Rome: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester/7141379.stm (The Rome incidents got press coverage at the time, surprised that you’ve forgotten)
Indonesia: http://uk.reuters.com/article/UK_WORLDFOOTBALL/idUKJAK15973620080208 (this one’s fairly recent, so you might have missed it)

Please get your facts right.

The incident in Iraq is an isolated incident yet violence is increasingly on the rise in new football nations like China, Korea and Australia? Do you have specific instances of proof? Specifically for me, I am absolutely stunned to read how Korea is even mentioned in the same post as even contemporary English football when it comes to football violence.

Like I said, fan support is sometimes rowdy, but I have yet to hear of a full blown football riot (be it pitch invasion, fans fighting in the stadia or on the street because of a football match) in Korea. The recent championship 2-leg matches between FC Seoul and Suwon Bluewings had passionate support from fans and we were simply thankful that the stadia sold out but emerging instances of football violence, I’m not sure what that is. Koreans will fight the police over imported US beef, the KORUS FTA, and other social injustices, but it has yet to happen for football. Korean fans were cleaning up their own garbage after watching World Cup matches live in big screen TVs across the country and we’re an emerging hotbed of football violence? To suggest that a couple of fisticuff incidents between fans amounts to football violence is laughable at best and a complete misrepresentation at worst. To say the Iraqi incident is the work of one madman and completely isolated but then to misportray countries like Korea as some kind of hotbed of football violence due to discontent youth is completely false. The problem with domestic football in Korea is that not enough youth give a rat’s ass about club football.

I’m not going to comment on China or Australia since I don’t know what their domestic scene is like, but let’s keep this real.

It’s funny, given the reputation the English game still suffers after the bad days of the 70s and 80s that our domestic game suffers far less in terms of fan misconduct than some of the other big footballing nations. The football worlds disdain for the English game seems to extend naturally to the sports media who would still like to paint English fans as the black-sheep of world football, when the reality is that in Italy, Spain, Germany, Brazil, and increasingly in the new football nations like China, Korea and Australia, violence is a bigger problem.

Maybe it is a natural stage in a nations evolution as a footballing one that there will be periods of unrest, but the likes of Italy and Germany can’t hide behind those excuses, they are too long in the tooth to still be behaving like teenage boys. The Iraqi case mentioned here shouldn’t be lumped in with other incidents of violence, this is the act of a single madman, and not a group led pattern of behaviour on the part of the countries footballing public. One just hopes that the Iraqi game doesn’t suffer terminally because of it, since football has been one of the few points of positivity since the occupation.