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Timing ‘dangerousness’: football crowd disorder in the Italian and Greek press

This article seeks to shed light on the reasons beneath the emergence of football hooliganism-related media-orchestrated moral panics. Comparative analysis of the upmarket press coverage of the issue in Italy and Greece from the 1970s onwards reveals that the transforming of football hooliganism into a security threat was to a great extent dissociated from the scale and seriousness of the phenomenon. In both case studies, the change in the way journalists perceived football hooligans was closely associated with an array of social and political factors that were unrelated to football crowd violence. Contextualization of these findings suggests that the gradual replacement of the political origins of this threat-focused perception by apparently depoliticized risk-oriented security threat assessments has played an important role in legitimating liberty-restricting counter-hooliganism policies.