Brett Bebber's Violence and Racism in Football is a useful addition to the flourishing scholarship on sport and leisure in twentieth-century Britain. Though football violence—most tragically displayed in events like the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, when ninety-six people were killed—has received a considerable amount of scholarly attention, it has largely been in disciplines such as sociology and has focused on the period since 1980. Utilizing an impressive array of sources from recently released government documents to football “fanzines,” Bebber provides an important longer view, tracing the origins and measures taken to curb football violence back to the 1960s and 1970s. Bebber also challenges the multidisciplinary scholarship that has consigned football violence to the realm of the theatrical or ritualistic, noting that “Public and political concerns of football violence were not unfounded” (39). Yet his central argument is that both the violence and then later the racism that plagued football in late modern Britain was frequently exacerbated rather than ameliorated by the government officials, football clubs, and special interest groups who sought to stamp out these tendencies in the nation's favored pastime. Moreover, Bebber claims that there was more at stake in these events than simply the experience or reputation of a leisure activity: rather, the violence and racism in football reflected and reproduced the social conflicts that were “allegedly eliminated by the post-war social democratic compromise” (1).

Part one of the book, which is composed of two chapters, examines the historical context in which football violence and racism escalated from the mid-1960s onwards, pointing to economic decline, anxieties about youth degeneration, and working-class “hooliganism,” and the racial tensions and anti-immigration politics of postcolonial Britain. This section also carefully details the forms of disorder that actually occurred within the country's football terraces, while arguing that politicians and the police elevated football violence to the level of moral panic through sensationalistic rhetoric. The three chapters in part two then examine efforts to curtail football violence through architectural transformations to stadium environments, increased policing at matches, and manipulations of the justice system to enact harsher punishments against perpetrators. In what is perhaps the most effective section of the book, Bebber makes clear that all of these measures were built on class-based prejudices and ultimately exacerbated rather than restrained football violence, creating only an “illusion of control” (124). Instead, the new moats and enclosures built throughout stadiums simply generated new challenges for disorderly fans seeking to stage a “pitch invasion” or confront rival fans, and spectators reacted with even stronger hostility to the additional police presence and not infrequent examples of police brutality at matches. Finally, part three of the book, composed of three chapters, focuses on the racism that emerged within football following the addition of more black players to the professional ranks after the mid-1970s. Bebber demonstrates that the sport soon became a social and political battleground for racists and anti-racists alike. Some spectators verbally abused black players and threw bananas on the pitch, while the National Front utilized football matches as a recruitment site. At the same time, the government and anti-racist groups developed campaigns such as “Let's Kick Racism Out of Football” as part of broader efforts to address racial tensions and promote multiculturalism within British society, though these rarely considered the experiences of or gave a voice to the black players themselves.

A particular strength of Bebber's analysis is the nuanced way in which he describes the interactions between the historical actors under examination: the British government, the police, the football industry, neo-fascist and anti-racist special-interest groups, and the fans. That there were conflicts between perpetrators of football violence and officialdom is to be expected in this story, but Bebber shows that these relationships were not always quite so straightforward. In some clubs, the police and fans got along well, jointly blaming the “away” team for any disturbances. There were also significant conflicts between the government and the football clubs, despite their mutual interest in ending the violence, over the cost of architectural changes to stadiums and increased policing, which generally fell to the clubs. Meanwhile, football fans often fought amongst themselves, physically and rhetorically, with many less disorderly spectators demonstrating anger and disgust over the eruptions of violence around them. Fans were also significantly divided over the racism within football, as racists and anti-racists competed on street corners outside stadiums to distribute their literature, and others worried that the efforts of both groups would lead to a renewal of violence.

The book is thus well attuned to the complexities of cultural production and consumption, highlighting football's potential for both social control and resistance. Politicians, football clubs, social activists, players, and fans contested the ways in which the national sport would be experienced, and in so doing negotiated meanings about class, gender, race, and nation. Bebber's argument that football exposed and helped to construct the racial tensions in postcolonial Britain is well established, and he convincingly contends that the National Front's impact on football culture reveals that the party was more influential than its lack of electoral success has caused some historians to assume. Where the analysis could be further fleshed out, however, is with respect to gender. Bebber occasionally presumes rather than provides evidence for football's connections to working-class masculinity—an absence that speaks to a more general issue with the book, which is a tendency towards dense narrative, occasionally at the expense of the wonderful sources. There is also only the briefest discussion of women. While Bebber rightly acknowledges that football fans were predominately male, the fact that women do occasionally warrant a mention—such as in part three, where he notes that they were marginalized within anti-racist campaigns—suggests more of a story to be told. Nonetheless, the book is ambitious, well researched, and a welcome contribution to the growing historiography on postwar Britain.