Evidence gathered over several World Cups suggests a significant rise in male-to-female domestic violence in several countries during the tournament. The explanation for this rise is likely to be messy. 

Historically, football has been a vehicle of masculine gender identification and solidarity. Women and girls have tended to be excluded, marginalised or demeaned in the football world. The type of masculinity most celebrated in the culture of football is ‘hegemonic masculinity’, characterised by physical and psychological domination, an ethos of excess and the denigration of anything thought to smack of the feminine, such as emotion, moderation, abstinence, the mind, personal sensibility and male homosexuality. 

Now add high levels of alcohol consumption to this mix, and it only gets worse.

If playing contact sport is the context in which one most demonstrates one’s masculinity, then football fandom might be a good proxy, with its social admiration of toughness, contempt for softness (physical and psychological), homophobia, boorish attitudes towards women, cultivated hostilities and heavy drinking. Therefore, the environment of fandom is a fertile site for the release of men’s ‘inner boor’, which might not be quarantined when a man gets back through the front door of the house.

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"The type of masculinity most celebrated in the culture of football is ‘hegemonic masculinity’, characterised by physical and psychological domination."

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The World Cup has precise qualities that sharpen the toxicity sketched above. It is a comparatively infrequent, ‘short and fat’ event with high stakes, particularly for nations – such as England – with a strong football pedigree and consequent hopes of progress to the business end of the tournament. Contests might be imagined, explicitly or obliquely, as tests of national virility and machismo.