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'I still fight at football,’ says Peter, 43, in hushed tones in a Soho pub. ‘Arsenal last season, for instance. There have been years when I’ve been trying to wind it down – I’m a respectable man – but we were at the Emirates and I’d gone to watch the football and you’ve got 57,000 pissed-off home fans and 3,000 delirious Tottenham rivals.

I had to fight every step of the way down the Holloway Road to Highbury Corner. It was like Beirut. And I f***ing loved it! You can buy a pill or a line any time you want, but imagine if you could only take them twice a season. Or only have a drink twice a season. That’s what the buzz is like. You get given the dates every August and you have to wait months, counting off the weekends. I still get my rocks off when we walk outside the station, there’s 40 or 50 of us, there’s police all around – I feel 10 foot tall.’ Peter is a football hooligan but he’s not the stereotype of a drunken England fan smashing up a stadium; he keeps himself fit, loves his wife and daughters and works in a senior position in television.

He’s not alone. These days football violence is more likely to be meted out by successful media types, bankers and businessmen than rangy kids from council estates. They’ll have contacts in the music industry, membership of private clubs and a decent pension plan. Why? Peter talks about violence the way Alcoholics Anonymous members talk about drinking – as something beautiful and addictive and almost born within him.

City boy and Millwall fan Gary, who has been in rehab for five years – coming off the cocaine and the booze – agrees, and says that giving up fighting is the hardest thing of all. ‘It’s an addiction just like alcohol, drugs and fags,’ he explains. ‘You ask any ex-hooligan what the best drug they’ve ever used is and I guarantee they will say football violence.’

With Euro 2012 on the way, the papers are full of panicky stories about the Polish authorities combing hooligan databases, neo-Nazi groups ambushing peaceful fans and riots stopping games. You could have read the same headlines for international football tournaments at any time over the last 30 years. But this time round the difference is that it’s not English fans expected to cause the trouble, its Poles and Ukranians. Last season saw the lowest number of arrests at English league games since records began in 1985 in part because most of the scraps taking place between rival groups of fans happen miles from the ground and are rarely spotted by the media. 2010’s battle between Chelsea’s notorious Headhunters hooligan firm and Cardiff City’s Soul Crew was the rare exception – a sprawling fight between the two firms spilled on to the King’s Road, leading to police horse charges, high-profile arrests and jail sentences.

‘The last time I was out it was towards Surrey Quays, Millwall vs West Ham,’ says Ian, a media lawyer and member of West Ham’s Inter City Firm (ICF). When he says Millwall vs West Ham, he’s not talking about the teams on the pitch, he’s describing the hooligan clash. ‘We’d arranged to meet. The boys phoned each other and agreed on this car park in an industrial estate. Everyone was over the age of 30, had several children, a Daewoo estate and much nicer clothing than a poxy Tacchini tracksuit ever was. There was a top DJ, an author, two journalists, a broker, a former pop star, two major... er... “businessmen”, a City tech-analyst and no doubt many more who were never meant to make anything of themselves. It was quite a pleasant meeting, a kind of impromptu outdoors social club punctuated by incessant mobile usage to track the other firm.’ In the end, there was a brief tussle.

It’s all a far cry from the 1970s and 1980s terrace battles or pitch invasions, when rival supporters in tightly organised gangs and sometimes with professional calling cards (those beaten up by West Ham’s hooligans famously woke up to find embossed cards bearing the legend ‘Congratulations. You have just met the ICF’) fought each other for a few inches of ground in crumbling soccer stadiums. Membership of a firm was open to anyone who supported the team and was prepared to fight for it, but a close-knit group of long-serving, battle-hardened and often style-conscious ‘top boys’ organised away trips and meeting points, acting as generals, issuing tactical instructions and insisting wannabe recruits prove their mettle.

Most of the time, the top boys were also the best dressed, setting the agenda for the rapidly moving world of ‘casuals’ fashion. When using the terms hooligan and casuals it’s important to tread with care. Football firms were (and still can be) sprawling groups comprising hardcore hoolies as well as plenty of softer-core members more interested in the clothes and the music – the casuals. Casuals wore high-end labels and expensive sportswear as a deliberately subversive challenge, much like Mods wearing Savile Row suits in the 1960s. As 1980s boom money flowed into the pockets of newly minted City boys and entrepreneurs, many took great delight in buying up racks of clothes from boutiques that would have thrown them out two years earlier.

‘Most of the terraces would be casuals,’ explains Banno, a leading member of Arsenal’s hooligan firm The Herd. ‘But if you saw a bloke in higher-end clobber like a Barbour, Sebago boating shoes, or Church’s shoes, he’d see himself as the top end of the terrace, unlike those wearing CP jackets and Reebok Classics who were more your thug types.’

‘Saturday afternoons on the terraces were like catwalks for the working classes,’ explains Gary Aspden, Adidas designer and Blackburn fan. One former casual, Ed, now a highly paid marketing consultant, agrees: ‘What used to amaze me was how quickly things changed. If you look at the jeans alone, football fans went from skintight to flares to bell bottoms to tapered to 501s and on to baggy in a short period. I remember showing up one week in Tacchini, feeling proud of my label and seeing three top boys come round the corner in Burberry jackets, wearing deerstalker hats and carrying walking sticks, and realising Tacchini was over. Instantly.’

Fusing masculine rituals, expensive fashion, a love of music and belief in a cause meant football firms’ top boys inspired a curious devotion in firm members. Take the funeral of Dainton ‘The Bear’ Connell in 2007, security man for the Pet Shop Boys and a top boy in Arsenal’s firm. Among those mourning his death in a Moscow car crash were the former Arsenal players Ian Wright and Lee Dixon, Frank Bruno, Pet Shop Boys Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, the Madness frontman Carl Smyth, the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, Janet Street-Porter, Matt Lucas and David Walliams. Robbie Williams sent flowers. Connell had left school at 16 to take up scaffolding and was briefly famous when he gave an interview to Janet Street-Porter claiming to be the ‘first black skinhead on the Arsenal terraces’. It was Connell who claimed the word Gooner for Arsenal fans, originally a taunt, and who led charges at Highbury stadium’s Clock End to ‘take’ ground held by away supporters. He chased National Front recruiters off the Arsenal terraces and was credited for the failure of the movement to infiltrate the Arsenal firm in the late 1970s. He went on to appear in videos for the Pet Shop Boys, an unlikely fusion wrought in the illicit raves of the late 1980s.

As acid house spread through the UK in 1988 and 1989, football firms became more interested in raving than rucking. Heading to nights at Shoom (in a studio near where Tate Modern is today) or the nearby underground acid house club Clink Street (where Boy George’s hard-as-nails brother Kevin worked on the door), casuals and gay men, united by a love of dance music and ecstasy, rubbed shoulders, entrancing the likes of the Pet Shop Boys and cementing a link that would last more than 20 years.

Since then, the boys from the terraces have grown up and out into culture, making music, writing books, producing films, television, theatre and fine art. Some believe it was inevitable. Banno, for instance, a well-known stage actor in his early fifties, has written two well-received plays and produced documentaries for Channel 4. He’s sure he became an actor because ‘being a top boy is about fame, attention and recognition; wanting to be a face. That’s something you never lose, you just apply it to other walks of life.’

It seems strange, I venture, to phone someone, chat to them, arrange to meet them and then try to beat the living daylights out of them – then, a few weeks later, do it all again. ‘We’re all the underground has got left,’ Banno shrugs. ‘Everything else has been co-opted. The local pub has gone, the community has gone, all you’ve got is your firm and it’s only another firm that can understand that. At Dainton’s funeral we had wreaths from the ICF and Tottenham’s Yid Army and we had boys coming down from every city to march behind his coffin. What we represent – and what fascinates all these artists – is simple: we’re the unity of the opposite, the outsider united.’

The ICF ended up running the pirate radio acid house station, Centre Force. Boy’s Own magazine, launched in 1988, was also a product of the football/rave fusion, led by the DJ and Chelsea casual Terry Farley. Boy’s Own was about music, fashion, slang, football and drugs. In the first issue it summed up its audience: ‘We are aiming at the boy (or girl) who one day stands on the terraces, the next stands in a sweaty club, and the day after stays in and reads Brendan Behan while listening to Run-DMC.’ The magazine later launched the record label Junior Boy’s Own which went on to introduce the Chemical Brothers, Underworld and the Black Science Orchestra to the world.

The 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey spent his youth on the stands at Everton and became a casual. ‘It was a working-class style, a genuine subculture. It was a kind of drag, a disguise. A means of using style to transform yourself,’ he says.

The 48-year-old’s 1999 video essay Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore was compiled from 1970s and 1980s film footage, much of it from a Thames Television documentary on the ICF called Hooligan.

Other ex-hooligans include Game of Thrones star Sean Bean, who was a fully tattooed-up member of Sheffield United’s hoolie firm the Blades Business Crew, Beautiful South and The Housemartins founder Paul Heaton (a fellow Blade), and Noel Gallagher ran with Manchester City’s firm. Even the opera singer (and Oxford graduate) Mark Glanville confessed to years clashing on Millwall’s terraces in his autobiography Goldberg Variations.

Reformed hoolies have become business leaders as well. One of Manchester United’s former top boys (now a Buddhist) runs a significant chunk of Ibiza’s wholesale food supplies. Ian Davies, who once adorned the front page of the Daily Mail as ‘Britain’s richest football hooligan’ now runs a wine bar in Dorset’s Sandbanks, one of the most expensive areas of real estate in the world. Flight Options, which handles travel to football games and had a significant contract with FIFA for World Cup flights to South Africa, was founded by a former member of The Herd. And the recent rash of hooligan memoirs such as The Football Factory and England Away has produced almost 100 kick-lit books name-checking more than 150 hooligan firms; two of the publishing houses dominating the hit-and-tell genre, Headhunter Books and Pennant Books, are run by former hooligans: Chelsea’s Martin King and West Ham’s Cass Pennant.

‘I’m not surprised you’ve got the boys out there running things,’ says Jeff, 45, a former ICF member turned international accountant. ‘After the trouble of the late 1970s got the law’s attention, anyone involved in an 1980s crew would have to have the best organisational skills you can imagine. And they were all doing deals, whether that be scallies nicking trainers from German stores and selling them back in Liverpool, firms sorting their own transport or, in the late 1980s, crews who ran raves and did a bit of dealing. Lots of using your initiative. It was no business school, but you learned a lot.’ ES

Some names have been changed