By Mario de Queiroz
LISBON, Jun 18 2004 (IPS)

In the Portuguese resort town of Albufeira, the owners of bars along the Sá Carneiro coastal strip and downtown Da Oura avenue say their receipts have averaged 22,000 dollars a day since the start of the Euro 2004 football tournament on Jun. 12.

The scene of recent rioting by England fans and hooligans, Albufeira is home to the largest community of British expatriates in Portugal. It is located 320 km south of the capital, in the Algarve region on the southern coast.

For the bar owners, the destruction of tables and chairs by England supporters amounts to an insignificant loss compared to the profits they’re raking in. But shopkeepers along Da Oura avenue in downtown Albufeira have protested against the ”undesirable tourists” with whom they do no business ”because they only drink beer.”

A total of 33 England fans have been deported from Portugal, after paying a 2,200 dollar fine, and several more have orders to be sent home. They were arrested in connection with the violence in Portugal, and are now facing trial and possible football banning orders in Britain.

A few minutes before the start of the Jun. 13 match between France and England in the Luz Stadium in Lisbon, a bar in a nearby shopping centre estimated that 3,000 litres of beer had been consumed, mainly by British fans, that day.

At the end of the match, in which France beat England 2-1, and despite the extra tension created by the fact that the victory was last-minute, fans of the two teams filed out of the stadium in perfect calm, peacefully mulling over the game – earning them a public congratulations from the police.

But when night fell in Lisbon and Albufeira, the England fans were transformed in the eyes of the police from ”bestiais” (stupendous) into ”bestias” (beasts).

Beer consumption steadily climbed, and temperatures remained high, between 30 and 34 degrees centigrade, as the night advanced and the defeat in the Luz Stadium began to sink in for thousands of Britons egged on by inconsolable hooligans.

There were racist insults (”bloody Arab”) against French-Algerian star Zinedine Zidane, who made the two goals for France, and 2,000 England fans began to make their way down Sá Carneiro avenue in Albufeira, destroying everything in their path.

Despite prompt intervention by special forces of the National Republican Guard (military police), the night of violence left a wake of broken chairs, tables and shop windows, as well as 16 injured – including police and doormen in bars – and 13 arrested: 12 Britons and one Russian.

Since Sunday, England supporters have also virtually taken over the Praça do Rossio, Lisbon’s central square, turning it into a kind of general headquarters where they gather day and night, and transforming the beautiful urban plaza into an immense garbage dump littered with piles of plastic bags, bottles, and plastic and cardboard cups.

All night long, thousands of British men and women, either scantily-clad or wearing England shirts, jump into the fountains, sing and dance, break bottles, wave flags and shout insults like ”F*** Germans!” while making the Nazi salute to passing German tourists.

After climbing statues and fountains in the square to decorate them with red and white flags and hats, the hooligans fired tear gas at floats in the parade for San Antonio, the patron saint of Lisbon, on Jun. 13.

The attack ended with a clear victory for the hooligans, who managed to send to hospital a 72-year-old Portuguese grandmother and her 14-year-old granddaughter.

Francis Sutton, a young Briton interviewed by a local TV station at 9:45 Thursday morning, while drinking a glass of beer in a local bar, said proudly: ”This is my breakfast, and it’s the fourth one I’ve had today.”

A source of information considered indispensable by many of the roughly 100,000 England supporters who have travelled to Portugal for the Euro 2004 tournament is the British magazine ‘Zoo Weekly’, whose target audience is men between the ages of 16 and 30.

The ”weekly men’s magazine”, which combines football, humour and ”girls”, has been a hit since its launch three months ago in Britain.

The information offered those who are visiting Lisbon includes the names and addresses of locales where ”prostitutes and strip-teasers” can be found.

In the magazine, journalist Richard Innes also points out spots in the Portuguese capital where drugs can be found at cheaper prices, while warning readers that taxi drivers in Lisbon will hike their rates if they see the passenger is a foreigner.

As Portugal receives planeload after planeload of visitors from all over Europe, the police are increasingly concerned about the disorderly conduct of the hooligans, and have assigned growing contingents to control the disorder.

An average of 1,220 planes a day are arriving in Portugal, and the air traffic is not expected to let up until the championships are over, on Jul. 4.

In Lisbon alone, around 7,000 people an hour are disembarking from planes, and the civil airport of Portela do Sacavem has had to reroute flights to the nearby Figo Maduro air force base.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Wednesday in parliament in London that the hooligans are not ”true English football fans at all.”

”They bring shame upon our country and shame upon the vast majority of decent English football fans who simply want to enjoy the games,” he added.

The Times of London, normally characterised by its restrained language, criticised the antics of the hooligans in Albufeira and Lisbon in an article titled: ‘How England’s Happy Drunks Turned into Animals’.

After pointing to the rioting by fans, the outrageous salaries drawn by footballers, and the huge business deals surrounding the football industry, the Portuguese humour magazine ‘O Inimigo Público’ sarcastically warned that because of the interest in the Euro tournament games shown by ordinary folk, ”football runs the grave risk of becoming a sport.”

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