The abuse hurled at Europe’s golfers in the Ryder Cup elicited gasps and dismay on both sides of the Atlantic. The crowd at the Bethpage Black course in New York graduated from boos and heckles to homophobic slurs and insults aimed at players’ wives. The first-tee master of ceremonies set the tone by leading a chant of “fuck you, Rory!”, putting Rory McIlroy firmly in the crosshairs – along with his wife, who was hit with a beer cup.
After initially playing it down, American golf officials apologised and said some fan behaviour had “crossed the line”, but the affair has left a nagging sense of unease. What if the line has in fact moved? What if accepted codes of crowd behaviour have changed?
It is a question social scientists and event managers have been asking in recent years and spans several countries and types of spectacle, obviating any sense that the issue is confined to US golf fans.
Taunting banners brandished at football terraces, gum spat at tennis players, objects hurled on to concert stages, heckles during concerts – an apparently never-ending litany of boorish, loutish behaviour fills news feeds.
“It’s undeniable that in all aspects of public life a growing number of people are becoming more belligerent,” said Kirsty Sedgman, a University of Bristol cultural studies scholar.
“It’s not just that people are becoming more badly behaved, it’s that when they’re called out, instead of simmering down they’re much more likely to turn against those making the complaint.”
Last week the Broadcasting, Entertainment, Communications and Theatre union (Bectu) published a survey that showed 34% of those working in live events in the UK had experienced antisocial behaviour, violence, aggression or harassment from audience members in the past 12 months, with that figure rising to 77% for front-of-house staff.
Some theorists of crowd psychology attribute aggression to “deindividuation”, whereby a sense of anonymity and sensory overload untether people from their sense of individual identity and they do things they ordinarily would not.
Other theorists posit “convergence”, in which the crowd dynamic uncorks individuals’ inner beliefs and values.
Either way, the results can be ugly. “Faggot!” some US fans screamed at McIlroy. “Wanker!” shouted others. Many commentators have linked such invective to toxic social media feeds and the climate of political polarisation, which suggests a modern phenomenon.
But there is nothing new in sports fans or theatre audiences behaving badly. In ancient Athens, Plato complained about spectators becoming mobs, arguably making him the first theorist of crowd behaviour.
Any gathering of humans, in fact, can cause upset. Thomas Hardy took the title of his novel Far From the Madding Crowd from Thomas Gray’s 1751 poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, that railed against the “ignoble strife” of those who disrupt “sacred calm”.
Today’s anxiety over the coarsening of crowd behaviour can be overdone and is to some extent “moral panic”, said Sedgman. “Each society has golden-age thinking – looking back to a time when everyone was kind and courteous.”
Some Scottish boxing fans still squirm over memories of a crowd booing Muhammad Ali during an exhibition bout at Paisley in 1965. “All booing must stop when the king’s in the ring,” he exhorted in vain.
Eric Cantona took more direct action in 1995 when a Crystal Palace fan shouted “fuck off back to France you French motherfucker” by leaping over the barrier to deliver a kung fu kick.
Some experts question whether modern manners really have degraded. “The headlines tend to come from high-profile incidents: disorder at Wembley, gate-rushing at the Copa América final,” said Anne Marie Chebib, the managing director of the UK Crowd Management Association (UKCMA). “Yet the data tells us these are exceptions. The overwhelming majority of events take place safely and securely, with no disruption, but those stories rarely make the news.”
In a 2023 poll of the association’s members, 93% reported deteriorating behaviour but the following year 57% reported no change or only a slight worsening, a pattern replicated in a Global Crowd Management Alliance report. “Many practitioners now see behaviour as broadly stable,” said Chebib.
Stephen Reicher, a University of St Andrews psychology professor and an authority on crowd behaviour, said there were perennial fears about the rowdiness and danger of crowds but that violence was extremely rare.
Of 49 million attendances at British football matches last year, there were 1,963 arrests, of which half were disorder, he said. “You would likely get far more arrests if that many people of that demographic were in town of a Saturday afternoon. So you could argue that people are less likely to be disorderly and violent in a football crowd.”
However, crowds make news only when there are disturbances, said Reicher. “You can have hundreds of games on a Saturday afternoon and violence at one. So which will be reported? And if we only see crowds when crowds are violent we get a highly distorted view of crowds as characteristically violent.”
The Ryder Cup’s history and uniqueness suggest other reasons not to extrapolate too much from the scenes at Bethpage Black. The 1999 contest at Brookline, Massachusetts, was marred by abuse likened to a bear pit. McIlroy asked security officials to expel a particularly obnoxious heckler at Hazeltine in Minnesota in 2016.
The tournament is structured around the US versus Europe at a time that Donald Trump is reconfiguring the meaning of Americanism, said Reicher.
“It affirms the new world against the old. It is about triumphalism, about domination, about success by any means necessary. It rejects a rule-based order. It celebrates masculinity, domination excess.
“The Ryder Cup shows the traction it is getting among at least some Americans. We cannot suppose from that it is relevant to all sports or even all golf.”
Mark Breen, the strategic director of Safe Events Global, a company that advises on security, said swift action can shape crowd behaviour.
“It’s about knocking bad norms on the head early, or establishing good ones,” he said.
“Normal, decent people will get caught up in some behaviours so maybe you throw out the first hecklers, make an example of the worst offenders. But you don’t want to sterilise the sport, take the passion out of it.”
Adding concerts and other events as adjuncts to sporting occasions complicates the balance, said Breen. “When you’re building a festival vibe, it’s harder to manage social norms. You just have to work as hard as you can to avoid boorishness.”
John Drury, a social psychology professor at the University of Sussex, said music event organisers had reported deteriorating audience behaviour since the Covid pandemic, to the point it was now normalised.
One possible explanation was that lockdown restrictions stunted socialisation, said Drury. “You’ve got a cohort of people that weren’t socialised by older generations when they’re going out, so they’re not used to it, and so perhaps don’t know what the norms are. What they’re doing feels right to them, but to other people it doesn’t feel right.”
Another possible factor was audience members doing stunts to get attention on social media. In most cases it was just a tiny minority causing disruption, said Drury. “But these dramatic events are then presented as a kind of trend in audiences.”
Sedgman has a more ominous analysis. Audience behaviour is a bellwether of wider societal trends and the apparent growth in loutishness, or lack of consideration, shows a fraying in the social contract, of the agreed norms that bind a society, she said.
“An increasing number of people think they don’t need to follow these norms, that only mugs do so. It’s the canary in the coalmine.”
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