in 2007, based on the true events of the life of West Ham United hooligan turned gangster Carlton Leech, played by Ricci Harnett.
Elsewhere, the likes of Jon S. Baird’s Cass, Pat Holden’s Away Days and Nick Love’s loose adaptation of Clarke’s The Firm were also released throughout the 2000s, proving Britain’s deep-set fascination with the football hooligan genre. Seeing as football is indeed so popular in Britain, football hooligan movies showed the grim realities of the sport’s most violent and diehard fans, revealing insights into the darker days of its past.
However, the genre is also of deeper importance, owing to the ultimately British cinematic sense of social commentary. Films like The Firm and Green Street show the socio-political issues that can lead to football in the first place, like poverty, unemployment, toxic masculinity and social isolation. In that light, such movies can get to the core of hooliganism’s causes and challenge their audiences to confront their own behaviours and change them for the better.
In addition, perhaps the hooligan films allow an audience to get closer to the action of the behind-the-scenes violence and thereby provide a sense of physical catharsis whilst also condemning such actions with the often tragic narrative conclusions. Sure, the football hooligan flicks of the 2000s can glorify the subculture and make it look attractive, but things pretty much always end in tears and bloodshed.
Still, the British obsession with the football hooligan movie in the 2000s proves the country’s interest in socio-politics, sport, rebellion and violence, much in the way that Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange had detailed in the early 1970s through the exploration of its protagonist’s ultra-violence. In showcasing the more bloody realities of football, British filmmakers highlighted the identity issues of the sport’s most diehard fans whilst urging audiences to confront the worst truths about human existence.