hooligan [L19th] The Hooligans were a fictional rowdy Irish family in a music hall song of the 1890s, and a comic Irish character called Hooligan appeared in a series of adventures in the magazine Funny Folks. One or other may have given their name to the hooligan, a phenomenon who made his debut in newspaper reports of cases in police courts in 1898. The football hooligan is first mentioned in the mid 1900s.