Ultra

by Tobias Jones

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  The ultra world was very different after the World Cup of Italia 1990. Dozens of historic stadiums were renovated or replaced. The ultras’ end of the oval, the curva, had always been sacred ground and the ‘irons’ were the altar of their temple. It’s true that groups had very occasionally swapped ends, moving from the Curva Nord to Curva Sud or vice versa for reasons of allegiance or animosity with other ultras. But that was almost always on their own terms. Now, in the name of an international tournament that was a foretaste of the globalizing game, their homes were being bulldozed. Juventus and Turin both left the Stadio Comunale, Bari moved into Renzo Piano’s Stadio San Nicola, Cagliari’s Sant’Elia was restructured, a third ‘ring’ was added to the San Siro.

  There were other reasons for the rebuilding. After the horrors of Heysel, Hillsborough, Bradford and the rest, stadium security was seen as essential to avoid atrocities and tragedies. It was easier to whisk fans in and out of those stadiums if they were located a few stops from the city centre, constructed in wastelands between railways and dual carriageways. On those scrublands, far from the bars and boutiques of a town centre, the ultras couldn’t do too much damage. Money, too, was a motive: the larger the ground, the larger the possible profit.

  For those who had been in the ultra ranks for twenty years, it was melancholic to see small grounds disappear. Rickety, romantic stands from the suburbs were suddenly empty. Walking to the new ground was often no longer possible, and when you got there you felt no connection. Not all the stadium changes occurred because of ‘Italia 90’ but that rebuilding set a trend that was followed for years afterwards: Ancona had played at ‘the Doric’ since 1931. It wasn’t even a stadium, more a field squeezed between housing blocks and a stone ticket office with ‘Doric Sports Pitch’ written above the lintel. It was a place bathed in memories but in 1992 the team moved to the Stadio del Conero, half a dozen kilometres away. New stadiums often had wide concrete ditches around the pitches so that the ultras could now never touch the grass. One, the Mapei in Reggio Emilia, even had a ditch with water and fish, with the result that animals were closer to the action than the fans (and were often more fun to watch than the football).

  In Abruzzo, Teramo upgraded its ground, moving a few stops away on the local train line. But the old ground was untouched because of the obstructionism of the ultras. To them, developing the old ground would be like building a casino on top of a cemetery. One of the ultra groups took on the name ‘13 Steps’ in memory of the number of stairs in their old curva. The faces of dead comrades were spray-painted on the walls, reminding citizens that their memories were cherished in this specific place.

  Italy usually lets ruins stay as ruins. Chancing upon a forgotten amphitheatre or forum has always been the charm of wandering its towns. These twentieth-century stadiums were also mostly left where they were, weeds sprouting through the cracks, saplings getting taller on the pitch. Sometimes their disuse was a result of council paralysis or fan pressure but often it was nothing more calculated than laissez-faire. The Torino ultras still meet in the ‘Bar Sweet’ opposite the crumbling remains of the old stadium. The longevity of these relics is remarkable. One of Roma’s first pitches, in Testaccio, still stands empty despite not being used since 1940.

  The face of the ultra world, too, was changing. The list of ultras who died of overdoses in the early 1990s was long: Geppo, the young man who had written the idealistic ultra manifesto… Zigano, who had gone on the run after Papparelli’s death… Beppe Rossi, the Juventus Fighter who had suffered so much after Heysel – all passed away after succumbing to their addictions. In a milieu in which gaudeamus igitur – ‘let’s party therefore’ – was the motto, it wasn’t surprising that excessive celebrations of freedom led to premature deaths.

  But in the early 1990s many surviving, die-hard ultras left the front-line and some of the famous groups of the first two decades dissolved. In Genoa, in the summer of 1993, the Fossa dei Grifoni folded, amid claims that ‘we don’t recognize this football any more’. Often groups dissolved because arrests or knifings had already decimated the ranks and ruined their reputation. Verona’s infamous Brigate Gialloblù dissolved in November 1991, a few days after four ‘brigadeers’ had been knifed in a Coppa Italia game against Milan. The dissolution of formal groupings was also strategic: an accusation previously only used against mafiosi, ‘delinquent association’, was now being trialled against ultras, and the less evidence of formal association the better. Perhaps many no longer felt the adolescent fury that energized those Manichean fights. Those easy labels of ‘faith’, ‘honour’ and ‘revenge’ seemed a bit embarrassing when emotional maturity brought an appreciation of subtlety and difference. For those who had just loved the singing and folklore, it didn’t make sense to beat up kids simply because they lived in another part of Italy.

  Sporting disappointments also played a part in the exodus. Cosenza only just stayed in Serie B in 1991. They had been in a relegation play-off against Salernitana. In the sixth minute Gigi Marulla ran between two defenders and headed the ball in with his thinning hairline. Cosenza won 1–0 and avoided relegation to Serie C. Afterwards, Marulla revealed that the day before the game four fans had boarded the players’ bus. Marulla remembered that they knelt before the players, saying: ‘Calabria is a bitter land, present us this joy tomorrow.’ Marulla (himself Calabrian) felt ‘like I was on a mission for a people’. He, at least, understood the ancient notion of championing a cause.

  But the following year there was more disappointment. Lecce, on the spur of the Italian boot, was often the graveyard of hope. It was there that Roma had, a few years before, failed to clinch another title and a distraught Bongi decided to withdraw from the ultra front-line. Something similar happened to Cosenza in 1992. The team was within touching distance, for the first time in its history, of Serie A. Ciccio had organized 10,000 flags for the occasion. Some said that as many as 15,000 Cosentini went to the seaside stadium in Salento.

  With only ten minutes to go, Giampiero Maini scored the game’s only goal for Lecce. Udinese had won 2–0 at Ancona and so Cosenza’s hope of reaching Italy’s top division disappeared. The trudge back to cars and trains was, remembers one observer, a via crucis: ‘The Leccesi were burning brushwood and creating fires which accompanied us all the way to the station and creating a red-hot climate…’

  Ciccio wanted to quit. ‘After that disappointment I wanted to do away with all the banners, leave off for a year.’ He had an idea to gather all the disparate groups behind one single banner: ‘Vivere ultrà per vivere’ (‘Live as an ultra to live’). Soon there were other sadnesses. On 27 September 1992 the Cosenza midfielder Massimiliano Catena scored a sensational goal. The ball was closer to the halfway line than the penalty area but he hit it so hard that it flew into the net. Everyone knew his father was dying and the fans and players stood to applaud him. Just a few days later, driving back from seeing his father in Rome, Catena – aged twenty-three – died in a car crash. The Curva Nord took his name.

  Many of the most politically committed ultras had begun to spread their focus outwards. Claudio and the Nuova Guardia boys in Cosenza occupied a building just outside the city. They called it Granma, the name of Castro’s boat, but someone mangled the name and it became known as Gramn. ‘The struggle isn’t at the stadium any more’ was the slogan. In the early 1990s there was a flurry of new projects emerging from the Cosenza curva, including a radio station (called Ciroma, or ‘Chaos’) and a publishing house (called ‘Coessenza’). Paride even stood for mayor. Elias Canetti had once written about the ancient arenas forming ‘a closed ring from which nothing can escape’, meaning that all the fury and rebellion was tolerated if it stayed only there, contained in that space. Many of the Cosenza ultras were trying to break that ring, to allow the idealism of the stadiums to energize the streets.

  Other ultras gave up because they glimpsed the impotence central to the experience of being a fan. All that exhortation – the sweary in
vective and derision – was partly a result of an awareness that the fate of the fan was, really, to do nothing. Whilst watching twenty-two men run you’re rooted in one spot. You can make as much noise as you want, but it’s like a prayer in the face of an earthquake. You are a voyeur, watching, rather than making, love. Punks at least made music or, as Johnny Rotten called it, ‘chaos’. The Hell’s Angels had bikes to ride and repair. But the ultras, once they had choreographed and sung and done the usual battimani (the rhythmic handclaps), were really just spectators, static and passive. Because most stadiums in Italy are elliptical, the position of greatest power for an ultra – the very centre of the curva – is precisely the point most distant from the ludic cauldron. It seemed a confirmation of exclusion or irrelevance. That, perhaps, was one of the sources of the ultras’ fury: the fretting that they’re not really needed. Maybe that’s the cause of the vein-popping screams of the capo-coro – the man with the megaphone – as he tries desperately to keep his troops active, scowling at anyone who dares to stand near him and not sing. And hence, one assumes, the genuine delight of the ultras when the chance arises to get a bit of action themselves.

  There was, too, a growing awareness that the ludic was linked to illusion (‘in lusio’: being mocked or ‘played with’). As in so many temples, some of the participants no longer believed in the conjuring trick, or in the rhetoric that their presence affected the action. Whether because of match-fixing, or rising ticket prices, or impersonal stadiums, the ultras were increasingly aware that they, as much as the ball, were being played with. One sociologist, Osvaldo Pieroni, had moved to Cosenza and had been drawn to the red-and-blue faith. Having followed both the team and the accounting trail (this was back in the 1993–94 season), he wrote a disenchanted monograph claiming that the game had become ‘a kind of self-deception… everyone pretending that they don’t know that Italian football is, in effect, one huge rip-off masked as a party’. He compared the club to a prostitute, ‘faking reciprocal attraction and spontaneous availability, pretending there were no profit incentives or intermediaries…’ From a dedicated football fan it was melancholic, albeit understandable, prose: the Cosenza president had used the club to boost his failed bid to be elected to parliament, had run up huge debts and was then imprisoned for forgery.

  But the mystery of football is that, just as you’re about to give up on it because it seems fictitious, it gives voice to the fans’ sense of futility. It was, perhaps inevitably, Torino that reiterated why people kept coming back for more. Emiliano Mondonico was the team’s manager in the early 1990s. In 1992 he took the team to a Uefa Cup Final against Ajax. Torino repeatedly hit the woodwork but failed to score. When what he thought was a clear penalty wasn’t given, he picked up a chair from pitchside and raised it above his head, shaking it with rage. It was, he said years later, ‘the symbol of the person who supports against everything and against everyone. It was a symbol of the person who won’t put up with it any more and who reacts with any means at his disposal. It’s a symbol of Torino because a chair isn’t a rifle, it’s a weapon of the hostelry.’ Torino, said Mondonico, was ‘the hope of a better world’. Torino lost the final but their supporters felt someone had understood their sense of futility and impotence. Meaning emerged, as ever, from loss. When Mondonico was dying of cancer decades later, Toro ultras marched with chairs, raising them to the gods. There was no violence, only rage and sadness.

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  If many were leaving the curva, others were moving in. On 30 January 1992, at the Hotel Universo in Rome, a conference was organized by two politicians from the MSI party. Entitled ‘A Fatherland Called the Terraces’, and with invitations issued to the notoriously right-wing fans of Lazio, Juventus, Inter and Roma’s Boys, it was an attempt to harness the energy and radicalism of the ultras for electoral politics. Within a year the Lazio ultras were chanting that ‘We want Fini [the MSI leader] for mayor’. Many ultras scorned the flagrant attempt at exploitation but the conference was evidence that reemergent right-wing political parties saw the ultras as the foot soldiers of a new movement.

  Given what was happening on certain terraces, it was natural that neo-fascist politicians sought political support there. When Hellas Verona was on the verge of signing Maickel Ferrier, the Dutch midfielder from Suriname, a black mannequin was hanged from the stands by supporters wearing Ku Klux Klan outfits. There were also racist chants and banners (‘Give him the stadium to clean’). Bowing to ultra pressure, the club decided not to sign him. Another Dutch player from Suriname, Aron Winter, was bought by Lazio in 1992 and immediately, on the white marble walls on the way to the Stadio Olimpico, antisemitic slogans appeared. One read ‘Winter Dirty Jew Out’, accompanied by a swastika.

  Ever since the end of the war, anti-fascism had been the foundation stone of the Italian Republic. But the collapse of the Soviet Union had gutted the credibility of Italian communism and by 1992 the other pillar of Italian post-war politics, the Christian Democrats, had been decimated by corruption scandals. These events represented the collapse of Italy’s First Republic and a political and ideological vacuum opened up.

  Many of those who stepped into that vacuum conflated footballing populism with a fondness for the authoritarian strand of Italian history. When the owner of A.C. Milan, Silvio Berlusconi, burst into politics by creating his Forza Italia party out of Milan supporters’ clubs and Publitalia, he made anti-communism the centrepiece of his slick sloganeering. He identified the MSI and the anti-southerner, anti-foreigner Northern League as his ideal political partners. With a huge media empire to ram home his message, Berlusconi made sure that fascism was sdoganato, ‘cleared through customs’. Everyone could see what was happening. It was an assiduous but subtle rehabilitation of a political extremism that had been shunned by the mainstream for five decades. Berlusconi rarely missed an opportunity to express his admiration for Mussolini and pointedly avoided the traditional 25 April celebrations marking the country’s liberation from Nazi-Fascism. By 1994 many neo-fascists who had been imprisoned as militants in the 1970s and 1980s found themselves in mainstream politics, if not in the upper echelons of government.

  The danger was sufficiently acute that in 1993, a law was passed (the Legge Mancino) outlawing fascist slogans, salutes and ideologies. It was an updating of the 1952 Scelba Law, which prohibited the recreation of the Fascist Party in post-war Italy. But that legislation was so rarely enforced that it enabled the resurgent fascists in Italy to butter their bread on both sides. They were able to present themselves both as persecuted underdogs and martyrs, while at the same time enjoy impunity for their proselytizing.

  Present Day: Siena v. Cosenza (Lega-Pro Final)

  It’s still 2–1 with ten minutes to go. Marotta, the bearded Siena striker, is toiling away. It’s tense now and we’re singing as it’s the only thing to do: ‘Take us away from this shitty division.’ They call it sgolarsi, doing your throat in.

  Alain Baclet has come on as a substitute. All through the run to this final, he has come on and scored so there is an expectation that it will happen again. He’s a tall, completely bald Frenchman, able to lunge for crosses with his head or toes. It seems as if everyone is tired except for him. Suddenly a long, looping cross comes in and Baclet runs in front of everyone and buries it in off the post with his right. The place explodes. 3–1.

  Chill, behind us, is hugging SkinnyMon. ‘It’s OK,’ he is weeping, ‘it’s OK, it’s OK.’

  People are jumping up and down, falling off the ergonomic seats with their annoying plastic edges. Vindov races around, slapping his forehead. Boozy Suzy is taking endless photos to prove, in decades to come, that she was here. A team that was second from bottom in October has just won the play-off between three different Serie C divisions (North, Central and South).

  When that third goal went in everyone in the stadium knew that Cosenza were back in Serie B. Siena had fought all through the second half and now – minutes before the end – had conceded a third. There was no way b
ack.

  Superficially, the communal ecstasy of that curva was about promotion: not just this team’s, but this terrace’s re-entrance onto the national stage. But that was only the surface meaning of this emotional excess. It was a collective triumph that brought people back together, even the warring ultra groups. And for the thousands of Cosentini living in the North, it meant that next season – with the team in a national league at last – they would see their friends at many more matches. Looking around as the dazed fans walked out, you could see all the familiar older figures of this fan base: Paride and Claudio and Ciccio and Padre Fedele… And like all comings-together, it was also a reminder of all those who weren’t here. Not just Drainpipe (on a personal strike in protest at the team hiring a player, Leonardo Perez, who is a declared fascist with a twitchy right arm) but all the other absentees – dead parents, Piero, Denis Bergamini, Ettarù and all the others, the victims of the earthquakes and overdoses, of car crashes and cancer. Fandom is another way of remembering the old days and the dead.

  What united these people wasn’t their passion for football, as such, but the markers it puts down in their lives. There was something political in that incredible victory too. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the vast majority of terraces today are in the control of leaders of the far right. The ultras’ longing for absolutism, for something on which they’ll never compromise, their desperation for unity when they’re told there’s disintegration all around them, their defence of territory and the conquest of another’s, the identity expressed through colours and clothing, the delight in order in a country that is often chaotic – all are perfectly aligned with the makeshift philosophy spun by an ex-Socialist from Predappio in the aftermath of the First World War. But Cosenza’s victory in that final seemed to offer a distant, maybe naïve, hope: that the definition of those extremist words – ultra, oltre, outré, other – couldn’t be hijacked by extremists from one side alone. These anarchic, devoutly anti-fascist Cosenza ultras offer the solace that, perhaps, there’s more than just a mythical order and racial intolerance on the terraces. And a victory for this almost unknown Calabrian city, against a stunning Tuscan town that was once instrumental in the founding of capitalist banking, suggests that sometimes football is able to invert the established hierarchies and give succour to the underdog.