i guess you can’t draw any causal links, but i wish there was more reportage or exploration about the connections between white nationalist groups and violent football fans. interesting choice to explore crowd/mob mentality instead. i love that the greatest violence the writer experiences is not from the “hooligans”

but from the police

. cool genre bending — felt part memoir in its structure/narrative choices overall. is this gonzo journalism?

My expectations for a gross and engrossing read were so brutally curb-stomped by this mess of a book. I even got my laptop out to write this review. It is actually that serious. 

My issues with Among the Thugs are that it is horribly sloppy, and it has huge flaws in its analysis.
Let me run through my criticisms chronologically as I encountered them:
* obsessive fatphobia. I get this was written in the 90s but there's a new description of how disgusting fat people are every 2 pages.
* unchecked conservatism. Maybe this just bothers me cos I'm of the 'red under the bed' persuasion, but the disdain towards the general working class (not the hooligans) was uncalled for IMO. In general I think Buford's conservatism sabotages his attempts at sociopolitical analysis later. I also hated that Boy Scouts epigraph about people being violent because the state feeds them. 
* lack of fact checking. I spotted a couple dubious references, the worst of which was calling my beloved St Ives a 'sleepy, suburban town 40 miles north of London.'
* immature prose. Consistently underwhelming, with portions that were unreadably cringey. I am specifically thinking of the two-page musing on the futile pursuit of subjectivity in journalism, as a preface to the author's confession he was drunk. It was really bad - my summary cannot convey.
* absence of setting. Manchester - London - Dusseldorf - The book is broken into chapters named after each new location, and yet there is little effort put into establishing these scenes and their individual identities. (The exception being the National Front disco). Buford is very good at establishing atmosphere through dialogue; it's this that carried the feeling of down-on-the-ground reporting, not setting.
* YOUR ANALYSIS IS SHIT MATE! Enough said. 
* synthesising machine broke. Failed to make some really obvious links. Ie. Hillsborough is recounted in excruciating detail (purpose: hooligans gone too far / mark end of the culture) and only a couple pages later Buford introduces the Sun newspaper (purpose: snobbish indictment of working class's inferior reading habits). But no connection made between Hillsborough and the Sun?

What was good: the dialogue as mentioned; the glimpse into National Front discos was an insight I've never had before; the author's relationship with violence -  at first seductively pulled in, then repulsed - was effective at threading an emotional arc through the book. 

The most striking aspect of Among the Thugs, and what I will remember it for, is its unfiltered depiction of some of the most depraved and brutal forms of violence humans can do to each other. Even if it was personally too much for me to stomach at times, recording real violence is a morally neutral thing that books do, so I don't consider that a failing.