Game Hunting in England's Premier League Warrick Page for The New York Times Arsenal fans chant and taunt Queens Park Rangers fans before an English Premier League match in London. NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, England - The Newcastle versus Liverpool match was about to start, and the police officer at the gate was providing advice for those sitting in the away section, amid several thousand tanked-up Liverpool fans. "They might be a little drunker than usual, considering the time of day," the officer warned, speaking of the away fans (it was 5:45 p.m.). Are you a Newcastle supporter? I was not sure. "Make sure you're not; you won't have any trouble if you cheer for Liverpool," he said. He looked concerned. They're the ones wearing red. Premier League soccer is growing ever more popular worldwide. A survey by Britain's national tourism agency in 2011 found that about 900,000 tourists - 61,000 of them American - attended games that season. The league broadcasts to 212 territories for a possible reach of 720 million homes, with more and more Americans watching the games. But nothing on television can provide adequate preparation for the startling, exhilarating, bewildering, exhausting experience that is a live English professional soccer match. First lesson: Pick a side. With the most recent season just finished, here is a primer on what to expect should you find yourself at an actual game. It will be noisier than you are used to. Emotions will be higher than they are at home. The food will be awful. People will be drunk. The weather will be bad. Many of the supporters, even the ones cheering the loudest, will not appear to be having fun as we know it, and will be expressing their feelings in novel combinations of swear words. The discomfort, the din, the rudeness, the cleverness, the chanting, the verbal abuse, the unalloyed ecstasy, the abject despair, the love, the hatred - all these are part of the ritual, essential to even to the most meaningless, late-season, non-standings-affecting match. Today's Premier League is in fact a modern-day iteration of an old experience. As charged as the atmosphere still is, it has changed a lot since the dark days of the 1970s, "80s and early "90s, when English soccer was a byword for criminality, violence and hooliganism. That was the time of the Hillsborough disaster, the Bradford City disaster and the Heysel Stadium disaster, when spectators were sometimes beaten senseless or burned or crushed to death in stadiums; when games were halted and teams were banned from playing outside England; when mayhem ruled the standing-room-only terraces; when rival fans controlled by criminal gangs fought not only in the streets and the stands but on the field, midmatch; when even the tough fans of continental Europe feared the thugs of England. Pockets of violence still break out, as happened recently when fans from Millwall (team motto: "No One Likes Us, We Don't Care," sung to the tune of Rod Stewart's "Sailing") brawled with one another at Wembley during the F.A. Cup semifinal against Wigan. In Newcastle, the home fans ran riot after the team lost to Sutherland (one fan punched a police horse in the neck). But by and large, soccer has turned peaceful. The serious hooligans have been barred from games, their photographs circulated, their images captured on surveillance cameras, their passports confiscated when their teams play abroad, their whereabouts known. Children and women now feel comfortable at matches. People are less likely to beat you up. The outlawing of all-standing terraced seating in the Premier League in the early 1990s means that fans have to buy tickets in advance and sit in assigned seats, so they are not crammed together and are easier to track. Police and stewards monitor the crowds and remove people caught drinking, committing violence, throwing things at one another or engaging in racist or other abuse. "There's been a huge decline in the kind of public disorder which dominated English football from the mid-"70s and late "80s," said Mark Perryman, a research fellow in sport and leisure culture at the University of Brighton and the author of "Ingerland: Travels with a Football Nation." Going to a football match today is an entirely different kind of occasion. When he was a child in the 1970s, an Aston Villa fan said at a recent game against Chelsea, it was virtually impossible to go to an incident-free game. "In the terraces when your team scored, everyone would lean forward, and the people in the front would be crushed against the barriers," he said. Lads would just fall down on the ground and disappear. It's a lot better than it was. Still, if you come from America, where it is possible to sit next to a rival fan without fear of bodily harm, English soccer games can be disorienting, unnerving experiences. 1: Stadiums are strictly segregated according to team allegiance. The team whose fans you are sitting with is the greatest sports team in the history of sports.