Abstract
Football hooliganism is an undesirable but widespread phenomenon. In this contribution, a range of measures to combat hooliganism in the Netherlands is evaluated. We use (logistic) multi-level models to analyze data on hooliganism from the Dutch Football Vandalism Information Office covering 3431 matches in the period 2006–2011. We controlled rigorously for (un)observed heterogeneity between matches and for differences in expected risk over time. Football matches played early during the day and in daylight are less likely to witness incidents of hooliganism than matches played at a later time and in darkness. The politically sensitive mandatory transport measure decreases the risk of incidents as well. On the other hand, we could not find any evidence for the effectiveness of the mandatory home-match cards or mandatory away-match cards. An alcohol prohibition within the stadium causes a waterbed effect, increasing incidents outside the stadium.
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Notes
It turned out that the mandatory transportation measure was only implemented in approximately 88 per cent of the high-risk C matches. Matches where it was not implemented were played without supporters (from the away team). The mandatory transportation measure was implemented in 89 per cent of the medium-risk B matches and in 8 per cent of the low-risk A matches. In additional analyses, which are available upon request, we included a dummy variable into our explanatory model denoting high-risk C matches without a mandatory transportation measure (this concerned 25 matches). The results of these models are almost identical as those presented in Table 1.
Naturally, there are other potential control variables. For example, a likely additional control variable may be ‘day of match’; on Fridays and Saturdays, supporters may be on a ‘moral holiday’ and adhere less strictly to behavioural standards. However, the inclusion of the variable ‘day of match’ does not substantially increase the explanatory power of our model and did hardly alter the parameter estimates of our variables of interest. We therefore decided to drop this control variable for reasons of parsimony. Results available upon request.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Dutch hooliganism registration institute CIV (Centraal Informatiepunt Voetbalvandalisme, http://www.civ-voetbal.com/), and especially Werner Leenders, for making the data available to us.
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Schaap, D., Postma, M., Jansen, L. et al. Combating Hooliganism in the Netherlands: An Evaluation of Measures to Combat Hooliganism with Longitudinal Registration Data. Eur J Crim Policy Res 21, 83–97 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-014-9237-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-014-9237-7