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The Ugly Side of Football
Tragedies such as the one in Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, Indonesia in October 2022 throw light on the dark side of football. The passions evoked by the sport along with stadium mismanagement are often the cause of such disasters. There is considerable literature on violence in stadiums, which is often fuelled by male aggression, the spectators, and club loyalties, often tribal in nature. However, stadium disasters are more often than not caused by poor infrastructure and administrative negligence, including overselling of tickets and weak security.
The end of 2022 saw a celebration of football in Qatar, culminating in a final that garnered an audience of over a billion people worldwide. However, a tragedy that occurred in a football stadium not much earlier that year seems to have been largely forgotten by the world. One might be branded a spoilsport to talk about stadium tragedies in the aftermath of a successful world cup. However, it is important to remember that just as sports and football have a universal following, there is also an ugly and tragic side to that passion.
On 1 October 2022, 131 people were killed and over 600 injured in crowd violence and a stampede in the Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, Indonesia during a match between the arch-rivals Arema FC and Persebaya Surabaya. The Malang tragedy ranks as one of the worst disasters, second only in its death toll to the incident at the Estadio Nacional at Lima, Peru, in 1964, during an Olympic qualifying match, where over 300 spectators died.
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