The Theater of Sport: Bill Buford Revisits Among the Thugs by Leo Robson

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By Leo Robson<br>July 29, 2026<br>At Work

The art and life of Mark di Suvero<br>-->

Bill Buford with Granta, between 1979 and 1985. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1984, Bill Buford, an American literary editor in his late twenties, began devoting his spare time to following “football hooligans”—a distinctive tribe of fans known for committing acts of violence and vandalism on match days. English soccer in those days was associated with brutality on the “terraces” (the standing area at stadiums) and in the streets before and after matches. Hooliganism was the so-called British disease, a source of national shame. Buford started going around with the Manchester United “firm,” or gang, known as the ICJ, or the Inter-City Jibbers. Later, he sought danger at a disco organized by the far-right group the National Front, and while traveling among England’s supporters at the World Cup.

Buford’s time in England had begun at a different social altitude. A Marshall Scholarship sent him from Berkeley to undertake a second B.A. at King’s College Cambridge, a grand establishment associated with members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. Buford fell in with the student journalism society, and worked to turn a failing undergraduate magazine, Granta, into a leading journal of international writing.

At a glance, Buford’s two identities were chalk and cheese. But in his work overseeing Granta, he displayed an appetite for danger, mischief, drama, and grit. The experiences Buford wrote up in Among the Thugs coincided with issues of Granta that featured a portrait of life on the road with the Rolling Stones in the late sixties (a piece he compared to Michael Herr’s writing on Vietnam), James Fenton’s account of the Snap Revolution in the Philippines, and a new subgenre of American fiction, represented by Raymond Carver and others, which Buford saw as being defined by “a curious, dirty realism about the belly-side of contemporary life.”

Buford’s own curiosity took him to Britain’s belly-side during some of its darkest days. They weren’t to last forever—at least not in that form. In 1985, following a stadium disaster in Brussels, partly caused by Liverpool fans, English teams received an indefinite ban on playing in European competitions. The most popular British broadsheet, the Sunday Times, having recently lamented English soccer’s status as a “scum sport” played in “scum stadiums” and mostly attended by “scum people,” expressed the hope that in five years’ time it could “cease to be a pariah” and turn into “a family sport.” Leaving aside the questionable choice of terms, this is more or less what happened. Buford’s account climaxes with a riot in Sardinia, during the 1990 World Cup in Italy—an event widely viewed as the turning point in the fortunes of English soccer. Among the Thugs, published in 1991, after six years’ labor, bore ambivalent witness to an era that was finally fading.

INTERVIEWER

The origin of Among the Thugs is recounted in the opening pages. Your first encounter with the phenomenon of soccer “hooliganism” came when you were waiting on a station platform in Wales and you saw a train rammed with chanting fans on their way home from a match. When did you start to think that this visceral experience had the makings of a book?

BILL BUFORD

It evolved. When I saw that train, I realized that even though football violence had been widely reported in a sensationalistic way, I had no idea of its intensity. Soon afterward, I went to a publishing party—it’s referenced in the book. I was talking to Salman Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa, and I described the scene. They asked if I’d been to a match. As it happened, the only match I’d been to was U.S.A.-Mexico in Mexico City, which the U.S.A. lost 8–0. So we all went to a Tottenham Hotspur game—this was at the end of the 1982–1983 season—and it just reinforced the delight and the power of the crowd in all its different manifestations.

I came away thinking that I’d commission somebody to write it for Granta. My first idea completely belly flopped. Adam Mars-Jones had written a piece called “Structural Anthropology,” and it was so witty—I thought, Adam can write about football hooligans. In fact, he would probably have had a hard time being accepted. His education, his delightful Englishness, his sophisticated accent. It was a rough lads’ culture and he would have stood out in a way that would have made it difficult to get access. I had no baggage. I was an American. If anything, people would ask, “What’s this American doing here?” I was a natural observer. But that’s later.

I then happened to be having lunch with an editor at the Sunday Times in London, Eric Jacobs. An old-school-type geezer, but very supportive of literary...