74 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED | SI.COM
This foundation of hardship, leavened with the coarse
culture of textile factories and docks, and baked in with
resentment from feeling looked down upon by richer
Mancunians and more blue-blooded Londoners, was a
recipe for Salford to become England’s most proudly pug-
nacious place. If there’s one thing a Salford lad enjoys
more than a pint of Boddingtons, it’s a good scrap. “When
they have a drink,” Massey said of his neighbors, “the lads
from Salford, they just like a fight.”
So, perhaps Salford’s eventual place in the world of
sport was inevitable. It just had that brawling nature, that
contempt for authority. And it had Old Trafford, home of
England’s most illustrious soccer club, a rare fountain of
pride, right in its backyard.
In the 1970s and ’80s, while a young Massey was steal-
ing crates of beer from Whitbread’s Brewery and getting
sent off to reform school, hooliganism, a part of soccer
since the sport’s inception, was spiraling the English
game toward its dark nadir. Innocent bystanders, in the
stands or on a train platform, would find themselves stuck
between two factions of overcharged supporters—say,
Manchester United’s Red Army and Liverpool’s Urchins,
to single out some usual suspects—and get punched or
clubbed. Or worse. Hungry-for-blood fanatics would
sharpen the edges of two-pence coins or spark plugs and
throw them into crowds. They would take over train cars
and brawl with police. In the Midlands, a goalkeeper
was injured by a block of f lying wood. In London, a fan
was killed in a postmatch riot. Doors at some stadiums
were closed to visitors. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
convened a “war cabinet” to address it all. And in this
violent epidemic, Manchester was a hot spot. After United
was relegated to the second division, in ’74, its hooligan
firms terrorized soccer grounds up and down the country,
culminating in the fatal stabbing of a Blackpool fan. The
Red Army’s antics—including a bloody at-sea brawl with
West Ham supporters, on a ferry to Holland—led to crowd
segregation. In ’77, based on its notoriously nasty follow-
ing, Man U was even banned from European competition.
“If there was any sociology at all to it,” says Bill Buford,
who embedded with hooligan firms for eight years to
research his 1990 book Among the Thugs, “it was that they
did it for no reason except it was fun.”
The beginning of the end of that fun came in 1989, at
an FA Cup semifinal at Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium,
where overcrowding led to a human crush that killed
nearly 100 people. Police wrongly fingered hooligans in
the aftermath (security’s own negligence was to blame, a
jury later ruled), but the catastrophe still served as a wake-
up call. Within a few years, it seemed, hooliganism had
all but disappeared from English soccer.
The hooligans, though, were still out there, and in
Salford, as much as anywhere else, elements of these groups
evolved into street gangs. For years those gangs operated
abandoned lots as unauthorized Old Trafford parking
grounds—now they began expanding into more lucrativebusinesses. They needed to. Greater Manchester was strug-
gling, especially Salford, where jobs were relocated to
India as factories closed. Shipping moved toward larger
containers, beyond what the canal could accommodate. In
1982, Salford’s docks, which decades earlier had employed
5,000 people, closed. Unemployment among young men
ran close to 90%. Manchester became a symbol of the
tough industrial city in decline.
It was this stew of hooliganism and down-and-out Salford
angst that fed and nurtured Paul Massey. A magnetic fire
hydrant of a man, with piercing brown eyes and a promi-
nent nose, Massey had all the promise of a future Mr. Big:
a streetfighter’s rash confidence, an innate understanding
of how to maneuver in the shadows and a middle finger
pointed squarely at authorities. All he needed was a big
opportunity, equal to his dangerous potential.T
HAT OPPORTUNITY CAME in a yacht-builder’s shop
on the other side of the shipping canal from where
Massey grew up. In 1982, the managers behind two seminal
Manchester bands, Joy Division and New Order, converted
an old red-brick warehouse into a multif loor nightclub.
The Haçienda hosted an era-defining roster of rockers,
including The Smiths, The Stone Roses and Oasis. But
that wasn’t really the scene for Massey and his hooligans.
Then New Order headed to the Spanish party island ofP
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