The Scottish satirist Armando Iannucci (the creator of Veep and the Oscar-nominated In the Loop) once wrote a column about "hard men" where he talked about his father as such a famously hard man that his job was to stand by the water at his local shipyard and fight the newly launched ships as they came down the slipway.

Iannucci's evocation of absurd machismo came into my head at the weekend when seeing the widely tweeted photo of a Newcastle fan apparently punching a police horse. As I was in Florida, my experience of that incident was via that combustible mix of absurdity, bleakly cynical wit and outrage that ripples out in the form of Twitter fragments, whether in the aftermath of that crowd trouble in Newcastle, or Milwall fans fighting among themselves at Wembley, or, closer to home, the FC Dallas player George John being struck by a bottle thrown from his own supporters' section, after scoring an 88th minute winning goal against Los Angeles Galaxy — all incidents that occurred this weekend and that collectively gave the two days a surreally ugly quality. They're moments where disgust at the actual violence involved is mixed with a head-shaking disbelief at apparently grown adults who appear unable to grasp the fundamentally symbolic nature of sport, even when they're just there to watch.

In the George John case, for better or worse, the action seemed to be an isolated incident rather than a representation of typical behavior from a supporters group, or part of a pattern of crowd disturbances. That said, quite rightly the incident is being taken seriously by the club and MLS, and with reports of an attack on a Portland Timbers fan by San Jose supporters this weekend, MLS reputation as a generally family friendly league is under scrutiny.

To take the John incident first, the player headed in the goal then appeared to many in the crowd to collide with the post and lie on the ground clutching the back of his head. The Dallas bench were initially unclear what had happened, and even the player didn't know what had struck him at first. When I spoke to the NBC team who were covering the game, Kyle Martino, who covers the games from between the team benches, confirmed that it was only when he started getting feedback over his headphones from the outside broadcast truck, about the replays showing the hurled bottle, that Dallas FC staff were alerted and began looking for the perpetrator. John, who'd come into the game as a doubt after receiving a concussion a week earlier, completed the game and actually joked with the broadcast team in interviews afterwards that next time the fans should drink the beer and not throw it, before leaving the scene for treatment on a nasty gash.

At time of writing neither MLS or FC Dallas owners had reached a decision on further action, though the two were in dialogue on Tuesday and an announcement was expected by Wednesday to indicate what action would follow from the club owners in the wake of the incident. In the meantime the club issued this short statement:

It is always unacceptable to throw anything onto the field of play because it endangers the safety of all players and personnel. In this specific incident, we have identified the individual and we are proceeding according to protocol with FC Dallas Stadium security, Frisco Police and Major League Soccer.

To be clear, all of the Dallas Supporters group reps I spoke to, including our regular Guardian commenter Gina Zippilli, were genuinely mortified by the incident. The section of the ground the bottle was thrown from is a supporter group section, though admission to the section is not controlled by the supporter groups, and the particular individual involved is not believed to have been affiliated to any supporter group. Zippilli described a process of going through their member list and comparing photographs to NBC footage to try and identify the perpetrator, and talked about the "idiot who turned a win into what felt like a loss, for how it would reflect on us." Zippilli is a member of the Inferno supporters group, some of whom were seated in the area, along with members of the Dallas Beer Guardians (a pun on the over-21 Beer Garden section of the stadium where the bottle was thrown from).

There have been sporadic similar incidents in the past in MLS: Sporting KC goalkeeper Jimmy Nielsen was struck by a bobblehead doll during a game against Portland Timbers in 2011, and Houston Dynamo fans were punished by MLS for throwing objects during the MLS cup final in the same year. Each incident brings up questions about MLS supporter culture — which at its best melds elements of the constant singing of South American fans, the wit and chants of British fans, and the conspicuous displays of the tifosi in an entertaining American hybrid. Lurking behind all of this appropriation and reinvention of course (and an ever present balancing act for MLS, clubs and even the formal supporter groups themselves) is the fear that certain fans might appropriate or imitate other less desirable cultural forms such as hooliganism, as misplaced marks of an authentic supporter culture.

For this reason, potentially as disturbing as the John incident, and perhaps more so (given the collective nature of it), were the reports that a Portland fan was set upon by a group of San Jose fans the next evening. If true, that represents a rather more worrying development — sections of the San Jose support enjoy a somewhat mixed reputation among their peers as it is, and there have been previous incidents with rival LA groups when the two have met, but any suggestion that that behavior was bleeding into city centers at any scale will do little for the reputation of the league.

Somewhat encouragingly, the organized San Jose supporter groups such as the 1906 Ultras have been quick to distance themselves from the perpetrators and have suggested that if it transpires that any of their members were implicated, they will be expelled and the victims compensated. But in a week where NBC announced blanket coverage of the Premier League, and in the wake of ESPN's expanded English language coverage of the Mexican league, it was disheartening to see any part of MLS participate in any form in the darker side of the culture of the sport, as it continues its slow, but seemingly inexorable globalizing push into the wider US consciousness.