The dark side of football is represented by hooliganism. Despite the fact that the British government and the media accepted it as a serious issue only in the 1960s, hooligan behavior at sporting events has a long history. 'Roughs' were on a regular basis denounced as starting trouble at football fields even from the start of the professional game at the end of the nineteenth century. A number of clubs which were located in particularly tough areas had many confrontations regarding the behavior of the spectators. In the game's earliest days, local 'derby' matches usually were the center of crowd disorder, even if no visiting fans attended the game because home 'roughs' were not shy to intimidate referees as well as the players from the visiting team, sometimes chasing them out of town!
Between the First and the Second World War a change appeared and football generally became more 'respectable' and crowd problems diminished but did not disappear. Only in the first years of the 1960s the media concentrated on football and started to report more frequently acts of hooliganism at matches. Simultaneously, in the British society there was a general moral crisis concerning the behavior of teenagers caused by an increase in the number of cases of juvenile crime. In this atmosphere, football became more and more identified as a venue at which fistfights and other kinds of disturbing activities regularly occurred. Around this period, football hooliganism in England began to change and take on a more structured aspect that is associated with the phenomenon today.
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