The Football Champions League was on Saturday, the day my family returned to Munich and the 14 years old son said to his Dad:…”we must be careful when we go by subway, the game will just be over and the hooligans are expected to be out to make trouble…” I thought, what is this, where are we? What happens to us?

I am not a football fan myself but I do remember the modest sports fields where our village youth played and the families got together and friends to cheer them on, but I have never experienced violence around sports events, or in this case football. Or, for example, in the USA, in Louisiana where we joined our grandchildren for all kind of ball games, for competitions between schools, but there were never any fights or ugly scenes like we have in Europe, with fire in the stadiums, street fights, people kicked who have nothing to do with it.

We won’t find this readiness to use violence in any other sports such as tennis, golf tournaments, equestrian sports, winter sports, why with football? In the internet I find it explained with the comments by some hooligans questioned: “Football gives me a kick, it unleashes me and violence and brutality liberate me…” So it has actually nothing to do with the outcome of the play but to get rid of frustration which had built up over weeks?

Football is a type of sport for the masses in the narrow space of a stadium, emotions whip up passions in waves and are passed on that even the coolest person gets infected. One wrong word in the wrong direction call for verbal or body attacks. I have never been in such a situation and am not looking for it but I have watched it build up on television.

Sports have become an industry, it has no longer anything to do with national pride, players ‘de toutes les couleurs’ are bought for millions and citizenships are no question, clubs are bought and supported by rich people, whatever their nationality is. This strikes me as very strange as just around the corner we find racists groups shout and protest, kick and kill, but if the same person plays football, it is a different matter.

I don’t believe it has anything to do with the idea of sports and competition if one club has all the means to get the best players and best trainers and other clubs will never get the chance to reach that level because of the lack of money.

So tell me, what get these hooligans so excited about. By the way, do you know where the term ‘hooligans’ stems from? In a music hall song of the 1890s a fictional Irish family by the name of Hooligan, rowdies and thieves, became known and thus the name became a synonym for street gangs and it appears in police reports of 1894. Hooliganism, however, was associated with sports in the 1970s in the UK, the football hooliganism.

Hooliganism has become a movement, these people travel across continents to make trouble, but in the depth of their heart they are, regarded separately, tiny insecure personalities that only outgrow themselves in big groups, there they find their identity, as a group they are strong. The problem is the alcohol that pushes these groups to the extreme, lowers their moral limits and makes them into dangerous often deadly weapons.

All this energy could be better used, perhaps some scientists find a way to store such energy in huge batteries for us to warm up our Middle European climate.

I found a shocking photo on internet, a small boy following in the steps of a hooligan, becoming a hooligan freshman.