Come and have a go if you think you're cool enough

'I still fight at football,’ says Peter, 43, in hushed tones in a Soho pub. ‘Arsenal last season, for instance. There have been years when I’ve been trying to wind it down – I’m a respectable man – but we were at the Emirates and I’d gone to watch the football and you’ve got 57,000 pissed-off home fans and 3,000 delirious Tottenham rivals.

I had to fight every step of the way down the Holloway Road to Highbury Corner. It was like Beirut. And I f***ing loved it! You can buy a pill or a line any time you want, but imagine if you could only take them twice a season. Or only have a drink twice a season. That’s what the buzz is like. You get given the dates every August and you have to wait months, counting off the weekends. I still get my rocks off when we walk outside the station, there’s 40 or 50 of us, there’s police all around – I feel 10 foot tall.’ Peter is a football hooligan but he’s not the stereotype of a drunken England fan smashing up a stadium; he keeps himself fit, loves his wife and daughters and works in a senior position in television.

He’s not alone. These days football violence is more likely to be meted out by successful media types, bankers and businessmen than rangy kids from council estates. They’ll have contacts in the music industry, membership of private clubs and a decent pension plan. Why? Peter talks about violence the way Alcoholics Anonymous members talk about drinking – as something beautiful and addictive and almost born within him.

City boy and Millwall fan Gary, who has been in rehab for five years – coming off the cocaine and the booze – agrees, and says that giving up fighting is the hardest thing of all. ‘It’s an addiction just like alcohol, drugs and fags,’ he explains. ‘You ask any ex-hooligan what the best drug they’ve ever used is and I guarantee they will say football violence.’

With Euro 2012 on the way, the papers are full of panicky stories about the Polish authorities combing hooligan databases, neo-Nazi groups ambushing peaceful fans and riots stopping games. You could have read the same headlines for international football tournaments at any time over the last 30 years. But this time round the difference is that it’s not English fans expected to cause the trouble, its Poles and Ukranians. Last season saw the lowest number of arrests at English league games since records began in 1985 in part because most of the scraps taking place between rival groups of fans happen miles from the ground and are rarely spotted by the media. 2010’s battle between Chelsea’s notorious Headhunters hooligan firm and Cardiff City’s Soul Crew was the rare exception – a sprawling fight between the two firms spilled on to the King’s Road, leading to police horse charges, high-profile arrests and jail sentences.

‘The last time I was out it was towards Surrey Quays, Millwall vs West Ham,’ says Ian, a media lawyer and member of West Ham’s Inter City Firm (ICF). When he says Millwall vs West Ham, he’s not talking about the teams on the pitch, he’s describing the hooligan clash. ‘We’d arranged to meet. The boys phoned each other and agreed on this car park in an industrial estate. Everyone was over the age of 30, had several children, a Daewoo estate and much nicer clothing than a poxy Tacchini tracksuit ever was. There was a top DJ, an author, two journalists, a broker, a former pop star, two major... er... “businessmen”, a City tech-analyst and no doubt many more who were never meant to make anything of themselves. It was quite a pleasant meeting, a kind of impromptu outdoors social club punctuated by incessant mobile usage to track the other firm.’ In the end, there was a brief tussle.

It’s all a far cry from the 1970s and 1980s terrace battles or pitch invasions, when rival supporters in tightly organised gangs and sometimes with professional calling cards (those beaten up by West Ham’s hooligans famously woke up to find embossed cards bearing the legend ‘Congratulations. You have just met the ICF’) fought each other for a few inches of ground in crumbling soccer stadiums. Membership of a firm was open to anyone who supported the team and was prepared to fight for it, but a close-knit group of long-serving, battle-hardened and often style-conscious ‘top boys’ organised away trips and meeting points, acting as generals, issuing tactical instructions and insisting wannabe recruits prove their mettle.

Most of the time, the top boys were also the best dressed, setting the agenda for the rapidly moving world of ‘casuals’ fashion. When using the terms hooligan and casuals it’s important to tread with care. Football firms were (and still can be) sprawling groups comprising hardcore hoolies as well as plenty of softer-core members more interested in the clothes and the music – the casuals. Casuals wore high-end labels and expensive sportswear as a deliberately subversive challenge, much like Mods wearing Savile Row suits in the 1960s. As 1980s boom money flowed into the pockets of newly minted City boys and entrepreneurs, many took great delight in buying up racks of clothes from boutiques that would have thrown them out two years earlier.

‘Most of the terraces would be casuals,’ explains Banno, a leading member of Arsenal’s hooligan firm The Herd. ‘But if you saw a bloke in higher-end clobber like a Barbour, Sebago boating shoes, or Church’s shoes, he’d see himself as the top end of the terrace, unlike those wearing CP jackets and Reebok Classics who were more your thug types.’

‘Saturday afternoons on the terraces were like catwalks for the working classes,’ explains Gary Aspden, Adidas designer and Blackburn fan. One former casual, Ed, now a highly paid marketing consultant, agrees: ‘What used to amaze me was how quickly things changed. If you look at the jeans alone, football fans went from skintight to flares to bell bottoms to tapered to 501s and on to baggy in a short period. I remember showing up one week in Tacchini, feeling proud of my label and seeing three top boys come round the corner in Burberry jackets, wearing deerstalker hats and carrying walking sticks, and realising Tacchini was over. Instantly.’