How does this strike you as a pithy form of postmatch analysis? “It’s very important that you stick together as a group . . . This was a mistake the British were always doing. They were always stranded . . . I can’t say that they lacked the heart, but obviously they lacked the skill.”
Spoken over vivid action replays, this critique in This World: Russia’s Hooligan Army (BBC Two, Thursday) is delivered by a pundit who is hidden behind a ski mask.
This is the leader of a gang of thugs from Orel – Ivan the Terrible’s hometown – reflecting on the violence in Marseilles during Uefa’s Euro 2016 championship, in which Russian gangs injured more than 100 English fans and put 30 in hospital. “I bet that’s my guy,” he says of one of two left in a coma.
By deciding to pursue Russia’s “firms” of hooligans – a term that connotes the determined professionalisation of violence – the film-maker Alex Stockley von Statzer goes looking for trouble. He finds it in Moscow, in the fearsome shape of Vasily the Killer, a fluent ideologue of a toxic movement, the Steve Bannon of football hooliganism. “Hooliganism has given me principles and courage,” he says over tea. “Some get it from sports, some from prison. I get it from hooliganism.”
Most participants speak of the attraction of such groups quite sensibly, without reaching self-insight. “When we are being good no one remembers us,” another masked hoodlum from a deeply depressed town says. “When we are being bad no one forgets us.”
Stockley von Statzer’s documentary loses its way for similar reasons: he identifies implicitly with the hard men. It seems that too many interactions with vainglorious idiots who describe themselves as “champions in combat fighting” – or, more risibly, “special military forces of football hooligans sent by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to conquer Europe” – have become intoxicating. Even when he is invited to share a nude sauna and a prebrawl bout of karaoke there is little dip in seriousness. Imagine what Louis Theroux would do in a similar situation.
Instead Stockley von Statzer accompanies the group of misfits as they take on a rival gang in a Russian forest, cutting the carnage with the kind of pummelling music they favour in their self-inflating propaganda videos. “I’m in shock at what I’ve witnessed,” he says. Sure you are. But if you want to defuse these glorified pub brawlers try setting the images to the Benny Hill theme tune.
As to the question that supposedly guides this documentary – will the Marseilles scenes be repeated in Russia? – few think they will. Putin doesn’t need to have Moscow trashed to prove the virility of Russian manhood. And no one here is going to mess with daddy bear.
