If you’re a sports fan there’s nothing quite like the Fall season on the calendar.
Football is tightening its grip on our attention. The drama of playoff baseball is intensifying. The dawn of new basketball and hockey seasons are upon us as well. And if you prefer the kind of football played with your feet, you’ll find the passionate singing of international soccer fans filling stadiums around the world.
But with this sports-inspired passion comes an all-too-common drama also where millions of fans find so much joy. Every week provides viral moments captured on cellphones of sports fans behaving badly, often erupting into life-altering brawls and chaos.
In September, Anthony Thomas left the first NFL game of this season celebrating his team’s “big victory.” Just outside the stadium where his hometown Washington Commanders beat the rival New York Giants, he heard a “commotion” erupt behind him.
Thomas saw two men – wearing Commanders’ jerseys – unleashing a flurry of punches on another man in a blue Giants shirt.
The crack of punches hitting the Giants fan can be heard on the cellphone video Thomas captured that afternoon. A young woman and a security guard stepped in to pull the two Commanders fans off the Giants fan who had fallen to the ground. One of the men wearing a Commanders jersey leaves the scene with blood on his face.
As quickly as the fight started, it seemed to evaporate just as fast.
Thomas doesn’t know what sparked the fight, but he says it’s just become part of the experience of attending a professional football game.
“It happens at every game. Every single game,” said Thomas.
Thomas is a high-profile chef in Washington, D.C. He has a growing social media presence and makes routine appearances on television cooking segments and even competed in a Food Network show called “Battle of the Brothers” in 2021.
Four years ago, Thomas started noticing the changing dynamic of sports fans at games. That’s when he decided to start taking his own personal security officer to every football game. Thomas acknowledges this “sounds crazy” but he calls the 6-foot-7, 310-pound hired security officer an insurance policy.
“There’s always one or two fans that are looking to impede on everyone else’s fun and try to find a way, if they have the losing team, to try to ruin the morale that’s going on in the stadium,” said Thomas.
‘High theater without a script’
Over the last year, I’ve embarked on a journey to explore why so many sports fans turn into neanderthal spectators in the heat of athletic battle.
We are there to admire the feats of the world’s premier athletes. We fill stadiums in our favorite team’s colors and jerseys and cheer young men and women who have reached the pinnacle of their sport. But the experience too often triggers barbaric rage.
To help explore the answer this question, I turned to Bill Buford the author of “Among the Thugs” – one of my favorite sports books. Buford spent years immersing himself in the world of British hooligan soccer syndicates. He befriended a wild cast of characters that wreak havoc at soccer venues around Europe.
“Being in a crowd at a live sporting event is one of the great dramas of human civilization that has been rarely understood and appreciated,” Buford told me in a London pub just blocks away from the Chelsea Football Club’s home stadium. “It is high theater without a script.”
Buford traveled to games with British hooligans to understand the mind of a violent crowd. He witnessed gruesome fighting and fans crushed by mobs. His book is raw and jarring.
There’s a scene where a hooligan bites the eye out of a police officer during a fight. In those days, Buford came to have a sixth sense of when a sports crowd was “about to go off” and spark “wild anarchic power.”
“Big crowds are capable of so much power, so much destruction,” said Buford. “If you have a unified crowd, there’s a moment when you realize how powerful you are. And it’s very hard to stop a crowd.”
Buford wanted to understand the psychology of what lures people – usually men – to feed into the violence inspired by a sporting event. And what he found is that in the rush of attending sporting events, there’s a connection and emotional transformation that takes place.
“There is a nationalism that arises out of loyalty to your side,” said Buford.
‘This is what they’re fighting over?’
A few weeks ago, Joey Cromwell settled into his seat to watch the Cincinnati Bengals and Jacksonville Jaguars football game, he didn’t expect a seat in row 32 to get him too close to the action. It seemed like a perfectly safe distance from which to watch massive gladiators violently blocking and tackling each other.
But at the end of the third quarter, a brawl between fans erupted two rows behind him and one of those fans was pushed into his lap. By the time the 40-year-old Bengals fan turned around and realized what was happening, his cellphone camera recorded a group of men throwing punches.
“My wife, she actually, took off running because she was so scared. She’s like, ‘I don’t know what’s about to happen, but I’m getting the hell out of here,’” said Cromwell. “We spent a lot of money for those tickets. I literally had somebody fall on me.”
Cromwell said the fight started with spectators arguing over someone standing up and blocking the view of the game for other fans. As Cromwell described what happened and how the tussle seemed to last nearly 10 minutes, you can tell he has a hard time believing something so trivial became so dramatic.
“I’m like, ‘Really? This is what they’re fighting over? Oh wait, this is really serious. They’re really fighting,’” said Cromwell.
After it all ended, Cromwell said an elderly couple sitting in the same rows were visibly terrified by what happened. Most of the fighting fans seemed to be escorted away from the section The scene returned to normal, and Cromwell said everyone went back to simply praying for the Bengals to win.
No coming back
I’ve thought about the fights I’ve witnessed at sporting events over the years and reflected about my conversation with Buford. Surely alcohol plays a factor, to a certain degree, but I sense there’s something else going on.
We fill stadiums to watch sporting events where success is often measured by toughness and the ability to inflict pain on your opponent or overpower them in battle. And many of those players on the field are our heroes.
Some of us sitting there as spectators absorb that mentality. Walking away from a fight or turning the other cheek at someone hurling insults your way would be an insult to our own ego and pride. And in these moments, it doesn’t take much to spark the flame of violence.
“If you allow yourself to do violence, it’s a little bit like a person jumping off a diving board, or jumping out of a window, or it’s like you’re lurching into no rules. Anything goes. You know you’re doing something you shouldn’t do, and there’s this exhilarating moment of like the leap,” Buford said.
And once a sports fan takes that leap into violence, Buford says, you cross a civil threshold, you are airborne and there’s no coming back.