So the Knicks have won. And naturally, the civilised world must now watch as Manhattan burns—or at least, its public transport does. The scenes of fans torching buses, overturning cars, and brawling in the streets are not merely the exuberance of victory. They are a symptom of something far more troubling: the re-emergence of a distinctly British disease on American soil.
For decades, we have looked across the Atlantic with a mixture of pity and condescension at the football hooligans of the United Kingdom. We told ourselves that such tribalism, such primal thuggery, belonged to the rainy terraces of Luton and Leeds. Not here, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But here we are in 2025, and the barbarians are not at the gate. They are the gate.
This is not about a basketball game. It is about the decay of civic virtue, the collapse of the public sphere into a playground for what the Romans would call the plebs. When a sports victory becomes a licence to destroy, you have a society that no longer knows how to win with grace. The Knicks’ championship is their first in decades, but the response is not joy. It is catharsis—a violent release of pent-up frustration that has nothing to do with the final score.
One cannot help but draw parallels to the decline of the Victorian era, when the industrial masses were pacified by spectacles—gin, circuses, and the nascent football leagues. We are witnessing a similar narcotising of the populace, but now the narcotic has lost its potency. The rage bubbles over. The buses burn.
And let us not pretend this is spontaneous. This is the logical endpoint of a culture that values the fleeting thrill over the enduring good, that celebrates the vulgar over the refined. When your heroes are overpaid athletes and your public squares are stages for instinct, you get torchings. You get the mob.
Of course, the apologists will rush to defend these actions as mere passion. They will say that every great city has its rowdy celebrations. But there is a difference between drunken singing and arson. There is a difference between the victory parade and the riot. The line has been crossed, and we are pretending it has not.
What we are seeing is the gradual barbarisation of American public life. A loss of self-control, a decay of the very idea that we owe something to our neighbours—or to the bus driver who will have to find a new route tomorrow. This is not a New York problem. This is a national problem, a civilisational one.
If the Knicks’ championship is the high-water mark of American sporting glory, then we are well and truly in a low-water mark of public order. The spectre of British hooliganism is not looming. It has already arrived. And it is wearing a Knicks jersey.
So let us stop pretending that this is all in good fun. Let us stop rationalising the irrational. And let us ask ourselves: what kind of society celebrates a victory by setting fire to its own city? The answer is one that has already lost the game.
