PROSPECTING FOR BOX-OFFICE gold, the film industry seems to have decided that hooligans are the new gangsters. A slew of movies that exploit the nation’s love of football and fascination with violence is about to hit our screens. One of the first and most high-profile, The Football Factory, is released on Friday, provoking fears that it will glorify and perhaps even encourage hooliganism on the eve of the European Championship finals.

Football’s popularity and ubiquity ensure a lurid tabloid fascination with the yobbish acts of an unsavoury minority, as if orchestrated violence among gangs of fans is somehow more serious and frightening than the sort of fights that pock-mark the high streets of Britain’s towns and cities every night at closing time. Predictably, The Football Factory has already been slammed in some circles as a fetid miasma of immorality.

It is not, but there is an ambivalence at the movie’s core, a refusal to take an ethical stance on the events it depicts. Not that you would guess at its even-handedness by the publicity. “Kicking off in cinemas May 14,” the blood-red poster growls. “This is England’s Worst Nightmare.” The debate as to the timing of the release, or even whether the film should have been made at all, has kicked off in earnest.

“The trouble with a film like this is that it seems to suggest that most fans either want to cause violence or suffer from violence and neither is the case. Then that affects how fans will be received in Portugal,” Mark Perryman, an academic who campaigns to improve the image of England fans, said. “On the one hand it’s a very accurate portrayal of a particular subculture and on the other hand, particularly in the build-up to Euro 2004, it creates a generalised impression that this is what football fandom is about and I find it difficult to be convinced that that is helpful.”

Filming has just finished on a Hollywood movie that stars Elijah Wood — Frodo from the Lord of the Rings trilogy — as a former Harvard student and journalist who becomes seduced by the lifestyle of West Ham United’s Inter City Firm. Due out in 2005, the project’s working title was Hooligans, but here it is likely to be known as The Yank. Dougie Brimson, who has written a series of successful books on the subject, co-wrote the screenplay. More such films are in the pipeline, including Soul Crew, an Irvine Welsh effort about the Cardiff City “firm”.

“People have started to wake up to the fact that there is a market there,” Brimson said. “We’ve already proved it with the success of the books. There are something like 42 hooligan- related books out there and they all sell. It was fairly obvious that sooner or later someone was going to target that market in the movies.”

Adapted from the successful novel by John King, The Football Factory is Trainspotting for the Burberry-capped, steel toecap, En-gur-land generation. Not so much Bend It Like Beckham as Crush You Like Chelsea, thugs thump each other to a thumping soundtrack. The film’s depiction of men immersed in a world of drugs and violence is handled with brutality, verve, humour and wit. An uncomfortable mood of menace percolates the picture. The sport itself is liminal, if not irrelevant, to proceedings.

The characters are working-class Londoners who take beyond the limits of the law football’s potential to breed antagonism and aggression. Men who embrace fandom’s indulgence of infantile behaviour. While the extent of the average supporter’s immaturity might be a chant suggesting that a dodgy referee is an onanist, these geezers seek their weekend entertainment through fighting rather than something more socially acceptable, such as bungee jumping or watching Gillette Soccer Saturday. Each away fixture is an opportunity for a military-style foray behind enemy lines. The subtext is that they are bored and disaffected by Blair’s Britain. The racist tendencies associated with some brands of hooliganism are deliberately circumvented.

The climactic battle between Chelsea and Millwall hooligans is highly naturalistic — not surprising, since it was filmed using real-life “firm” members. “There were a few high-level thugs dotted about the place, but they were very helpful in terms of organising it. I made a big effort to hand-pick all the people involved because we didn’t want flashpoints,” Nick Love, the director, said.

Hooligans, Love says, are “here, they’re among us, they’re not all off ghetto estates. I’ve got friends that are active football thugs and they’re very bright people, some of them. It’s diversified. It’s not loads of skinheads bashing each other on football terraces any more. It’s people that want to get their rocks off by bashing each other.

“I’ve never been a football thug but I’m a Millwall supporter, I’ve seen (violence) first hand plenty of times over the years and I think that there is no deep social problem to people that engage in football violence a lot of the time. It is purely about adrenalin. In order to do the subject justice you have to show that it is exciting for some people and it’s adrenalin-fuelled.”

Brimson, a former hooligan, agrees: “People get involved in hooliganism because it’s very exciting and it’s a great deal of fun,” he said. “End of story. There is no ulterior motive. There is an element of anarchy in it which is itself very exciting. There’s an element of danger, bravado, camaraderie, bullying. It’s not as simple as the media would like it to be. Many people in the media would like to think all these guys are right-wing, unemployed morons. The reality is that’s not always the case.” A point proved last week when a history teacher was jailed for orchestrating a clash between gangs of Southampton and Charlton Athletic followers.

The Football Factory was executive-produced by Rockstar Games, a company that was taken to court in the United States over an instruction to players to “Kill the Haitians” in the controversial video game, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Love, 34, is already weary of people suggesting that his movie will encourage violent behaviour. “If someone wants to watch a film and afterwards wants to start beating people’s skulls in, I’d say that person was slightly unstable before,” he said. “I don’t think a film is going to have that much impact on something that’s already inherent in society.”

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