Hated and Proud- Ultras Contra Modernity

by Mark Dyal

  Issues of Soccer and Globalization

  The disconnection between long-time local fans, the business of soccer, and what some perceive as FIFA and UEFA’s vision for the game is consistent with other responses to postmodernity and turbo-capitalism. In essence, what is being experienced is the deterritorialization of fandom.341 Deterritorialization is a process first theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It occurs when an ‘event’ (thought or action) is detached from its original environment (of meaning or location).342 Poststructuralist theorists use the concept most consistently to explain the radical changes to the experience of space since the onset of postmodernity. The deterritorialization of space through geographical mobility and inconsequentiality (via the internet and global capital systems), coupled with flexible labor processes and markets, not only de-territorializes the individual but also re-territorializes him or her within a structural and functional system designed to accommodate radical increases in consumption.343 Fandom is impacted similarly.

  The features of deterritorialized fandom are multifarious, impacting the non-local fan, the clubs, and the local fan. For the fan who is part of the global audience, deterritorialized fandom allows him or her to actually be a fan. Indeed, the act of consuming the game demonstrates the sometimes-positive effects of deterritorialization, namely the reterritorialization of the event as a personal experience full of meaning and value. As Deleuze explains, each act of deterritorialization is concurrently destructive and constructive. While the local context is negated, such an act of negation also opens new ‘conditions of possibility’.344 The process here is entirely subjective, even as it occurs as a benefit of recent communication technologies.345

  It is possible to explain reterritorialized fans as a ‘third culture.’ Mike Featherstone explains ‘third cultures’ as practices and knowledges that are independent of nation-states and particular locales.346 Internet and satellite television make it possible to engage in fan activities for events occurring anywhere in the world at any moment. While this fan is not yet the norm, it is the target of EUFA’s Champions League. Part of the Champions Leagues approach to transnational marketing is the use of the ‘global clubs’ discussed above and de-and-re-territorialized fandom.

  The disconnection of clubs from their local contexts makes them ripe for the polysemic narratives so necessary to the promotion of transnational consumption.347 The creation of identities around such consumption is a must if the game is to be experienced worldwide. For their part, fans now have an unlimited number of choices regarding which club or clubs to support. ‘Third culture’ fandom thus may include an expansion of knowledge, as the deterritorialized fan may possibly gain awareness of places and political processes otherwise unknowable.348 ‘Third culture’ fans might also develop, or enhance, their appreciation of the game — its strategies and aesthetics — through ever-improved televised images of the players’ skills.

  While for the non-local or global fan, the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or of globalization, are experienced positively, it is clear that for others these processes can be negative and quite destructive. For many clubs, the processes damage not only their financial viability but also their cultural worth. Smaller clubs, those without the following or resources to position themselves within the global flow of capital and information, are often rendered superfluous.

  If a club is unable to compete at a level that allows Champions League qualification, and their local constituents are able and willing to follow, through the television and Internet, a larger or even ‘global’ club, they eventually find themselves playing to empty stadiums and without the ability to support themselves financially. This has happened to numerous clubs in Italy. Most recently, in 2008, FC Messina, club of a small Sicilian city, was declared bankrupt and disbanded. The club’s history began in 1900 and survived depression, migrations, and earthquakes but it was unable to compete financially in Calcio Moderno.

  Many fans in the United Kingdom (as well as the Ultras of Italy) fear that globalization will render their clubs contentless. As they lose their symbolic connectivity to place and particular fans, clubs become the empty signifiers that are thought (and sought) to generate consumptive desires, but they lose what made them important in the first place.349 The language of placelessness and contentlessness forms part of the discourse of deterritorialization. It argues that experiences of culture are losing their connectivity to space, time, and place, wherein the local is subsumed by global identities and processes.350

  The decimation of cultural worth occurs as local particularities are replaced by the new postmodern universals: consumption, multicultural identities, psychology, and increasingly, genetics. Behaviors are motivated by, and meanings are sought in, the most ecumenical and bourgeois explanations available.351 In Europe, the most telling example is the changing relationship of the two clubs of Glasgow Scotland: Celtic FC and Glasgow Rangers FC. As Celtic has begun positioning itself as a ‘global club’ it has been forced to distance itself from the very thing that has made it an institution in Scotland: its identification with Catholicism; more specifically, Catholicism against the Unionism and Protestantism of its biggest rival Glasgow Rangers FC.

  Since the 1880s, Celtic has been an institution amongst Catholic Scottish and Irish soccer fans. It became a symbol of these communities at an early date, after Rangers became the team of choice for Scotland’s Protestant majority. Celtic has no prohibition against Protestant players, but until recently it focused on fielding a team entirely of Scottish players. For their part, Rangers enforced an un-written rule of not fielding Catholic players. The first openly Catholic player to sign, and play, for Rangers was Mo Johnston in 1989.

  Both clubs, known collectively as the ‘Old Firm,’ are now actively engaged in fighting sectarianism amongst their fans. Sectarian songs, flag waiving, and aggressively religious support are now banned in both of the clubs’ stadiums. Celtic has launched numerous campaigns aimed at calming sectarian passion amongst its fans. One, called ‘Youth Against Bigotry,’ was an educational initiative for the promotion of respect for ‘all races, all colours, all creeds.’

  Not coincidently, it is playing in the Champions League that has prompted Rangers to police its supporters. Rangers fans were accused of sectarianism by UEFA after a 2006 match against Spanish club Villareal and the club was ordered to pay a fine as well as to make public address announcements against religious or nationalist singing or display. They were specifically ordered to make announcements prohibiting the singing of the song ‘Billy Boys,’ which honors Billy Fullerton, the leader of a 1930s Protestant gang in Glasgow.

  The Ultras and the Spiritual Attack on Calcio Moderno

  The example of the Glasgow clubs brings us closer to what is driving the Ultras’ critique of a globalized, modern, soccer. While the influx of money into the game has made it harder to win without money, it is more so the sterilization and standardization promoted by Calcio Moderno on which the Ultras have declared war. Simply put, it is the encroachment of a vision of globalized modernity on the particularities of, in this case, the Ultra (and Roman) form of life. It is, then, a spiritual, rather than economic, issue.

  Figure 17. AS Roma’s Ultras salute their SS Lazio counterparts, December 2006.

  What is at stake for the Ultras is apparent in the shrinking of the earth by televisual technologies. It is apparent when Joseph Maguire explains that the local and the global are more interconnected and interdependent now than in the 1970s, or that the world is ‘compressed’ via a world economy, global technology, transnationalism, and global division of labor.352 It is interesting to consider Anthony Giddens’ proposal that social relations are now worldwide, revealing multidimensional links between local happenings and universal understandings.353 However, theorizing such a development cannot prepare us for the force with which universals destroy particularity, nor for how this destruction is experienced.354

  Just as Italy’s economy
is deemed ‘structurally unsound’ and ‘uncompetitive’ because its productivity is low and production costs are high, so too is its soccer explained by neo-liberals to be ‘uncompetitive.’355 As competitiveness has become a universally valid concept to explain and justify global capital and production flows, it has also become the mantra of the upper-echelon clubs seeking ‘global’ status and success in the Champions League. When it was reported that the vast majority of Italians support the imposition of some form of quota on the number of foreigners able to be fielded by sporting teams, it was suggested in the English press that this was a ‘step back in time.’

  The same article explained the folly of the Italian attitude, saying that ‘a plan to make all clubs field at least six footballers from their own country, a cap if you like, [is] completely against the laws of the European Union. It would restrict movement, personal freedom and the currents of globalization.’ The anonymous author notes that Italy’s Serie A is still, at this juncture, composed of 64% Italian players. The Ultras think this compares favorably with England’s Premier League, which is dominated by foreign players (60%) and coaches (50%). However, the author explains that the predominance of Italian players in Italy is indicative of the country’s backward attitude or xenophobia. Without an end to racism and a gain in foreign investment, the article concludes, the Italians will be unable to compete with the English clubs.

  But this form of competitiveness is not the concern of the Ultras, except as a corruption of the game. There is no question that AS Roma’s Ultras would like to see the team win all of its games in Serie A and in Europe. They are, after all, fans of AS Roma. However, the issues that a globalized Calcio Moderno celebrates, be it competitiveness due to television contracts, foreign investment, or the creation of ‘third cultures’ of reterritorialized fans of global clubs, are understood as too damaging to how the game is experienced as an Ultra to have any value.

  Under a banner reading ‘Non Omologati, Non Omologabili,’ (Unstandardized, Unstandardizable) AS Roma Ultras presented their manifesto against Calcio Moderno in 1999. It contained much of what is still argued today: that Calcio Moderno, as an element of globalization, seeks to render all life in its path standardized, moralized, egalitarian, multicultural, passionless, and consumerist. AS Roma Ultras proposed that they coordinate with other Ultras and anyone else to disrupt the televised product of soccer. They suggested that, in order to do so, the Ultras violate every limitation placed on their potential behavior by any authority.

  The manifesto explained the future proposed by Calcio Moderno. ‘Soccer fans must understand,’ it begins, ‘what is being established by the television industry, FIFA, UEFA, and the various national leagues: the creation of a European championship open only to the biggest clubs on the continent. This is being done for the sole purpose of creating profits for those involved. It is being done with the largest clubs in mind because these are the ones with television followings. Smaller clubs, those without large television audiences, will be sacrificed. The fight is, thus, between the television audience and the local aspects of calcio including those at the stadium — which are destined to disappear in the future.’

  ‘The industry of soccer,’ the manifesto continues, ‘works in conjunction with local authorities, bringing in hundreds of police officers to help subdue those at the stadium. No flags, banners, or songs that may offend anyone in the worldwide audience will be permitted, nor will the voicing of criticisms of society. The future has already been promised to the moderate, standardized fan — those who watch from home and are ready to purchase what is being sold — always a multinational product and never one that is local and artisanal.’ It concludes by saying that the industry promoting Calcio Moderno misunderstands the Ultras as a fringe that can be eliminated from soccer. ‘Instead,’ it says, ‘the Ultras are a faith, for whom the symbols of their cities and teams are tattooed on their bodies, and for whom their cities are worth defending at all costs.’

  Chapter Nine

  Conclusion

  Che importa soffrire se c’è stata nella nostra vita qualche ora immortale

  (What does suffering matter if there were some immortal hours in our lives?)

  Curva Sud Roma

  2007 was marked by the deaths of police officer Filippo Raciti and SS Lazio Ultra Gabriele Sandri. The period between these two deaths, the first in February and the second in November, was tension-filled for the Ultras of AS Roma, as the Italian State took a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to the Ultras. Despite years of conflict between the Ultras and the State, it was seemingly Raciti’s death that exhausted the State’s patience with the Ultras and their violent and antagonistic form of life. As the State began implementing laws and policing measures that banned the Ultras’ style of fandom from Italian stadiums, the Ultras turned inward, becoming more introspective about ‘being Ultras.’ The major groups of Curva Sud Roma decided to continue attending games of AS Roma in whatever forms the State would permit. If they did so without flags, flares, and bombs, at least they demonstrated that the Ultras themselves were going nowhere. However, after the death of Gabriele Sandri and the night of extreme violence that followed, those same groups began to think more critically about their involvement with the industry of soccer that was determined to rid itself of the Ultras. Thus, the Ultras began a four-week strike period with the protest at Rome’s Circo Massimo described in the previous chapter, and thus I ended my time amongst the Ultras an exile, imbued with the same defiant mentalità and love of Rome that drove the Ultras.

  By removing their voices and their passion from the stadium, AS Roma’s Ultras were not only seeking to give the State, media, and bourgeois fans a vision of soccer without the Ultras, as was explained above, but were also self-abnegating in an attempt to preserve what is most dear to them. By withholding their performances, they were also preserving the right to be Ultras in the sense that the State was removed from any position of authority over them. In other words, the Ultras decided to remove themselves by their own accord rather than allow the State the power to have them removed. In this way, their silence preserved the integrity of the Ultras phenomenon rather than have it dispossessed by the State.

  It was the State’s and the Ultras’ actions in this period of open hostility that I have tried to explain here. Perhaps oddly, considering the amount of discussion (on both sides) about violence, there was little physical contact between the Ultras and the State during this time. It can be said that one death on each side is a high enough price to pay. However, the lack of physical confrontation made the discourses of violence being employed by the State and the Ultras that much more important. To the greatest extent possible I sought to use statements from the Ultras as empirical data. And, because the Ultras utilize an ethic of violence purposely at odds with the hegemonic aversion to violence in the modern West, I sought to avoid a sort of paralysis in the face of their statements that would be generated by anthropology’s own ethical position. An anthropologist who claims complete objectivity and detachment from their subjects is being disingenuous, given the creative act of ethnographic writing. This is especially true when the subjects of study stand outside the bounds of our comfortable notions on violence, morality, and altruistic inclusiveness.

  That being said, I have let my subjects ‘speak for themselves,’ even going so far as to use philosophical and theoretical sources that they themselves use to understand the Ultras phenomenon. In writing this way it made for an interesting slippage between their voices and those of Nietzsche, Evola, and Sorel. Actually, the Ultras of Boys Roma and Antichi Valori, two of the most influential groups in Curva Sud Roma’s history, had made their use of Nietzsche and Sorel clear to me before Raciti’s death in February 2007. It was only to become more evident after his death to what extent the other Ultras of Curva Sud acted in a way that could be called Nietzschean or Sorelian.

  If I may be allowed a slight detour, I would like to provide a few examples of the power of epistemologi
cal and conceptual apparatuses to weave what might be called a ‘web of morality’ through what they make knowable. In the case of Far Right politics and violence, there is almost nothing in the American Academy that will allow for their being studied without condemnation. In choosing methodology and theory, then, I had to circumvent the bureaucratic conceptual and institutional structures that work to delimit intellectual freedom. I needed a way to legitimate fascism by moving it beyond bourgeois liberalism, just as I needed a way to understand violence that did not psychologize the Ultras or attempt to explain it away via socialization.

  A common theme in the anthropology of violence is that its adult perpetrators tend to be violent as children.356 Regardless of how the Ultras might have accorded with such a model, it was irrelevant to the uses they put to violence. That violence can also lend itself to courage, strength, and rites of passage is largely lost to current anthropology. To solve these problems, I went to sources that were not only used by the Ultras themselves, but that were also well beyond the proper legitimacy of most anthropological theory.

  Indeed, without having done so it would have been impossible to convey the clash of moralities and forms of life definitive of the Ultras and the bourgeois state — a critically important addition to the study of the Ultras (and of Fascism). My political reading of Nietzsche — one that put him, as Fredrick Appel (1999) says, ‘contra democracy’ — was necessary because it allowed the Ultras’ critique of modernity and its impingement of what they know as their traditions, to flow forth. Similarly, I am unaware of anthropologists having used Evola as a way to understand the uses of history and tradition. Yet, his works on the destruction of valor, strength, and honor — the Roman values — by the forces of modern liberal politics, gave a true sense of what the Ultras despise about globalization and Calcio Moderno. Finally, Sorel’s theory of ‘ethics of violence’ allowed me to think and explain the ways in which bourgeois morality could be highlighted as well as contradicted. Once properly embedded with the Ultras, it became difficult not to see a bourgeois fear of violence in almost every human action.