Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Present Day, Sambenedettese

  The June sun is setting over the main tribuna now and there are bats flitting in the floodlights. Men, stripped off to the waist, pump their fists in time to the music. People are bumping into old mates they haven’t seen for months or years. Left-Behind is here, as are Vindov, Mouse, Boozy Suzy, Chill and all the rest. San Benedetto del Tronto is halfway down Italy on the Adriatic coast. Its team is called Sambenettese or, simply, la Samba. ‘Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate’ says the banner as you come into the stadium (‘Leave all hope, you who enter’).

  It’s a club with loyal ultras, partly because they have many martyrs. Two young women lost their lives in a fire in the old stadium, the Ballarìn, in 1981. In 1986 a Samba fan, Peppino Tomassetti was knifed to death outside a nightclub by rival fans from Ascoli. But most of all, the Samba fans mourn Cioffi. In 1977 he had co-founded the Onda D’Urto (‘Shockwave’) ultra group. Tall and thin, with receding hair and round glasses, he worked as a parking attendant at the local railway station. He always perched on the ‘irons’ at the front of the curva, inciting the other ultras with a megaphone. But on 4 May 2003, he was shifting position when he fell seven metres onto the asphalt below. He was in a coma for the next eighteen months until his death. The north stand of the new stadium, the Riviera delle Palme, is now named after him. ‘Curva Nord Massimo Cioffi’, it says in large white letters on a red-and-blue background. The Cosenza ultras, who know their history, applaud as the rival ultras sing the name of their late leader.

  Ever since March Cosenza had been climbing the league table. The team had scraped into the knock-out competition for promotion to Serie B, and had already beaten Sicula Leonzio, Casertana and Trapani. The same players – Baclet, Okereke and Tutino – just kept scoring. This evening is the return leg of the quarter-final. The home game in Cosenza ended 2–1, so a draw would be enough to send Cosenza into the semis. There are about a thousand Cosentini at the ground. The team’s warring ultra groups – the Anni Ottanta and the Curva Sud – have been separated into the ground level and first tier of the south stand. Cosenza are playing in white and there’s no contest. We’re singing trills of ‘Come on, come on, come on, come on… score us a goal.’ And they do: 1–0 with a clean strike from Domenico Mungo.

  ‘We’re going to win,’ the ultras keep singing. ‘La vinciamo noi’. It’s strange how little nervousness there is. ‘We’re not going to lose this,’ says Half-a-Kilo happily. The flaps of his red-and-blue shell suit are rattling in the seaside breeze. Left-Behind is singing so hard that the vein on his forehead looks like a scar. Baclet scores and it’s 2–0 with only a few minutes left. And then we’re all densely packed again, singing the Popeye tune to the opposition: ‘Che siete venute a fà?’ (‘What did you come here for?’). Vindov, now worse for wear, grabs me and screams in my ear: ‘Cosenza is beautiful and Vindov loves Cosenza.’

  1989, Genoa

  Genoa’s main ultra group was called the Fossa dei Grifoni (‘The Pit of Griffons’). It had made its first appearance at Monza on 3 June 1973, when some fans wore parachute regiment berets and T-Shirts with ‘FG’ on them. In many ways the Genoani were more English than other ultras. They gave Italian the word ‘mister’ for a football manager (because of their great interwar manager, Mr William Garbutt). They also screamed English words during games: ‘hands’, ‘corner’ and ‘offside’. The fact that the stadium, too, is rectangular rather than oval, and without an athletic track, makes it feel more English and the noise booms off the vertical walls, rather than dissipating in the air.

  Through their early years, the Genoa ultras had had the usual problems: fights, arrests and addictions. A man known as ‘Onion’ was shot dead in April 1982 over a drug debt. Another, Scotto, went to prison for dealing. But as always, the openness of the curva made the ultras admirably non-judgemental. His friend, Nico Ruello, wrote about Onion, ‘… for the group he wasn’t a drug addict but a companion of many, many battles.’ Other friendships were cemented too. A twinning was created with Napoli when Genoa unexpectedly equalized there in the dying minutes at the end of the 1981–82 season, and the whole San Paolo stadium celebrated Milan going down instead. The Genoani were twinned, too, with the anarchic ultras of Cosenza, having met them at Padre Fedele’s ultra conference.

  Luca had left Cosenza to live in Milan to be closer to his mother during his father’s illness. But at every opportunity he took the train to Genova. ‘There I rediscovered that human warmth and passion for life,’ he remembers. ‘At the end of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, the Fossa was a splendid community for those without a community, permeated by a passion for the team and a love for the city.’

  It’s intriguing how ultra groups reflect the cities from which they emerge. Genova is a rough, steep, crowded city. It’s not dirty as such, but gritty. There’s graffiti all over the narrow lanes near the seafront. As you walk those lanes there’s only a ribbon of light six floors up, and you feel like you’re in the bottom of a canyon that cuts left and right below the laundry floating in the salty air. There’s something rebellious about the place, a sense of energetic defiance. Nicknamed ‘La Superba’ (‘the Proud’), it’s a heady mix of mountaineers and seafarers, of provincials and internationalists. Because it’s always been a port, it feels Portuguese and North African and English too.

  The Genovese poet Eugenio Montale called it a ‘land of ironwork and mast forests in the evening dust’. There are flat, spacious piazze and steep, narrow lanes. The geometric contrasts of dazzling sunshine and shady recesses make the city feel, according to Antonio Tabucchi, like a chessboard with ‘stains of shade and glare’. Like many ports, it’s also infected with something of the Portuguese saudade, the melancholic sense of the passing of a place or person.

  That melancholia wasn’t often lightened by sporting glory, which only seemed to make the Genoan ultras more fanatical. ‘Only those who suffer learn to love,’ said one of their banners in 1988. ‘We suffer, we love you and with you will we return to greatness.’ They also did a good line in insulting humour. Since they gathered in the gradinata nord (the north terrace) and their derby rivals, Sampdoria, in the south (sud), the banner for one derby read: ‘Noi nordici, voi sudici’ (‘sudici’ meant ‘filthy’, but sounds like ‘Southerners’ too). Sampdoria was created by the fusion of two other Genovese teams, Andrea Doria and Sampierdarenese in 1946 and was thus considered by fans of Genoa – a club dating from 1893 – decidedly arriviste.

  By the time he came out of prison, Scotto had learnt to read. He was a much-loved figure around the city who had been running with the ultras ever since he was twelve. By then his parents had divorced and he used to pretend to each that he was with the other as he rode around the city on a moped. He was already over six foot tall by then and going to away games. ‘You beat each other up,’ he says. ‘It was like a classical medieval tournament, just trying to capture their flag.’

  With his pear-shaped face and stars tattooed around his left ear, Scotto was, by the late 1980s, one of the leaders of the terraces. The other was a man called Puffer. The oldest son of a Sicilian father and Genovese mother, Puffer had first been taken to the stadium by a schoolteacher. He had joined the neo-fascist organization Terza Posizione, that ‘third position’ between fascism and communism that never seemed far from Nazism, but he was soon expelled. He called himself a ‘right-wing anarchist’ or, sometimes, a ‘red fascist’. By the late 1980s, he was, he told me, ‘using cocaine in abundance’. In many ways, Scotto and Puffer were opposites: one huge and anti-fascist, the other diminutive and elegant, and far to the right. But ‘we’re like brothers’, Scotto says. ‘Never had a political argument.’ Genoa was one of the places where politics never seemed to overshadow the colours.

  The group always met in Via Armenia 5r, a cul-de-sac off Piazza Alimondi near where Puffer lived. It had been rented to the ultras by Pippo Spagnolo, the grandfather of Genoa fans. He called the ultras, in dialect, his figgieu, his ‘sons’. It
was Spagnolo who had once organized, along with the ultras, a boat to take Fabrizio De André and a thousand other fans (the legend sounds eerily similar to Garibaldi’s thousand patriots) to a game in Sardinia. When it looked like the club might go bust in the 1969–70 season, Spagnolo inspired fans to become shareholders in the club they loved, organizing 18,000 investors to stave off bankruptcy.

  At the end of the 1988–89 season, Genoa won the Serie B championship to earn promotion to Serie A. The main reason for their success was the team’s manager, Franco Scoglio. Born on Lipari, one of the tiny Aeolian islands off the north coast of Sicily, Scoglio’s surname meant ‘rock’. Straight-backed, balding, forthright but gracious, he was a maverick, having learnt his trade the hard way in the lower leagues of Calabria and Sicily. In Messina, Scoglio had nurtured a raw talent called Totò Schillaci, the Sicilian with the blazing eyes who would illuminate Italian football for the next decade.

  Scoglio was the sort of man who left goodwill wherever he went. Journalists nicknamed him ‘the Professor’ because of his intellectual delivery. Almost everything he said in his calm, deadpan way was quotable. Players knew that his obsessive attention to detail – positioning, preparation, diet – would improve them. He came out with gnomic comments that subtly changed one’s understanding of what football was. ‘Bellopede [a Messina defender] mustn’t pass the ball to Orati [a Messina midfielder],’ he said when coaching the Sicilian side. ‘Bellopede must put the ball in an area of the pitch where Orati has to be. Pay attention, they’re not the same thing.’ Credited with having invented the ‘rhombus midfield’, Scoglio spoke about spatial dimensions and zonal occupations, and created teams whose passing and movement were often mesmerizing. ‘I’m not a football coach,’ he said proudly. ‘I’m a teacher of football.’ He went even further: ‘I’m coaching the fans, the club, the city.’

  Scoglio felt at home in Genoa. He found something there that he hadn’t felt since he had left the little island of Lipari. It was partly to do with the sea. ‘The sea is civilization,’ he said once, ‘sentiment, passion, storms, love, landings, leavings, the sea is everything… madness walks with the sea.’ There’s no doubt that he liked the sound of his own voice (‘I will die talking about Genoa,’ he once said) but then so did everyone else.

  Scoglio’s first stint at Genoa, resulting in promotion to the promised land of Serie A, might not have been high-scoring but it was exciting in other ways. Marco Nappi was nicknamed ‘the Seal’ because he invented a form of dribbling in which he bounced the ball repeatedly on his forehead whilst running at full pace past bemused opposition players. In one game he ran all the way from penalty box to halfway line with the ball pinging off his forehead, tiny bounces as he ran fifteen paces until at one point he was running so fast the ball seemed to stay there, and so he nodded it down and sprinted onto it, taking him past the opposition midfield.

  There was a symbiosis between Scoglio and the ultras. Scoglio seemed as passionate as they were. He celebrated goals with pumped fists, facing the fans in an era in which many ‘technical commissaries’ were more cold-blooded. He wore the Genoa scarf around his neck. When he won a big game, he would hug his players and smack their backs ten or twenty times. It was partly him charming them, as he charmed everyone, but he said, ‘I want to remain at Genoa exclusively because of its fans, for its ancient Fossa… The history of this city is the history of this ancient fan base.’

  But in the summer of 1989 it turned nasty in the city. On 10 May that year it was the final of what was then called the European Cup in Bern. The Catalonian club Barcelona were playing Sampdoria. The Dutch master Johann Cruyff was in the Barcelona dug-out, chain-smoking in his beige trench coat. The Sampdoria coach was the legendary Serbian manager Vujadin Boškov.

  It was a one-sided game. Barcelona scored early with a tap-in header and then scored on the break, near the end, when Luis María López Rekarte broke through and, from just inside the area, slid the ball past the advancing Sampdoria goalkeeper, Gianluca Pagliuca. It was a defeat celebrated wildly by Genoa fans. Whilst their team had been labouring in Serie B, Sampdoria had been exciting Serie A with its great attackers, Roberto Mancini and Gianluca Vialli. That Wednesday evening, with 20,000 Sampdoria fans at the game in Switzerland, thousands of Genoa fans, all wearing their red-and-blue tops and scarves, partied in the streets. Convoys of cars, with flags pointed out of their windows, drove through the suburbs. They spray-painted slogans on walls like ‘You’re in Bern, we’re in the armchair, the Cup to Barcelona’, or deliberately sang songs in ‘Samp’ areas of the city.

  It wasn’t just young men but whole sections of the population. There were (so newspapers from the time say) old ladies shouting obscenities, schoolchildren imitating the adults, flicking the finger to any evidence of the rival creed. It was an opportunity for chromatic aggression, spray-painting walls red-and-blue in suburbs that were on the front line between the two teams.

  There was nothing new about goading rivals by revelling in their misfortune. When Genoa had been relegated after a defeat in Florence, Sampdoria fans met the Genoani at the train station and sang insults and slurs. In the past they had organized processions of coffins, with donkeys wearing red-and-blue helmets, and even processions of sheep to symbolize how far the ‘Griffons’ had fallen. In 1988 the Sampdoria fans had gone to Modena to support the local team as Genoa tried to avoid another relegation, and for the end of the 1989 season they had planned to hire a helicopter – decked-out in Samp colours – to drop excrement in the stadium during Genoa’s last match of the season. The sfottò – barbed insults – were all part of the ultra game.

  But there was something about those celebrations in 1989 that infuriated the Sampdoria ultras. They had been so close to the greatest prize in European club football and the disappointment was already sickening before the Genoani rubbed their faces in it. There were isolated incidents of individuals getting beaten up and Samp ultras trashed a Genoa bar. Tensions were also high because the city was suffering the consequences of a contracting economy. With heavy industry in decline in the late 1980s, the city’s port and petrol industries were badly hit and 60,000 Genovesi had lost their jobs.

  Everyone was ready for a fight. In the ultra mentality there was no other way for the Samp ultras to redress the insults they had received. If they didn’t react, it would be a sign of submission and an invitation for more ridicule. There would be no retreat, they said, but counter-attack instead. Their leaders contacted the Genoani of the Fossa dei Grifoni and told them the date and place for the fight: Tuesday 16 May, at 10 p.m. in Piazza Galileo Ferraris, one hundred on each side.

  For days leading up to the encounter, people hid bars, spanners, baseball bats and chains nearby, in skips, lorries, lock-ups and garages. The ultras were excited by the military planning, looking at maps and lanes, where to ambush and where to block escape routes. This was no longer about football or fandom. This at last was action, what they called a ‘coming to the hands’. There was a lot of macho bravado that afternoon, young men describing what they were going to do and to whom. As much as anxiety, there was relief: at last they wouldn’t just be exhorters, but actually on the pitch, performing for the honour of their colours. This was the war they longed for.

  The Samp ultras had been waiting in the piazza behind the stadium for almost an hour when a hundred ultras from the Fossa dei Grifoni rolled up, all in motorcycle helmets and carrying metal bars and chains. They started running towards the Samp ultras, yelling incoherently and ignoring the two police units trying to keep them apart. It was, witnesses said later, like watching a film of troops rushing towards each other. Some in the front line were knocked to the floor immediately as others ran on, rampaging through the ranks, swinging the weapons in their hands.

  The noise was intense. The police fired fifty-eight shots in the air, whilst metal hit metal and bone. Seven cars were burnt, six policemen were knocked to the ground, stamped on, kicked. Spanners smacked skulls, elbows broke cheekbones. T
he city was shocked by the violence. But in truth there wasn’t that much unusual about it. That season at least one game in ten saw violence of some kind.

  What was unusual, however, was the response. The city had an alternative councillor, a young Communist called Mario Tullo. He had spent years on the terraces and understood the fans. Rather than demonize them, he started phoning and visiting both sides. He spoke to the police, to fellow councillors and friends. He wanted to bring the ultras together into a cooperative, called tentatively Genova Point.

  It seemed, to many, a ridiculous idea. Christian Democrats and Socialists pontificated that it was the usual Commie nonsense of giving a hand to idiots who should be locked up. The many parents of law-abiding but unemployed children were angry that the ultras might jump the work queue and start getting decent contracts from the city council. But Scotto, the self-educated bear of the terraces, got it immediately. ‘One way to make everyone calm,’ he said, ‘is to entrust the most agitated with responsibility.’

  The ultras began to talk to each other. Many were bored of prison or of being nagged by their wives to go straight. Others were simply desperate for any kind of wage. The Samp ultras invested as a group in the start-up, and elements of the Fossa dei Grifoni invested individually. The name was changed to Genova Insieme, ‘Genova Together’. They decided that 30 per cent of the cooperative’s employees should be people who were ‘socially excluded’.

  That year the 500-million-lire contract for cleaning the stadium was up for renewal. It seemed natural to give the contract to the ultras who made most of the mess. It wasn’t plain sailing. Rather than pay a VAT bill, the first president pocketed 120 million lire, so Scotto took over the accounts. When he went to pitch for jobs for his band of merry men, businesses, for some reason, seemed to trust him. He was – like most people in Genova – blunt and straightforward. If he didn’t like the smell of somewhere or someone he walked away. But if he took on a job, he got it done. The ultras began cleaning swimming pools and the juvenile prison. They took over parking lots and won the cleaning contract for the city’s aquarium.