Another thought that occured to me concerning re: Internet forums.
The thing is, Internet forums matter. They actually matter a great deal more than so-called "actual people". Because when one comes here and claims that he or she met a real idiot out on the street, that's all there really is - one person's account of some occurence told from a purely subjective perspective. Which is really no big news anyway because everybody knows you can run into a wide variety of idiots when you hit the night.
But the stuff posted on forums, social media, careless comments given to reporters... that's all on the record. It's recallable if necessary, can very much be used to point out that "yes, you did say so-and-so".
I don't mean to claim that so-called "hockey rednecks" don't exist. They do, I've run into a bunch myself. But since there's very little of them on the record, they can be easily written off as singular cases. Which is not so easy if you have whole soccer fan enclaves in the web, openly acting hostile towards the game of hockey. In the end, it doesn't really matter what the reality is. What matters is what one's rap is.
If the soccer fans wish to be taken more seriously, that's indeed what they should be doing - improve their record. But interestingly, at least in this thread, perhaps the most prominent defense we've seen is the simple "you guys are equally bad". Which strongly hints that soccer fans are not really interested in bettering their behavior - they rather wish to excuse it.
