Fan Violence Runs Deep in Italian Society

Nov. 28, 2007 — -- In soccer-mad Italy, home to the World Cup champions -- a country whose former prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, named his political party "Forza Italia" after a fan chant -- the domestic game is in a downward spiral as confounding as it is real.

For proof, you need look no further than the stadiums themselves. Once teeming with colorful patrons, they have been transformed into near-barren fortresses.

Those who still choose to visit are greeted by the architecture of obstruction -- concrete barriers and tall fences meant to separate potentially riotous fans from the field.

But the result often differs from the desired effect. The line between being protected and feeling caged in is thin. And in this new era of Italian soccer, when tensions rise, it has too often been the culture of violence that prevails.

With this in mind, Atalanta club officials in Bergamo, Italy, were probably wise to abandon their team's match against European champions AC Milan on Nov. 11.

The sides played just seven minutes that Sunday afternoon before the plexiglass border built to separate players from the masses began to waver against the crush of a surging mob.

The attempted field invasion was the crowd's crude response to the murder of a 26-year-old fan from Rome, who was shot and killed by a policeman in Tuscany just hours earlier. The officer was responding to an early morning scuffle between rival fan groups at a highway rest stop.

The death of Gabriele Sandri was another blow to the national sports scene, its psyche already battered by decades of corruption and a slew of recent scandals.

The World Cup summer of 2006 was tainted by Italian league match-fixing trials. Six months later, in February of this year, a policeman was killed before a match in Sicily. His death prompted authorities to postpone the week's matches and bar supporters from stadiums that didn't meet common safety standards.

Tear Gas and Batons

In the capital, where the AS Roma match was postponed -- though only at the last moment -- rioters armed with burning flares took over the streets near the Stadio Olympico. They would go on to deface the national Olympic headquarters before being subdued with tear gas and baton sticks.

By day's end, Italian sporting authorities had put the season on an indefinite and nervy hiatus. It was the second time in less than a year that a day of rage had made it necessary to shut down the national game. The sports ministry promised the suspension of games would last for at least "several weeks."

Skepticism over the ruling body's dedication to reform remains widespread. Crackdowns in Italy are common. Effectively coping with and ending civil unrest is not. Even the players, who tend to remain silently beholden to their considerable paychecks, questioned the emergency declarations.

"If they asked us not to play in the next round of league games, I would do it, but I wouldn't fully understand the reasons behind it," Juventus goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon told the press the day after the riots. "What happened in [Tuscany] is not a football problem. It is a social problem that should not fall on the world of football."

Maybe those in charge of Italian soccer were as mystified as Buffon, because after one weekend off -- a misnomer really, considering Serie A, the first division, wasn't scheduled to play anyway -- the matches went on without any real change.

The Road to Ruin

Despite success internationally, the Italian domestic game has been in steady decline since the mid-1980s, when the Serie A was considered the world's best league both on the field and at the gate.

Average attendance at league games hovered at or above 40,000 during those more prosperous times. By last year, that figure had been cut in half.

Italian soccer fans, the Financial Times said in November 2005, "used to teach the rest of us how to watch football." Now they teach us how to stay home and watch televised matches for a fraction of the price and none of the hassle.

The so-called "flight from the stadiums" is the subject of great debate in Italy. Conventional wisdom lays the blame on pay television, the threat of police or fan aggression, and the predictable outcomes of most matches.

But these explanations do not describe strictly Italian phenomena. The English Premier League, a tournament contested essentially among four clubs, is also a financial giant that pulls in billions from cable and satellite contracts. Yet there is very little violence at most English matches -- even less between police and fans -- and the grounds are routinely filled.

Why then, are so few people turning out to Italian matches?

A War Zone

Considering the complex culture of soccer -- and that goes double for the Italian brand -- there is no simple answer.

The Italian fans' rights and anti-racism group Project Ultra is dedicated to addressing such issues. Ashley Young, a Bologna-based coordinator, has been doing research and working with the organization since 2002.

In an interview with ABC News, Young was quick to run down the laundry list of factors driving the two-decade-long downturn: The economy, for one, struggling with the rise of the euro, along with the sustained influence of organized crime -- a recent report listed the latter as Italy's greatest source of GDP-- was among the prime factors.

Then it was television, a ready-made excuse for many Italians to avoid what Young describes as a stadium culture that's grown "more and more depressing, more and more sad."

But at the root of the issue, he proclaimed, are the measures taken by police to curb the occasionally violent demonstrations by Italian Ultra groups. Ultras make up some of the world's most fierce and passionate fans, but their nature is more complex than your average band of sodden thugs.

"I would probably say a fan by himself cannot be an 'Ultra,'" Young explained. "It is different from a hooligan group. It is about identity, belonging to a group that will follow and support a club, but almost on the same level support the idea of strengthening and protecting the group."

There is also a perception that all Ultra groups are fronts for the propagation of far right-wing ideology and political goals. And while this is true in some places, there is no uniform code. The Ultras main concern is themselves, not the future of the state.

Young himself is not an official member of any faction, but he believes that police have taken the wrong approach in dealing with the men who fill the "curvas," or standing-room terraces where the groups convene during matches.

"We want to first of all recognize the values of popular fan culture," Young said. "Only once we've done that can we limit violence and racism through social measures and dialogue, not through sanctions and punishment."

The authorities, he said, "have turned the stadium into a military war zone. Every year in the past five, there have been harsher laws, more and more police … more and more military. There is a mistrust toward the system in general. If there isn't some form of dialogue, some social work, nothing can change."

As things stand, there's no reason to believe Project Ultra will gets its wish. The sentiment among a sizable number of Italians is that police corruption is so ingrained in their society that no honest negotiations would ever be possible.

In recent years, the judiciary has agreed to hear the cases of fans cited by police for provoking violence, but those petitions can take as long as two years to reach a courtroom. And in the meantime, the accused are treated as the convicted, and usually banned from attending games.

The future of the officer who shot Sandri in Tuscany is likely to remain in the balance for some time as well. What has been promised by the police commissioner in charge of the case is that there will be "no coverup."

That he felt obliged to make such a statement is remarkable in its own right. That the quote was made so prominent in newspaper accounts the next morning is instructive.

"You take all things together, the only reason to go to the stadiums now is to make trouble," Young said. "You've lost a lot of the positive elements. Instead of putting down tension, they react and retaliate."