Exploring the digitalization of football violence: Ultras, disembodiment, and the Internet

This chapter works at the nexus of criminology, football studies, and digital cultural studies, and seek to move beyond “old” understandings of football violence as a “problem” of the past and explores how the Internet allows groups of football fans, known as ultras, to interact internationally. The chapter first appraises existing literature on football violence and online football violence, to offer a conceptual framework that explores and explains the digitalization of football violence and its role in ultras’ culture. More specifically, in exploring this it develops the notion of “(dis)embodied football violence”, which captures how some, what are called, “cyber-ultras” act behind pseudonyms and/or a football club’s avatar to attack others through text or action. It argues that violence done online necessitates violence off it, which, in turn, allows us to consider former theoretical frameworks used to explain the related but separate literature on “hooliganism” as dated. Its key contribution is to point to a growing need to explore further the contemporary phenomenon of football violence as transnational and digitalized.