Them Olde Wankers

Since the early 90's, Swedish football has exploded. A huge focus from media, lots of supporters in the stadiums, and an economy that has a close to an absurd development rate over the last years.

In the 80's, Swedish football had problems. The audience didn't come to the matches, and Sweden was shot out of the 1990 World Cup with three consecutive losses (1-2,1-2,1-2). Then, something happened. Hammarby supporters, Bajen Fans, perfectly exploded. The foundation had been laid ten years earlier, in the 1982 final vs IFK Göteborg. But now the time was ripe. Mostly influenced by Italian ultras, Bajen Fans got famous with their never ending positive support. With Bengal fires and huge flags we occupied towns and cities throughout the 90's. The supporters of other teams followed, and today we have a quite healthy culture on the terraces.

Off course, there are darker sides to this development. Subcultures has sprung forward, or rather changed scene, that has violence built into them. They are called Firms, and the individuals Hooligans, and every major team in the highest league has one or more of these firms. They do fight, and they do cause some trouble, but for the LARGEST PART, they carry out their work outside of the arenas. Perhaps they meet with their antagonists in some park somewhere, and they quite accurately fight it out. We, who live our lives on the terraces, acknowledge this tendency as a SOCIAL PROBLEM. Not a problem directly correlated to football itself. Young men have fought against each other for ten thousand years; it's not exactly fresh news. In loosely formed groups, they met and fought it out. In the early 1900's, gangs related to city parts would fight it out, and today the scenario is what team you are related to.

The Swedish Football Association, SvFF, is less impressed. Since the early 90's, they have ever tried to oppose this development. In their world, everyone should sit down at the matches, pay their high ticket prices and shut the hell up. The SvFF is glancing at England, which after their rather troublesome 60's, 70's and 80's, carried out a rather extensive legislation program. Which led to a point where you as a spectator has to sit down, and much accurately should shut the hell up.

The reason for this article, is that the time has come where not only a guiding principle has been drawn up by the SvFF, but the prosecutors of the city has proposed new legislation to tighten it all up. That's fine, to some extent. If you hit another man in the face, you should be prepared to receive a punishment. Nobody oppose that. But the problem here is that the SvFF in particular is judging everyone alike. If there are 10 000 supporters in an arena, not everyone are hooligans! It's what, 100? 150? I STRONGLY oppose to this type of collective punishments. It's one of the ugliest sides of our society, that large authorities has the tendency to punish a collective instead of an individual.

As an example, the majority of the Allsvenskan teams have passed a new legislative proposition which means that the visiting team has to pay for the security of ALL visiting supporters. This is nothing short of an outrage, since the majority of the teams do not have any supporters to speak of. When one of the big teams - Hammarby, AIK, Djurgården or IFK Göteborg - travel to another city, perhaps a thousand or three times that travel their. The costs of keeping security is large. But it doesn't stop there. Additionally, the visiting team does not get anything from sold tickets in the away sections. The home team get all the money, while the visiting team has to pay. It's also odd in another sense, as the home team is always responsible for the event itself. In fact, the team's very existence in Allsvenskan is regulated by how well you arrange the events.

As a result, Hammarby supporters united association, Bajengruppen, has decided to boycott the two following away matches, against GAIS on Thursday and then vs Kalmar. We HAVE to show the SvFF and try to create an opposition among the regular audience, that we, as a collective, will NOT be treated as criminals, we'll NOT be frightened to silence, we'll NEVER sit down in matches (until we get old) and we'll sure as hell never accept to be compared to hooligans. Because we're not. We're just passionate supporters that do everything in our power to stand by our team, in good times as in bad. We happily pay high ticket prices, we travel 600 kilometers for an away match.
And what do we get? Mistrust. From whom? Wankers!

Supporters of other teams are following behind. AIK supporters are first out, they are probably going to perform some type of protest in the following matches. That's positive!

--------------------------------------------------------------
As a side note, I think one major problem is that we, the supporters, and the SvFF does not speak the same language. When we say "supporter" the SvFF hear "hooligan". One of the first things you have to do when you discuss something, is to clearly define the true meaning of the words you use. In plain English: To know what the hell you're speaking of. That's a whole science, in fact, and it's called philosophy.