This book provides a holistic and interdisciplinary focus on the legal regulation and policing of football violence and disorder in Britain. Anchored in ground-breaking ethnographic and participant-action research, the book combines a crowd psychology and socio-legal approach to critically explore the contemporary challenges of managing football crowds. It sets out the processes by which football disorder occurs and the limitations of existing approaches to policing ‘football hooliganism’, in particular the dominant focus on controlling ‘risk supporters’, before setting out proposals for fundamental reforms to both law and policing. This book will be of value to academics, students, legal and policing practitioners, as well as policy-makers. The two authors are internationally known experts in the management and behaviour of football crowds and bring together for the first time over 30 years of research in this area from the disciplines of law and social psychology.

This book provides a holistic and interdisciplinary focus on the legal regulation and policing of football violence and disorder in Britain. Anchored in ground-breaking ethnographic and participant-action research, the book combines a crowd psychology and socio-legal approach to critically explore the contemporary challenges of managing football crowds. It sets out the processes by which football disorder occurs and the limitations of existing approaches to policing ‘football hooliganism’, in particular the dominant focus on controlling ‘risk supporters’, before setting out proposals for fundamental reforms to both law and policing. This book will be of value to academics, students, legal and policing practitioners, as well as policy-makers. The two authors are internationally known experts in the management and behaviour of football crowds and bring together for the first time over 30 years of research in this area from the disciplines of law and social psychology.