Should soccer games not have live spectators?

Without fans paying for tickets the football club would not exist. That’s a singularly stupid plan to “improve” the game.

I guess I haven’t been watching the news. Where do you read that fans are being killed or injured at soccer games every week? I would think the most violent fans would be hockey, but I’ve never looked in to it.

And yeah. What @Seek said.

Yes.. i think soccer fans must top the list across the world when it comes to violence and other sh*t. If anyone watching what’s happening in France you’ll come to know easily. But the solution you have given is absolutely not possible as without these fans no game can exist be it hockey / football or anything else. If you’re so much concerned about your safety then yes you should watch it from comfort of your home!!!

Come on. Hooliganism is what Football is all about.

It is rare. If we expanded further nobody should go to nightclubs or high school.

Gotta roll the dice. I’m eating Arbys and drinking PBR right now. I will die first.

To be clear. I wasn’t suggesting, they don’t have an audience, but couldn’t think of an easier way to ask if there should be changes made in how the sport is viewed by live crowds… I was interested in hearing from someone who might frequently attend some of the more note worthy events where the violence makes its way to the news.
I would also note that I disagree that tickets for the game provide the majority of the funding for professional teams. I would think that smaller / semi pro teams count on ticket revenue, but I know that pro baseball, NBA, and NFL don’t rely on ticket sales to pay the bills. They make exponentially more on TV deals and merchandise. For every 60,000 people in an NFL stadium there are many , many more watching on TV. I would assume that is the case with pro soccer, although I already admitted I’m not very knowledgeable about the sport.

The saying, you can’t protect people from themselves may aply here. I wanted to know if there’s anything different about these games from other sporting events that may be the cause. Has anyone attended a soccer game where a riot broke out? Was it preventable? Is it simply a matter of needing more security at the rivalry games?

It’s not a nonsensical question, although it obviously does offend some sensibilities.

In the first place “fans are not necessary to the game”. The game exists, or could exist, without fans. I can’t count the number of athletic contests and games that I’ve played in that had no spectators whatsoever. “The game” doesn’t need them.

Obviously, for professional sports, we assume that paying spectators in an arena are a necessary element, else how would sports attract and retain such peak athletes in the prime of their physical lives? Not many people play games at that level “for free”, or for very long.

But we do have the Olympic model. Billions are spent on creating Olympic venues (which certainly include present live, paying spectators at those venues), but consider how many more billions are spent in broadcasting those Games to a far larger worldwide audience than will ever view them in person. So it’s possible that even high caliber professional sports could exist in some form with other kinds of remuneration / sponsorship / reward models. We just haven’t thought of that, yet.

It might also be possible to in some way limit the viewers’ attendance at a live event to below some as-yet-unknown critical mass point, below which an event of “fan violence” (assuming it doesn’t include weapons, arson and the like) would be no more than an unpleasant embarrassment, like a fight between parents at a Little League game, instead of a mass casualty event that spills over into widespread municipal rioting. In that way, live attendance at sporting events could be a total billionaires’ show, with only the team owners and selected fans – and relatively small numbers of them – in attendance, and the rest of the interested world watching on television.

Or maybe the fans just need to be armed, so that when rioting breaks out, they can start shooting the ringleaders. Or at least shooting at the ringleaders of the rioting on the other side. Hell, it could be a whole new endeavor for competition. Those Hunger Games aren’t going to start themselves, after all.

@CWOTUS but the Olympians aren’t paid to compete. For many of them it’s a major stepping stone to the pros, where they will be paid to compete, or at least paid to appear in the media, or to have sex change operations.
You just can’t compare an ancient, once-every-four-years event to weekly soccer or football. Plus you have to be pretty well off to be able to afford to watch the Olympic in person. Any bum can get tickets to the local soccer games.

I think that people have just gotten the idea that violence is OK now. I was in a drive through line at a fast food restaurant. The gal in front of me wasn’t pulling up when the line moved. Behind us people were backed up into the street. Finally I gave a gentle honk, and she proceeded to just start screaming and cussing me out. She was on her phone and I heard her tell the person she was talking to that she was gonna come back “there” and show the “bitch some real trouble.”
That’s what this world is like any more.

@CWOTUS football, as it exists in the world now, is VERY MUCH a huge multibillion dollar business. As is the Olympics. Would kids still pay football? Sure, but it would be more like LaCrosse. Where there is money, there is crime. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2015/may/international-soccer-officials-indicted/international-soccer-officials-indicted
https://rdeliason.com/2015/06/01/fifa-indictment-charges-issues/

@MrGrimm888 Football hooliganism is actually held against the football club the supporters are there for. Here are some latest articles. http://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/football-violence

The hooliganism behind the sport has more to do with petty regional arguments thugs have. Thank fuck they don’t have guns because there are gun control laws here. But the violence is the European version of your gangs in America, I guess, and it is fuelled by large doses of alcohol.

Thanks for the links, @cazzie.

Yes, I am very much aware that there is a ton of money in football (soccer, as we call it), which was why the FIFA corruption scandal has been such big news for so long. But that doesn’t mean that the performance / spectator model can’t change. There’s big money in purely American sports, too, but for some reason the fan violence isn’t the problem that it frequently is in Europe and some other parts of the world. (Not that it’s non-existent; when American teams win championships, it is often bad news for the sponsoring city, with rioting and fan violence – primarily alcohol-fueled – causing a bad night or two. Still, the mass casualty events that result in pandemonium and frequent deaths from stadium rioting, that’s foreign to us. Let’s hope it stays that way.)

One hopes that the model can be tweaked in some way – even if it’s just stadium engineering and massive security, or the threat of a city losing a team completely if certain minimum standards of safety and security for players, referees and fans are not maintained – to prevent the horrible violence that seems to occur with some regularity elsewhere.

Thats because Football isn’t famous or doesn’t have much fans in America. You would always find the stadiums full in Europe :)

Just wanted to state that soccer is growing fast in popularity in America right now. I used to work part time in a large sporting goods store, and soccer is becoming a more popular choice for first sports for kids than a lot of longer standing, more traditional US sports. Some of that is due to it being (on field ) less violent than say , football. And the start up cost is much cheaper. But the world should give America some credit. They are trying to get more involved with soccer…