The problem is neither new, nor unique to football or Britain
REGARDLESS OF WHICH team wins the European Football Championship on July 11th, three things are certain. The first is the large viewership in sports bars and homes: 600m watched the final of the tournament in 2016. The second is the soundtrack. Italian fans will urge their team on by singing the melody to “Seven Nation Army”, as they have done since the World Cup in 2006. English fans will chant “It’s coming home, it’s coming home…” The third given is alcohol consumption.
In much discussion of this scourge, researchers and activists often refer to the “heightened emotion” involved in supporting a team. “Show Domestic Abuse The Red Card”, a promotional campaign around Euro 2020 led by local councils in England, suggests that the “hope, excitement, frustration and ultimately disappointment” of a match can push perpetrators to take out their anger on their partners. The authors of the CEP study suggest that is inaccurate.
Instead, the increase in violence after fixtures is entirely driven by alcohol, the authors argue. There is no statistically significant increase in domestic abuse by people who have not been drinking. During the two-hour span of a game, when attention is focused on the players and on drinking beer, abuse decreases. In the first four hours after the match is over, it starts to pick up again, reaching a peak ten to 12 hours after kickoff.
The problem is neither new, nor unique to football, nor to Britain. In the late 1980s researchers examined the frequency of admissions of women to hospital emergency rooms in Virginia around the time of American football games. They found that “gun shots, stabbings, assaults, falls, lacerations and being struck by objects” increased when the Washington Football Team won.
There are some straightforward solutions to this ghastliness. The authors suggest that a “considerable amount of domestic abuse” could be mitigated by arranging football fixtures on weekdays or later in the evening. This would prevent all-day binges , which the authors reckon are responsible for most of the additional violence. Restricting the sale of alcohol at sports venues, as France does, would also help.
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