Liverpool's universities and colleges bring more than 30,000 young people to the city during term time. Liverpool has not produced a world-beating band since Frankie Goes to Hollywood in Patterns the early Eighties, and that band got its ideas for Patterns htm "Relax" and "Two Tribes" from a Manchester journalist, Paul Morley. It is less obvious that young men in Liverpool have any choice of identification and celebration outside football. Description Dave Haslam points Patterns htm out that Liverpool has only one big club - Cream - to Patterns compare with the dozens in Manchester. "Clueless boys who don't know how to history do anything: htm they don't history know how to dance, they don't know htm how to drink, they don't know how to pick up women."Manchester Description history Description Circulation boys do, however, have some varieties of choice. Description There Circulation is a kind of Circulation trainspotter's history earnestness about both their htm fervour for the club and their Patterns hooligan image.But history Description Circulation they might as easily have chosen to be passionate about the music of Manchester; and Dave Haslam sees many young men like them Circulation in his clubs.

You couldn't look at those Liverpool fans and ask yourself, 'Who are these people?' You already knew." Looking at Kurt and his friends in Manchester, you know them again.It doesn't bother them whether or not the economic resources of Manchester and its hinterland might be insufficient to allow United to compete for European cups with Milan, Barcelona or Madrid. "We don't lie awake in bed wondering whether we're good enough to beat Inter," says one. "We do lie awake worrying about beating Liverpool."Like Nick Hornby - who had his books, his Buzzcocks records and his lapidary conversations about feminism with north London women he wanted to impress - Richard Kurt and some other members of IMUSA seem to have adopted the identity of the football moron as an elective choice, perhaps for want of a more mature source of male identity. He writes, "They are the only fans in the country of whom you would not be ashamed to think the following: You wish it had been them at Hillsborough '89 instead of Liverpool."Fever Pitch discussed the consequences of this style of Blackshirt posturing in the context of Heysel. "The kids' stuff that proved murderous in Brussels," wrote Hornby, "belonged firmly and clearly on a continuum of apparently harmless but obviously threatening acts - violent chants, wanker signs, the whole petty, hard-act works - in which a very large minority of fans had been indulging for nearly 20 years.

In short, Heysel was an organic part of a culture that many of us, myself included, had contributed to. You might suppose they are just winding you up, and themselves as well. If so, the act is convincing.In Kurt's book, Leeds supporters are variously described as being subhuman, sheep, vermin, scum and pond life. football [is] my child comforter, my security blanket..."The devotion of these fans for their football allows and ratifies irrational hatred and baseless prejudices. It encourages violent intolerance towards nominal external enemies and a specious bonding between "committed" followers of a common cause. Richard Kurt and his friends will declare, like Nick Hornby, a political sympathy for the Left; but the language of their hatreds and their attachments is close to that of the racialist BNP and British Nazis they abhor.