But nothing on television can provide adequate preparation for the startling, exhilarating, bewildering, exhausting experience that is a live English professional soccer match. (First lesson: Pick a side). With the most recent season just finished, here is a primer on what to expect should you find yourself at an actual game.

It will be noisier than you are used to. Emotions will be higher than they are at home. The food will be awful. People will be drunk. The weather will be bad. Many of the supporters, even the ones cheering the loudest, will not appear to be having fun as we know it, and will be expressing their feelings in novel combinations of swear words. The discomfort, the din, the rudeness, the cleverness, the chanting, the verbal abuse, the unalloyed ecstasy, the abject despair, the love, the hatred — all these are part of the ritual, essential to even to the most meaningless, late-season, non-standings-affecting match.

Today’s Premier League is in fact a modern-day iteration of an old experience. As charged as the atmosphere still is, it has changed a lot since the dark days of the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s, when English soccer was a byword for criminality, violence and hooliganism.

That was the time of the Hillsborough disaster, the Bradford City disaster and the Heysel Stadium disaster, when spectators were sometimes beaten senseless or burned or crushed to death in stadiums; when games were halted and teams were banned from playing outside England; when mayhem ruled the standing-room-only terraces; when rival fans controlled by criminal gangs fought not only in the streets and the stands but on the field, midmatch; when even the tough fans of continental Europe feared the thugs of England.

Pockets of violence still break out, as happened recently when fans from Millwall (team motto: “No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care,” sung to the tune of Rod Stewart’s “Sailing”) brawled with one another at Wembley during the F.A. Cup semifinal against Wigan. In Newcastle, the home fans ran riot after the team lost to Sunderland (one fan punched a police horse in the neck). But by and large, soccer has turned peaceful. The serious hooligans have been barred from games, their photographs circulated, their images captured on surveillance cameras, their passports confiscated when their teams play abroad, their whereabouts known.