10 football clubs with the most violent fans
Players and coaches in football clubs are non-permanent entities;fans on the other hand swear life-long loyalty to the club they support, their allegiance often spanning generations. As a result, sections of supporters often decide to take matters in their own hands when activities on the pitch are not to their liking. No match can be decided in this way, but this is a futile plea to make to irate football mobs.Clubs have football firms in England, Ultra groups in East Europe, and barra bravas in South America to fight their clubs cause instands and outside stadiums. Clashes between rival groups have claimed many lives throughout history, and brought an ugly reputation to the beautiful game. Itis only a game after all, butthe scale of the blood lost over it is proof to the contrary. Every once in a while, shocking images from stadiums in some part of the world leave the whole football fraternity shaken and questioning the rationality of their chosen profession.These are some of the clubs with the most notorious reputations in football hooliganism and for building an air of hostility in their home stadiums.
#10 Barcelona
The ultra fan club at Barcelona is known as the ‘Boixos Nois’, and have evolved over the year to being a hardline right-wing separatist group.
In the early 1990s, Spain was rocked by a series of seemingly irrational crimes committed by this group of fans, for whom football was never quite the focal point of going to stadiums. Investigations were initiated into the double murders of a fan of a rival team and a tranvestite, but the growing political importance of the Boixos Nois meant that they were immune to punishment.
The darkest hour in their history arrived in 2002, during ‘The Game of Shame’ on the occasion of the return of former Barcelona player Luis Figo to the Camp Nou, in Real Madrid colours. They reacted to Figo’s ‘treachery’ by whistling and jeering at every touch of the ball he made, and finally crossed all boundaries by throwing a severed pig’s head at him when he was taking a corner kick. Reacting to the ‘message’, the referee took the two teams off the field for 13 minutes for safety precautions. The match was restarted, but everyody’s appetite for goals had possibly dried up after the incident, and the match ended as a goalless draw.
Barcelona fans have been at the centre of the call for Catalonian independence that is currently threatening to tear Spain apart, and the Nou Camp has always been a setting for large-scale calls for separatism.