I am not a sports fan by any stretch of the imagination. But I must say that, when play-off time comes around for certain sports, I can kind of maybe get a little bit interested, and maybe sometimes you can even find me sitting in front of the television shouting at the top of my lungs at the little athletes on the screen.

So, the European Soccer Championships are taking place right now, and seeing as I am living in a Fussball-crazy country, it’s almost impossible to not get caught up in the hype. Especially when the German team is playing. Especially especially when the German team is playing the English team. When Germany plays England, it’s like they’re going through World War II all over again. Seriously.

This is the confrontation that took place last night. Now, normally when Germany is playing against somebody else, I always cheer for the other team no matter who they are. One reason for this is that I have a tendency to support the underdog in any given situation, and anyone playing against Germany in soccer is usually automatically an underdog. But the main reason for this is that I get so sick of the arrogance and self-importance of the German team and the German sports commentators that I want the team to lose just so that they’re all cut down to size a bit.

So I was all prepared to be cheering for England last night until the game actually got underway, at which point I found myself distinctly sympathizing with the German side of things. Maybe it was because I hadn’t noticed any arrogance coming up to this game. If anything, everyone on television was beating up on the German team for not having won their last game. Even the German players had shown an amazing lack of cockiness, which was quite refreshing.

Or maybe it was because the English - not necessarily the ones on the playing field, but definitely the ones in the stands, definitely the ones outside the stadium wanting to cause a ruckus and probably the ones back in England who were all riled up and ready to beat the “Krauts" - these English were just really annoying. And seeing as I’m not a real sports fan, my team loyalties are ruled strictly by my emotions (like, “Ooh, the French have a cute goalie - I hope the French win!”). So I decided last night that the English team and all their fans were irritating, and I hoped that the Germans would win.

Well, the Germans didn’t win, which made me sad for their sake (for a total of maybe 2 minutes), but happy for my sake: I’m happy I’m not in England right now, because I think the soccer-insanity of the English combined with certain ugly anti-German tendencies in England would serve to make me feel quite disgusted with the whole country.

But what I’m really disgusted with - and what this whole thing has been leading up to - is the hooligans. The hooligan situation is always quite a big thing in the news here, and everyone was pretty on edge (and rightfully so) about the stuff that could take place surrounding the Germany-England game.

I’m not going to get into some big discussion of hooliganism. I’ve seen quite a few documentaries on hooligans where people get all into the psychological dimensions of hooliganism - the high that the hooligans get off being violent, the rush it gives them, the release, blah blah blah.

It always boils down to one thing for me: hooligans are just stupid. Period. Sociologists and psychologists can analyze the motivation of the hooligans all they want. I don’t care what the motivation is. I think these people (the hooligans, that is) simply have no brains. They are mentally stunted. This whole thing about Neanderthal man dying out after the more intelligent Homo sapiens came along is simply not true. Neanderthal man has, over the course of millennia, evolved into that strange breed known as the football hooligan. And I use the word “evolved" very loosely.

In fact, as I watched the pre-game hooligan events going on in Belgium - which consisted of English and German hooligans throwing chairs and beer bottles at each other - I just thought: “I am looking at the lowest common denominator of humanity right here.” If you scrape the bottom of the evolutionary barrel, the sludge you dredge up will consist of sweaty, beer-bellied hooligans shouting nationalistic slogans, dribbling alcohol on themselves and throwing chairs.

I also thought that back in the Middle Ages they sort of had a similar problem: in the absence of a big war, all the bored, out-of-work knights and mercenaries would run around committing random acts of violence against their own countrypeople. To combat knightly boredom, the Church came up with a little event known as the Crusades. The Crusades made it so that, instead of beating each other to a pulp, all these medieval hooligans could go off to the Holy Land and beat the “heathens" to a pulp. From the Western European point of view (not, however, from the heathens point of view, I’m sure), this solution worked quite well.

We need to do something similar today. I don’t think we should send the hooligans off to another country. I think we need to go for more of a Roman gladiator type of solution: instead of throwing innocent people to the lions, we need to throw the hooligans at each other. We need to build a big pen, and then take all potential weapons (knives, bottles, etc.) away from the hooligans, and then put the hooligans in this pen, lock the door and just let them have at it. If they want to fight each other, let them fight each other. This way, the hooligans have what they want - mindless violence - but no property will get damaged and no innocent bystanders will get hurt.

And if some of the hooligans get wiped out - well, so be it. That’s natural selection, folks. I think we’d be doing Homo sapiens a great service here.

Further reading…