This isn’t a moral debate — it’s a call for curiosity and harm reduction.
If drugs are part of the fan experience for some, ignoring it won’t make it safer.
Let’s talk evidence, not stigma.
📖 Full paper: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

So why the silence?
Is it because football fans in the UK have long been under media & policing scrutiny, while American fandom is treated as more commercial, polished, and contained?

US: 22% fans reported using drugs at a game, and 76% saw others take drugs.
But unlike the UK, drug use didn’t vary by sport — basketball, baseball, hockey fans behaving similarly.

UK: 6.5% of fans said they’d taken drugs at a game in the past year. ⚽ 60% had seen others doing so. Cocaine use among football & rugby fans was twice the national average and greater than in cricket.

Local rivalries can ripple out to affect cohesion at the national level.
Raises big questions for ethnicity, religion, class, politics & beyond.
Huge thanks to @MBilgehanAytac & Linus Peitz — and to Türkiye for hosting this study!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Participants saw Turkish national team line-ups with more or fewer players from their own vs. rival clubs.

- National bonding dropped when rival clubs were overrepresented

-Stronger national bonding → more prosociality

- More rivals on the team reduced prosociality

Whether it’s gang violence or helping a stranger, group bonding shapes action.

Time to reframe how we understand social ties in criminogenic & prosocial contexts. Read the article: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our framework bridges criminology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology.

We call for more dialogue: crime science needs fusion theory—and fusion research needs crime scholars to tackle moral & social harms.

Fusion isn't "bad" or "good". It's powerful. People fused to their group may commit crimes for it—or make deep sacrifices for others. This has huge implications for how we study & prevent crime. 🧠

Time and outstanding staff are needed for both; invest in strong community programmes and supporting staff. Full article: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

🤝Attachment to coaches → immediate bonding & sustained group identification
Whilst both strengthen social bonds, they work differently over time.
Our findings highlight the power of community interventions for building positive social identities in prison.

A focus on shared depth might be what it takes to close the empathy gap.

Full article here: bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

It's not about the specific story you tell. It's about helping others feel that you’ve been changed by something—and ideally, that they have too.

Shared transformation, not shared trauma, is the real glue.

In a final study, analyses showed that it's less about WHAT happened—football, prison, death—but that something deeply transformative occurred internally, and both people recognised it.

That sense of shared transformation was enough to bridge differences—even criminal history.

In both countries, identity fusion (a deep sense of connection) predicted whether people were willing to hire someone who’d been to prison. But what triggered that fusion was culturally shaped. Sport in the emotionally repressed UK; bereavement (and overt feelings?!) in the US

Across four studies, we found...
🇬🇧 Brits who saw football as transformative felt more bonded with prisoners who were also football fans—especially when they'd endured tough defeats.

🇺🇸 In the US, it was personal loss & adversity (like death) that did the bonding work.