The grim violence outside Anfield on Tuesday night, in which Roma fans attacked their Liverpool counterparts, was like a flashback to the dark days of the 1980s: romanisti were carrying belts, bottles, stones and even a hammer; one man, 53-year-old Sean Cox, remains in a coma.
Although it seemed like the hooliganism of old, its roots are actually very different. The Roma fans are part of what Italians call “ultras”, meaning “beyond”, “intransigent” or “extreme”. Every Italian football team has its ultra gang and big clubs have dozens. I’ve been researching the subculture for years and, violence apart, they’re nothing like old-school British thugs.
Hooligans were generally chaotic and drunk. Italy’s ultras are uber-organised, hierarchical and calculating. They started, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as wannabe paramilitary groups. They gave themselves names that made them sound like insurgents: Commandos, Guerrillas and Fedayeen (the group suspected of Tuesday’s violence). Although nominally apolitical, the vast majority of ultra groups in the 1970s borrowed the images and slogans of the far left, some even using the names of partisan brigades from the Second World War.
That paramilitary planning is evident in the weekly meeting each ultra group has in its own HQ, with a “president” or capo taking charge of proceedings. I’ve sat in on many and they’re like strategic policy meetings, with the core members debating slogans, songs, press releases, alliances and ambushes. I once asked someone nicknamed “Half-a-kilo” what would happen if I started my own song on the terraces and he was aghast at such spontaneity: “It would be a very serious offence if it hadn’t been agreed by the directive.”
So it was no surprise that last week’s ultras were dressed identically: all in black bomber jackets, blue jeans and white trainers. As with many Italians, the ultras are fixated on appearance and pageantry: for major games, they spend tens of thousands of euros on what they call “choreographies”: stadium mosaics, taunts, flags and flares. An ultra group’s own banner is like a military herald.
In that sense, the ultra world seems folkloric: the ultra world is a faux-medieval defence of the country’s campanilismo (attachment to the local bell tower). In fact, many ultras say they care nothing about football: it’s all about territorial defence, about the colours, the fights and the “mentality”. Ask an ultra next to you on the terraces who scored a goal and they’ll laugh at such naivety: they either weren’t watching or players change teams so often that they don’t know or care about the name.
It’s a world that, at its best, can often seem like a Sherwood Forest of outlaws and rebels. Their hated “Sheriff of Nottingham” is modern football: the fixture folly caused by TV schedules, tinny stadium music, Orwellian surveillance, disloyal players and asset-stripping owners. Many ultra groups from small clubs are genuinely noble, racing to help earthquake and flood victims or planting trees after forest fires.
But there’s also a very dark side. Last December, Italy’s parliamentary anti-mafia commission concluded in a report on the phenomenon that ultra behaviour “often reproduces mafia methods”: omertà (silence or secretiveness), collecting funds for jailed accomplices and holding weapons and drugs for third parties. The head of Lazio’s Irriducibili was recently convicted of dealing hundreds of kilos of cocaine in the capital. The commission’s report suggested that 30% of ultras are either petty or major-league criminals.
Dealing in tickets is as lucrative as, and less risky than, slinging drugs. Until his arrest, one Juventus capo-ultra, a Sicilian member of the Bravi Ragazzi (the “goodfellas”) was making €30,000 (£26,000) a game through ticket touting. That was only possible because Juventus were giving bulk tickets to ultra groups to keep them sweet; the ultras made millions a year and the club were untroubled by bad behaviour that might have meant fines or docked points. Few clubs can afford to take on their ultras – a fans’ strike is costly – with the result that there are always compromises between the suits and the “soldiers”.
When I went, a year ago, to the HQ of Juventus’s Droogs (named after the violent types in A Clockwork Orange), I saw bricks of cash and tickets next to a huge poster of Mussolini. It was more like a bank than a fan club. The Calabrian mafia tried to move in on those huge profits and in 2016 the man acting as a bridge between the ultras and the club, Ciccio Bucci, either committed suicide or was “suicided” the day after talking to investigators. His was just the most recent in a long line of deaths; over the years, the ultras have been responsible for shootings, arson, stabbings and disappearances. Each time, the murderer is eulogised on the terraces. At Anfield on Tuesday, one of the banners held by Roma fans read “DDS Con Noi”, meaning “Daniele De Santis is with us”. De Santis murdered a Napoli fan before the Italian cup final in 2014. Two years ago, an ultra in Fermo, in Le Marche, murdered a Nigerian immigrant and his name was sung throughout every subsequent match.
In the past, only a handful of ultra groups (those of Lazio, Verona and Inter, for example) were from the far right. Now the vast majority have neo-fascist names, symbols, slogans and salutes: Hitler and Mussolini are frequently invoked and foreigners are abhorred. In 2012, Tottenham fans were stabbed in Rome as they were considered Jewish. Anne Frank stickers have been used to insult rival teams.Hopefully, Liverpool fans won’t have any trouble during the return leg in Rome on Wednesday, but experience shows that anything can happen in a world that means “beyond”.