ByDarko Savic
How can we minimize rivalrous dynamics and maximize collaboration on online platforms?
4 years ago
14
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Challenge
jnikola Jul 19, 2022
How can we make extreme fan groups (hooligans) aware of their primitive behaviour and make them do good things instead?
Image credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/1lnahzzte-E
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Football fan groups (hooligans), although gathering for a good cause (to cheer for someone or help those in need), are more often known to be rebellious and destructive. Hotels and accommodations don't want to accommodate them, bar and restaurant owners are scared when a match between rivals is being played in a stadium close to their business, and fewer parents with children go to football matches since it's not always safe.
- How can we make them aware of their primitive behaviour?
- How can we empower tolerance without affecting their sense of attachment to the club (social identity)?
- Instead of fighting the rival fans and destroying their cities, how could they do good and still have an opportunity to compete with rivals?
5
Creative contributions
Make a competition between hooligans
The hooligans are extremly devoted so let's make a competition out of this. Witch team donates the most blood? Witch team cleans better their stadiums? Witch team cleans more garbage from nature?
Let them battle in good deeds, and the winner hooligan team will receive some aditional rights: sing their song before the match? Free tikets? Their fotball team are allowed to kick the ball first?
Let them be proud of their humanity!
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Make social media groups accountable for inflammatory rhetoric
This take is coming from my experience of working as a sports journalist in a country with strong and highly polarized hooligan groups.
Social media groups or profiles are the primary means of sports news dissemination. That is the unofficial groups revolving around a certain club, something like "Real Madrid fans forever" page on Facebook, or "Chelsea hooligans" profile on Twitter. Just examples.
The legit media sites rent the chance to post their articles on the page/profile because they get a lot of visits that way. In order to make the post more clickable, they'll post the link with an inflammatory caption. Especially if the article is referring to the rivals and their negative statements towards one's own club. So they would write "the mice are yelling again" or "the honourless pussies are lying again".
With the day-in-day-out rhetoric of this style, the group's audience is getting more extremist. The opposite side stops being your neighbours or schoolmates, they are the "others". Groups and sports news sites are radicalizing the viewership for puny clicks, angering the mass and making violence more acceptible. Instead of fists, the hooligans revert to using bats, knifes, or guns.
Yet no one is held accountable for this poisoning!
So I propose to make it mandatory for the admins of social media groups with large followings to be publicly known, with name, surname and photo. For instance, if they go over 10,000 members or an agreed number. The journalist who shares the post via the page should also be credited. This will stop the vicious rhetoric from being used.
Groups doing the service of media houses now. Yet news organisations have an editor that is known and responsible for what he and his subordinates publish. Social media pages should follow the same principle.
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jnikola2 years ago
Great! People having the power to influence many people should be aware of that and carry the responsibility, whoever they are or whatever they do. I completely agree with you. So you think a simple name, surname and photo would be enough to stop the vicious rhetoric and take responsibility? We know that some individuals can not only feel good about having the responsibility but thrive and prosper even more if their identities are known. How to ensure it would really work and not become a new extremist group?
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Miloš Stanković2 years ago
J. Nikola At the very least it would lessen it. For a sports journalist to write something inflammatory, he would face scrutiny when in front of other colleagues or club representatives and players. While the group admins are usually younger people and would face consequences for their writings if the fans of other groups knew who they were.
And let's say there's an NGO that focuses on diminishing fan group violence, well now they can keep the person who shared the post accountable.
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Collective scores
Inspired by Shireesh Apte's comment, I would like to propose an app that would both entertain fans and help their team to win.
The idea
Before each match, the organizers would announce the game which lasts for a few days. A goal would be to collect as many points. Points can be collected through third-party apps or organizations by uploading activities performed in a specified period.
The benefits
- number of substitutions per team
- minutes in additional time
- better cheering equipment
- collecting donations for their team
- helping local community through club donations
Examples
- Collective running game - fans would come to the stadium, scan the QR code on the entrance or on their seat and upload the points collected by the distance they ran in the last three days; total kilometers ran or an average kms per person would decide about the winner between two fan groups
- Collective score in Candy crush saga game - fans would be asked to play the sponsoring game and, depending on the collective score they upload on the day of the match, certain amount of money would be donated to the winning club
- Collective Uber kilometers - the collective number of kms of Uber rides of the fans
- Collective numbers of voluntary work done by fans (validated by certified volunteering association)
- Collective numbers of pets adopted from the country-wide centers for abandoned animals
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Shubhankar Kulkarni2 years ago
All the suggestions are awesome! I think the viewer's games should not interfere with the player's game. For example, the first two points from the "benefits" suggest that the viewers' participation in their games benefits the actual players. There are a couple of reasons for this: Ensuring that it happens fairly is difficult since the game location changes and one team might have the home advantage. Also, the teams will then start recruiting the audience before the game and it will be a 10000-player game instead of the 11 football players or respective players in the game. I also liked the suggestions in the comment.
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jnikola2 years ago
Shubhankar Kulkarni what if the first two points were calculated as an average score per player/viewer? Would that be better?
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jnikola2 years ago
- mining crypto via the computational power of people's smartphones that earns money for the club - people would open the app and click the "start cheering" button which would start mining cryptocurrency processes via smartphones' computational power. The higher the computational power, the more cryptocurrency would be mined. The app would track the overall mining and turn the solar-powered cheering led lights on. Depending on who generates more crypto, domestic or the opponent's part of the stadium would be more or less lit up to generally create a wonderful atmosphere in the stadium.
Why?
- Creating value (money) for the club - Although the computational power of a single mobile phone is not big, the power of 20000 smartphones could be significant. That way fans could help their club by generating value, while
- Uniting fans in an honourable cause with no violence
- Teaching people about cryptocurrency
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Target the group leaders
The leaders of the groups almost exclusively craft the behaviour of the mass.
I think most of it is done for status. At least in the groups that aren't covert criminal groups, but those are beyond reeducation anyways.
But for the less-extreme groups, here are some tactics that might work:
- Have the club reach out to the group leader and incentivize him to do community services with promises of money for choreographies, merchandise, or tickets. Afterwards, have the players of the team, the captain or the manager ideally, give the leader some sort of a plaque, a trophy for doing goods. Air it via all the club's social media channels. Give a more far-reaching status to the group leader. The new given identity would be tarnished with violent outbreaks and incentivize the group leader to try to stop it as he would lose the recognition he got from the broader public than usual.
- There are some groups that already do good things, like shovelling snow in the winter. So maybe other clubs social media profiles can promote it too. Making it into a joke like saying "Team Dogooders 1, us 0". Or keeping a mockup table of community work. Daring their own fans to keep up.
- Use media to highlight who the leaders are, and frame it so that they are the ones who are responsible for the actions of the other fans under their wing. The public scrutiny aimed towards a particular individual, not a shadowy mass, should be enough to mitigate the primitive behaviour.
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jnikola2 years ago
Great suggestions! I like the idea of reaching out to the group leader. It should work. However, I am afraid some people would still disobey the leader and do acts of vandalism. They would probably not care about the leader or the messages he/she sends. For these isolated groups that are not fans because they enjoy football, but use it as an excuse to recharge their endorphin levels and fight, we need something more serious I think. But the leader tactic is definitely worth trying!
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Making it their job
What if fans actually "signed a contract" or worked as freelancers for the club?
Idea
Anyone who is a member of the club gets a unique offer of local jobs that can be done for the club. Club serves as an employer and pays out to their fans/employees.
Why?
Some clubs are owned by citizens. Clubs like these sometimes have a hard time surviving with increasing expenses of transitioning to higher leagues, fulfilling conditions, paying players, etc. This way, club can serve as an employer for the people that have a hard time finding a job or want to work a second job to help their club. Part of the money earned goes to the club to pay for the part of the expenses.
How would it work?
Jobs can include logo or t-shirt design, production of sports equipment, accounting, small projects management, bus drivers, food and drinks, farming, fruit harvesting, graffiti, babysitting or any field that require people at that moment. CLub fans are known to be very organized and efficient, therefore perfect for such roles.
Do you have any other idea how they could make profit from being fans?
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Miloš Stanković2 years ago
Cleaning the area around the stadium from litter could result in the individual being higher placed on the season tickets waitlist. Or having the priority right to purchase single game tickets, without waiting in lines, online or at the box office.
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Add your creative contribution
General comments
Shireesh Apte2 years ago
Add load cells under each stadium chair. Each chair will, in addition, have in built buttons for opposing teams. At a pre-clocked broadcast signal, the spectators press which team they are for and jump as vigorously as they can on the chairs for (say) 1 minute. An algorithm records the maximum force for each chair, adds up the two teams totals separately and displays on the stadium screen. Then, as suggested earlier on this forum, the points work themselves up to team perks: for example (for soccer): If a certain number (greater and greater) is reached:
- + 3 yards nearer to opponents goal for a free kick
- + 3 yards neaer to opponents goal for a throw in
- If team winning, then decrease 1 minute from injury time (after 90 min)., If team losing then increase 1 minute to injury time (after 90 min).
same can be done with some kind of sound decibel level measurement device but that would be harder to implement and easier to cheat.
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jnikola2 years ago
Shireesh Apte Hahahahah very cool idea! It's a great way how to engage people in spending their energy to win awards for their team. Excellent! Of course, the harder part is to implement it, but a great idea which could spark great implementation solutions.
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Subash Chapagain2 years ago
Individuals are rational, but the masses are not! This is a serious problem not just in sports but in politics and other social agendas as well. Only with a critical mass that can resist the bandwagon effect can this be solved. If we want to end hooliganism (or the negative side of it at least), the best way would be to help people be more critical and mindful.
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Shubhankar Kulkarni2 years ago
Not just football, this is an issue with most games, I think. There may be regional variation in the type of game but not the behavior. On second thought, this might be the issue with a "group of excited people with a common agenda and dedicated free time", as observed with winning political parties, too.
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jnikola2 years ago
Shubhankar Kulkarni Yes, maybe there could be some kind of an obligation of beneficiary work everybody in such groups need to do from time to time. Who collects more hours of volunteering gets to be the first in the ranking.
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