Who are these new Russian football fans?

Watching the story, and the images on television of football hooliganism from Marseille unfold between Friday and Monday was hardly an uplifting experience, not

Watching the story, and the images on television of football hooliganism from Marseille unfold between Friday and Monday was hardly an uplifting experience, not least because of how one version so quickly eviscerated all the others.

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The early pictures and the commentary that went with them told of the shameful return to vintage form of the England football team’s travelling supporters. Here we were, so it seemed, right back in the 1980s: The early-morning drinking, the trashing of businesses and the outbreaks of hand-to-hand combat between our flabby white islanders and the tougher, fitter natives — in this case, some of the hard men of the sprawling Marseille gangland.

By Saturday afternoon, however, a new warrior detachment entered the fray in the shape of the Russians. And in the aftermath of the actual match, things really kicked off, when the Russians clambered over barriers to ambush their foes in the stadium.

There was a sense that starting the fighting while still in the stadium was unfair and that the French police, condemned for overzealousness outside the ground, had now been asleep on the job. But suddenly the English were the victims. Their excesses of the previous 24 hours were forgotten in the headlong rush to blame the Russians. Not only had their team had the nerve to score a late equaliser, but their fans’ brand of quasi-military thuggishness had apparently broken some unwritten rule.

At least the head of Britain’s Euro 2016 policing operation, Mark Roberts, seemed to think so. But the whole thing only reinforced — among Britons, at least — the stereotype of Russians as no-holds-barred barbarians. Their discipline and organisation also suggested an extra layer of militarism — a reminder, as it were, of Russia’s operations not so long ago in Ukraine.

The damage was compounded when Igor Lebedev, a Russian football official and MP, said it was normal for fans to fight an degged them on. “Well done lads,” he tweeted.

In all this, however, it is worth considering the wider context. The Russian sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, struck a different tone and condemned the violence. Russia’s hosting of the 2018 World Cup, he would have been aware — is not uncontested.

During a journalistic trip to Moscow in the early 2000s, I met an aide to the relatively new President Putin, whose tasks included trying to devise ways of fostering a new sense of national pride among citizens who saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a humiliating defeat. At one point, the official delved into a side cupboard and pulled out a bag. Inside was a “kit” for Russian football fans. The “kit” was sweet in its innocence, and much has happened since then. Now Russia has been fined €150,000 and has been told any further violence will result in its disqualification. But the new breed of Russian football fan may be better understood as a regrettable stage in the evolution of sporting self-assertion, than as the vicious shape of things to come.

The Guardian