After winning the Super Bowl for the first time, the citizens of the city of Philadelphia went on a euphoric alcohol-fuelled rampage, turning over cars, smashing windows and looting businesses. Three arrests were made. Amongst the madness were a number of off-duty police officers taking part in the festivities.

After losing in the Stanley Cup Finals in 2011, the citizens of the city of Vancouver went on a melancholic alcohol-fuelled rampage, turning over cars, smashing windows and looting businesses. Hundreds of arrests were made.

The first recorded sports riot was in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) in 532 AD. Chariot races were a popular sport in Ancient Rome with a number of different teams. Each team had well-developed spectator associations that would organize under the banner of the team and push for a variety of social issues – these associations were among the only outlets for social discourse. The Emperor at the time, Justinian, was trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the Persians, and the citizens of his empire were chafing under a heavy tax regime. The social preconditions for rioting were set.

Organized spectator sports had been a feature of Imperial Rome for hundreds of years. In fact, the Roman poet Juvenal coined the term “Bread and Circus” to refer to a policy of superficial social appeasement back in the first century.

“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

This argument has been extended to the modern entertainment industry from sport to film to television. Guy DeBord has written at length about the links between the spectacle and society, noting:

“What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very centre that maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.” (Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle)

To be clear, this is how we end up with riots and stampedes and tribalism. My tribe is Chelsea Football Club, and part of the compact involves an irrational distrust of the Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool tribes. Sure we’re all watching the same spectacle – soccer – but from socially-constructed diametrically opposed positions. We call these “sports rivalries”.

The sports entertainment industry developed in the late 19th century. Sports clubs were organized in urban centres so that restless young men had something to do with their free time. Christian and political organizations had been busy making links between physical fitness and moral well-being, concerned with the restless masses and their potential revolutionary instincts. The late 19th century was also marked by mass labour consciousness and the development of unions, you see. (See Hobsbawm’s Age of Empire)

The sports entertainment industry itself was initially built on the backs of the fans. Teams only made money from ticketing on game days. Safety was rarely a concern, as greedy owners would pack thousands and thousands into rickety old stadiums – and at first, refused to even pay the players. There are countless examples of stadium disasters over the last hundred and twenty years. The fans kept flocking, bonded together by a sense of community – one that had been uprooted by the urbanization of the late 19th century, with millions moving to cities leaving behind generations of family and traditions.

The anonymity of the crowd afforded the discontented citizens an opportunity to declare their unhappiness with the state of affairs. Back in Constantinople, once the chariot races were underway, the crowd started chanting and yelling obscenities at Justinian. It quickly escalated and devolved into a full-scale riot. By the end of the madness, over 30,000 people had been killed, and order was restored.

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The noted French sociologist Gustave Le Bon wrote a pivotal piece on crowd psychology back in the late 19th century. He posited that:

“…the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint”

Furthermore:

“Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian — that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings… and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.” (Gustave LeBon, The Crowd)

Since those chariot races fifteen hundred years ago sports events have been riling up people for generations. Political grievances, economic hardship or just plain sectarian conflict often frame the riots themselves. You’ve got Catholics and Protestants fighting before, during and after soccer games in Scotland and Ireland. You’ve got Serbians and Croatians fighting before during and after soccer games in former Yugoslavia. But those riots had nothing to do with the game itself – and everything to do with the social context surrounding the society.

The thing that sets the Vancouver and Philadelphia riots apart is that they were directly in response to the result of the game. When the Chicago Bulls won an unprecedented series of basketball championships in the 1990s the city was crippled by euphoric riots. Vancouverites went nuts because they lost, and once consumed by the madness of the crowd, couldn’t contain themselves. Philadelphians went nuts because they won, and once consumed by the madness of the crowd, couldn’t contain themselves. Indeed, as Le Bon noted:

“The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immerged for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself — either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant — in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser.” (Gustave LeBon, The Crowd)

I’ll always remember the first time I went to a soccer game in London. There was something incredibly powerful and rousing about being in a like-minded crowd. All forty thousand of us were there for the same reason – to support our team. Sadly my team lost and I didn’t get to cheer a victory – so my favourite moment from the evening was when myself and ten thousand other fanatics belted at the top of our lungs: The referee’s a w*nker. I turned around and there was an eight-year-old boy belting along with his grandfather. I played soccer growing up, and the one time I swore at a referee in anger I was sent off the field and wasn’t allowed to play anymore. From the safety of the crowd, I was able to yell obscenities at a stranger with no repercussions.

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It is certainly fascinating that in the two thousand years since Juvenal termed the phrase “bread and circus” to describe a tool of social control the same dynamics are still at play. Why else would ordinary citizens go absolutely bonkers after a sports result?

Psychologically speaking, what is it about modern life that compels people to lose their collective minds and break everything in euphoria or distress. How is it that sports have such an undue psychological effect on people? Is that a reflection of a certain existential emptiness in our Western societies? Or perhaps because there are so many rules to adhere to, the anonymity of the crowd allows us to strip away all our socialization in a Rousseau-ian pique of existential fury? Or perhaps there are a number of underlying social problems that come rumbling to the fore with an emotionally charged event.

Sports are certainly emotionally triggering, I get visibly frustrated when my favourite teams don’t do well – and I’m well aware it’s completely irrational. I know I’ve left you with more questions than answers, but I’ll be exploring this in depth over the next few months – especially the linkages between social unrest and riots. We live in an age of extremes after all.

Tuko Pamoja,

Rashid