Hooligans are coming home. A response to Ellis Cashmore and Kevin Dixon, ‘Why football violence made a comeback in continental Europe but spared England’ [soccer & society 25, no. 3 (2024): 378-384]

The studies on hooliganism and football-related violence are particularly exposed to a strong temptation to jump to bold and simple conclusions. It is caused by the sensitive nature of the subject and considerable media attention that often blurs lines between scientific analysis and a more descriptive but attractive style of reasoning and writing. In addition, football violence is a phenomenon that is extremely hard to measure and compare, though serious measures to overcome these barriers are carried with the use of accessible public dataFootnote1 or in-depth fieldwork methods,Footnote2 drawing on a wide spectrum of social sciences’ theories to make sense of them. [...]