Hooligan Wars Edited by Mark Perryman Mainstream Publishing, 192pp, £9.99 ISBN 1840184213

English football is in decline, and has been for nearly a decade. The crowds are now bigger than they were in the 1980s, and the football played is more accomplished, but attendances still don't match those of the 1970s - when flair ruled on the pitch and modern-day "football hooliganism" was at its peak. Football was the people's game then. All you had to do was turn up. It was cheap, and a broader range of people were going along - thousands of kids, lots of OAPs and, yes, despite the propaganda, women and minorities. Now the great home ends such as Liverpool's Kop, Manchester United's Stretford End and Chelsea's Shed have been demolished and replaced with designer stands filled with new seats and new fans. The passion has gone; and if you stand up or swear, you'll be chucked out and banned.

What made England's terrace culture unique was its chaos and spontaneity, and the way it connected to the youth cultures of the various eras. It belonged to the terraces where we grew up and the terraces where we stood, and had no formal structure - any sort of connection with the club's administration was avoided. This was in marked contrast to the choreographed spectacles of the Italian and Spanish "ultras", and it is interesting that two of the best contributions to Hooligan Wars come from Italian and French perspectives. We are constantly told that foreigners regard England fans as scum, but this is not true. They love English football and its culture: the rebel element. It is this that sets the English apart from the hooligans of other countries, not the violence.

George Orwell once wrote: "The genuinely popular culture of England is something that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities. One thing one notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world." This sums up the England supporter, who is a million miles away from the conservative English gentleman our tourist board would rather promote. The middle-class liberal is also very conservative, and very different. "In intention at any rate," Orwell continued, "the English intelligentsia are Europeanised. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality."

While I wouldn't go so far as to call the contributors to Hooligan Wars intellectuals, there is a very one-sided argument being put forward here. The term "Europhobia" is used early and sets the tone. It takes two to fight, yet no attempt is made to present the point of view of those England supporters involved in disturbances abroad.

There seem to be two main arguments in Hooligan Wars. First, that football hooliganism is caused by fascists. Second, that England's away support is so violent and racist that it needs to be turned into a copy of the Tartan Army, the fancy-dress merchants of Holland or the ultras of Spain and Italy - anything, in fact, but what we already have. The idea that "Nazis" are responsible for football hooliganism has been around for a good 20 years, and it's amazing that it is still offered as a serious explanation. But, as is clear from reading Orwell, who was writing in 1941, not much has changed over the years. In Hooligan Wars, there is much talk of neo-Nazis and racists. It's an obsession.

If there was a period when racism was prevalent, it was the first part of the Eighties, when a wave of black players entered the game for the first time. Thatcher was running riot, backed up by a rabid right-wing press, and the middle-class left had disappeared up its own arse. Even then, there were black faces and black mobs, and there are many more today. There were well-known black hooligans around in the Seventies as well. The race thing passed. It wasn't nice, but people sorted it out for themselves. In some ways, football firms represent some of the most integrated areas of our society. If you are hard enough, you are good enough. In one of the most informed pieces in this book, Nick Lowles, co-editor of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, puts the fascist argument into its proper perspective.

England is a relatively tolerant country, yet you would never think so listening to our social commentators. And why do these same people always hold up nations such as France, Italy and Spain as our cultural and intellectual superiors, when they are the ones that have fascist pasts and still have neo-Nazis winning large numbers of votes in elections?

As for England's away support being so violent and racist that it ought to be changed, Hooligan Wars identifies the problem with this sort of social engineering when it notes that England has the "best and worst fans". People moan about the destruction of the atmosphere at domestic games: do they want the same thing for the England team, which in many ways still has a pre-Nineties support, with all the devotion and rough edges that includes? You can't have one without the other, and the problem with the Premiership is that, although the spectacle has gone from the grounds, the various firms still exist and, in some ways, are more violent than ever.

When it comes to travelling abroad in numbers to support their team, the English are some of the best fans in the world. When it comes to being the worst, there is no trouble at home games, apart from occasional "domestics". It's only at away matches where there is sometimes trouble. Other countries have hooligans; the difference is that they turn out only at home. Why this is so, I don't know; but what is obvious is that the England fans who travel away are the most dedicated supporters we have and deserve their tickets on merit. However, the authorities do not see it this way and want to change the make-up of the side's following, the view seeming to be that there are too many white males aged between 20 and 40. If this were planned for any other section of society, there would be uproar. But the media are silent on the issue.

England's reputation goes before them. The first time I saw England play abroad was in Spain, during the 1982 World Cup. In Madrid, gangs of Spanish blueshirts hunted the English. After one game, a Derby fan was surrounded by a mob and stabbed in the chest, the knife narrowly missing his heart. He lived. Other England fans, sleeping in a park, were beaten with iron bars. Outside the Bernabeu Stadium, thousands of Spaniards, many with knives, waited for the England fans, and then ran when England went into them. Then the riot police, who had been standing by watching, stepped in and battered the English.

Over the years, the story has been similar. In Turkey last year, two Leeds fans were butchered in the street, a level of violence you never find in England. In this book, these murders are given a single paragraph by John Sugden, and even then the subject is overshadowed by a long account of how, on a later trip to Germany, some Leeds fans were punished for sieg-heiling in a Bierkeller. The implication seems clear. In another piece, the Guardian's Vivek Chaudhary appears almost excited that the English met "a formidable foe" when trouble broke out between them and local North Africans in Marseilles during the 1998 World Cup in France.

The water-cannon incident in Charleroi during Euro 2000 and the police attacks in Brussels are mentioned by several contributors to Hooligan Wars. But what actually happened? In Charleroi, drunk teenagers threw plastic chairs and were cooled off using water cannon, while in Brussels the police went on the rampage, gassing and deporting people for being English - a repeat of their actions against Chelsea fans in the mid-1990s. There is no mention of the Turks rioting in Brussels and the Belgians blaming it on the English, who weren't even involved.

The truth is that so-called football hooliganism is wildly exaggerated. Small incidents caught on camera are turned into major stories. Tales of English drunks abroad sell newspapers and enable politicians to let off steam and our social commentators, left and right, to earn money by indulging their prejudices. The poison they are normally forced to hold back is let loose on the white heterosexual working-class male with a beer gut, short hair and tattoos. He is an easy target, rather common in fact, and who in their right mind would ever defend him? After all, he's probably a Nazi.

John King is the author of a trilogy of novels about football, The Football Factory, Headhunters and England Away, all published by Vintage. His latest book is White Trash (Jonathan Cape, £10)

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