Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  The boundaries are so firmly enforced now that there’s no transgression or trespassing. Pitch invasions are impossible. The ultras are still nomadic but always on someone else’s terms. We’re kept caged, kettled, scorned, evicted. The floodlit grass is nothing to do with us any more. It might just as well be the end of the rainbow. We’re not even interested in our champions. As one recent Udinese banner said: ‘Only for the shirt, not for whoever wears it.’

  The strange thing is that the people gathered here are not remotely an underclass. The cars, clothing and careers of this group speak of success and social integration. It’s almost as if we’re role-playing at being the dregs, relishing our collective descent into an underworld. And the relief of the collectivity is that our atomized lives suddenly come together in a world that is, finally, binary: it is simply and blissfully just us against them. Mors tua vita mea: your death, my life. No nuance, no complexity. There’s a decent party going on now, with all that entails: drinking, smoking, singing, dancing, flirting. Two blokes are even fighting but they looked so smashed that they probably don’t even know what it’s about.

  This game is even more binary than most. It’s a grudge match – the most left-wing, Southern ultras coming up against the most right-wing, pseudo-Aryan ones – and so the authorities have rescheduled it for a Monday night at 9 p.m. It’s a 2,000-kilometre round trip from Cosenza but a few hundred supporters are here, probably about half of whom live in the North. Exiles are greeting old friends. The temperature is well below zero and everyone is singing: ‘Veronesi should be strung up’, ‘Veronese, piece of shit’ and, since Romeo’s squeeze came from Verona, ‘Juliet is a whore’.

  The floodlights, rectangles of white, tower above the mighty Bentegodi stadium. Eventually we shuffle through the turnstiles. We keep singing as we’re split up, stewards frisking, Carabinieri filming. ‘How beautiful it is, when I get out of the house,’ – the noise is raucous – ‘to go to the stadium, to support Cosenza. Oh, oh, oh, oh…’ Through more turnstiles – with their two-inch thick horizontal bars – and then up and up into the very top of the stadium. It’s vertiginous and from up here – the far side of the damp, blue running track – the players are tiny. It’s like trying to watch TV from the other end of the house. The stadium is less than a quarter full, the result of scheduling with public order, rather than public engagement, in mind.

  The Verona banners give an idea of their anglophilia. There’s a huge Union Jack and many groups with English names, including ‘Hell’ (Verona’s full name is Hellas Verona) and ‘The Geekers’. There are hints of jokey eroticism – ‘Calcio Club Osé’ – plus the usual memorializing of dead ultras. There are religious borrowings – ‘I believe’, says one banner, ‘I will rise again’ – and hints of unorthodox extremism, like ‘Bassa Estrema’ (‘Extreme Base’). Another banner says, ‘Against all drugs’.

  Elastic is on the megaphone. He’s hissing into it to make everyone silent. His lieutenants in the front rows turn around and shout ‘Oh!’ to the back rows where there’s still chatter. Discipline descends and it’s all quiet. Everyone is looking at Elastic, who can read the mood like it’s a book. Everyone here wants to stick it to the blue-and-yellow fascists on the far side of the stadium and so the opening song is ‘Come on Cosenza’ to the tune of that old partisan favourite, ‘Bella Ciao’. As if to underline the political differences, one Cosentino is holding up a banner – in Verona colours – saying ‘Refugees Welcome’. Another flag just says ‘We are who we are’.

  There’s a reluctant respect for the Veronesi, though, despite all the political differences. Although they have a reputation for being fascists, that extremism is partly about riling the righteous. Certainly, many are true-believers but, like the Laziali with whom they are twinned, others play up to it because that’s just what they’ve always done. It’s part of the tradition by now. And if from the outside the Veronesi ultras all appear to be fascists, in reality it’s far more heterogenous. Under the Hellas banner, there are plenty who are keen to keep the terraces apolitical. Some – a small minority – are even anti-fascists. The ultra world is not just a place where political extremism thrives, it’s also the place – perhaps the only one – where political extremisms occasionally make peace and rub shoulders.

  ‘Ultrà’, we chant, clapping hands quickly, before shouting again, ‘ultrà’. Elastic starts the Marseillaise but the troops go off too quickly and he rolls his eyes. He wanted it slower. He hisses everyone quiet, smiling at the enthusiasm. Most cheerleaders on a megaphone have to encourage more singing, but here it’s as if he had to slow them down.

  Verona are playing incisive football, sliding in clever balls behind Cosenza’s back four. They take the lead and suddenly the sulking ultras on the far side of the stadium are booming. Verona score again shortly after half-time. It’s strange but that second goal doesn’t interrupt our singing. ‘I’m mistrusted,’ goes the melancholy lament, ‘photographed, because any excuse is an accusation of crime, but I’ve got by, I haven’t given up, and in life I’ll always be an ultra…’ It keeps going on repeat for five minutes. ‘I’m mistrusted, photographed…’

  The game goes on far away, like watching ants on a snooker table. Because we’re right under the roof, our singing rebounds loudly and it’s more fun watching ourselves than the match. Almost all the photographs and videos people are taking on their phones are of the singing and bouncing and debauchery. But just as we’re singing a strange version of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, with scarves pulled tight, Cosenza score. Almost no one realizes. It’s only when you see, through the taut scarves, the players hugging and walking back towards the centre-circle that you realize it’s a goal. We just keep singing like nothing has happened.

  But as the match progresses, people are straining to see what’s going on. Usually, only Elastic with his lieutenants decide what is sung but there’s an unstoppable mutiny in the ranks as the two hundred spontaneously start chanting incessantly, ‘Lupi, Lupi, Lupi, Lupi’. Elastic smiles wearily and turns around to see what’s going on. There are only five minutes to go and Cosenza are pressing for an equalizer.

  Suddenly, Cosenza score again – another obscure goal that no one saw – but the place explodes now. Strangers hug. Even the growlers are grinning, pumping their fists and their fingers towards the yellow terrace at the far end. Now you can behave however you like because the regimentation has broken down and people are walking up and down the seats, waving their arms in the ‘suck this’ gesture.

  Both teams are now playing for the winner and it’s an open game. The fact that Cosenza have come back from 2–0 against the hated, fascist Veronesi is poetic and the songs take on a more playful tone. We sing about being ‘Southern peasants’ – ‘terrun terrun’ – and, to a melody that is almost The Crystals’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ about how ‘we’ll never leave you, we’ll always be by your side’.

  The final whistle goes. A 2–2 draw. We’re locked up for another hour to make sure that there are no fights with the Veronesi, so we rile the departing locals with ‘You’re staying in B’ and ‘You can only win at the table’ (since the game back in the summer, unplayable because of the pitch, was awarded to them by authorities ‘at the table’). Then, after midnight, we’re ushered back into the caged car park. There’s more singing and drinking, and slowly the cars and coaches disperse, heading to the motorway between the blue lights. We’ll be back in Cosenza just in time to start work in the morning.

  February 2011

  Piero Romeo, the ultra felled by an aneurysm and whose health had been declining for years, died in February 2011. His coffin was taken to the Curva Bergamini after the funeral, where it was draped with red-and-blue scarves. Flares were lit.

  A few weeks later, Cosenza were playing against Nocerina, with whom there had been, for years, a twinning. The Nocerini had brought a banner saying ‘Fly, Piero, and amaze paradise’. The whole afternoon was supposed to be a memorial to the late leader. There are differing vers
ions of what actually happened. Some say the Nocerina fans had a tricolour, which to the anti-nationalist Cosentini was paramount to a declaration of fascism. Others say the incidents were provoked by Cosentini, who insulted the visiting fans for having adhered to the hated tessera. Whatever the reason, the Nocerini ripped up their banner, a tribute to Piero, and a grieving Drainpipe – watching aghast as the tribute to his best friend was ruined – left the stadium, vowing never to step foot again in the Curva Sud.

  It was an example of how twinnings can suddenly end and decade-long friendships evaporate in an afternoon. There are many reasons for twinnings between ultra groups. Sometimes it’s political affinity, like that between Lazio and Inter (‘A Roman salute to the real Milan’ said one rhyming banner by the Laziali) or between Cosenza and Ternana. The Genoa–Napoli twinning was cemented in 1982 when a 2–2 draw relegated Milan, whom both sets of fans hated. Fiorentina ultras are so anti-Juventus that they are naturally twinned with Torino (Torino is also ever-grateful that Fiorentina lent the club players after the Superga tragedy).

  These twinnings mean that when the two teams meet, you’re guaranteed not urban warfare but a liquid lunch. Twinned ultras will be invited to each others’ end-of-season football tournaments. Quite often marriages and children result from that interaction, a classic example of how hostility and hatred between ultras can be reduced by contact. When visiting twinned groups, the delicacy and etiquette are very pronounced: pennants and scarves are swapped, threnodies to late ultras read out, cheap commemorative shields handed over. The encounter is fed back to the next meeting with words of almost medieval admiration: ‘exquisite’, ‘knightly’, ‘genteel’.

  Plenty of famous twinnings have been broken, the affection replaced – like divorcing couples – with scorn and hatred. Those between Atalanta and Roma, and Verona and Inter, both broke down. They say the Genoa–Cosenza twinning was strained, if not ruptured, by the Genoani inviting Cosenza’s Calabrian rivals (and often far-right) Lamezia fans to the San Vito stadium at the turn of the millennium. The thirty-seven-year twinning between Napoli and Genoa was terminated by Napoli ultras in the spring of 2019 when Genoa remembered, with a banner, the dead Varese ultra, Dede, who had ambushed them. When there are break-ups, personal friendships usually survive but understanding the reason for the break-up is always hard. As Alessio, one of the founders of Spal’s Gruppo d’Azione, once said: ‘To make an alliance is an important thing because it means your group is recognized as such by another group from another curva, maybe even outside your country. Then who manages to have more twinnings is also the most strong, in the same way that who manages to break historic alliances demonstrates they have the power to do so.’

  Present Day, Milano

  Back in February 2009 there was a Milan–Inter derby at the San Siro. For years, a peace deal had held between the two Milanese clubs, and violence was rare between the various ultra groups. On that occasion, however, a Milan banner was hung on the railings from an upper tier and came lower than intended, blocking the view of the Inter fans just below. That, at least, was the excuse. They tugged at it hard, ripping it. The damaging of a banner was an affront to the group, and Milan’s ultras quickly came down, some slipping their chunky watches round their fingers to use as brass-knuckles.

  Luca Lucci – known as il Toro, ‘the Bull’ – was at the forefront. He didn’t look bullish. Then aged twenty-two, he had a thin face with a pointy nose and a shaved, scarred head. But he charged the same way, piling in with his head down. He aimed for the leader of the Banda Bagaj group, meaning the ‘lads’ gang’ in Lombard dialect. One of its leaders was Vittorio Motta, who was now protecting his own group’s herald. Punches arrived from behind. Motta later described one particular punch: ‘It was anomalous, a very strong pain, a tremendous pain. I removed my hand and looked: I found blood, many tears and a gelatinous substance.’ Motta had lost his eye in the fight. The Bull was prosecuted and obliged to pay compensation but three years later, Motta took his own life.

  By 2018 Lucci had become one of the undisputed leaders of Milan’s Curva Sud. He and his mates met in a club called Al Clan, in the Sesto San Giovanni suburb in the northeast of the city. Police had planted a listening device in the building, as they suspected Lucci of drug-dealing. They filmed him taking delivery of marijuana and cocaine at the crack of dawn at Al Clan, receiving them from an Albanian gang who were importing from Spain. He was arrested in June 2018 and pleaded guilty to drugs offences, receiving an eighteen-month suspended sentence.

  There was nothing particularly unusual about ultras being involved in drug distribution. In many ways, it was hardly surprising. They were regularly travelling all over the country in convoy, tooled up and almost untouchable. Drugs busts in the ultra world were common. In 2016 the Carabinieri arrested an ultra from Genoa, Davidino, who had two garages full of narcotics – twenty-six kilogrammes of hashish, eight kilogrammes of marijuana, 1.1 kilogrammes of cocaine and seven of ecstasy. There was also €18,000 in false notes, along with bullets, two pistols with the serial numbers filed down and silencers. There was a theory that ultras were being used merely as the foot soldiers for the Mafia: people with whom one could park the product or weaponry.

  But there was something different about the Luca Lucci case because it revealed that politicians, from the unknown to the most notorious, enjoyed intimacy with his world. One of the men arrested with Lucci was called Massimo Mandelli, head of Inter Milan’s volunteer stewards and a candidate in local elections with CasaPound. And only a few months after Lucci’s arrest, during celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of Milan’s ultras, the Minister of the Interior and the most powerful politician in the country, the Milanista Matteo Salvini, warmly shook hands with him. Salvini – who was also deputy Prime Minister – said: ‘I’m a suspect amongst suspects.’

  It seemed more than a repetition of that old Italian plea for impunity, percolated through Catholicism’s notion of us all being fallen sinners (‘Nobody is innocent, so we’re all equally guilty’). It was a choreographed show of support from one of the highest officers of state to an underworld that, in many ways, embodied his electoral base and his political philosophy: the defence of your own and an aggressive rejection of those with different colours. In March 2019 a comparable incident occurred prior to the Inter-Milan derby: the security detail of the San Siro stadium refused to allow a choreography paying tribute to the Blood&Honour group and commemorating ‘Dede’, the ultra killed in the ambush of Napoli ultras on Boxing Day 2018. At Salvini’s behest, the Interior Ministry over-ruled the decision, meaning that a game broadcast by Sky contained a huge homage to a neo-Nazi group. Two months later a publisher with very close links to CasaPound, Altaforte, published a hagiography of Salvini in the form of his replies to one hundred questions.

  *

  In 2008 the Juventus board of directors approved the designs of a new stadium. The board had previously agreed to buy a ninety-nine-year lease from Turin city council to the ground beneath the old stadium that they had shared with Torino, the Delle Alpi. Construction work began in 2009.

  Juventus was then, by the club’s high standards, at a low ebb. It hadn’t won the Serie A title since 2004 and hadn’t claimed the Champions League since 1996. The club was desperate not only for sporting success but also for a tranquil relationship with its fans. The club decided that all the ultras should be seated together, in the Curva Scirea of the new stadium. That was the area for which Juventus would provide hundreds of tickets to its ultras on the condition that they were well-behaved. Given the money those ultras were making, they were unlikely to do anything to rock the boat. One capo-ultra – Andrea Puntorno, from the Bravi Ragazzi – later boasted that he bought two houses, an Audi and a bakery from the proceeds of ticket-touting.

  The new stadium was, for a club with such a large following, curiously modest. There was space for only 41,500 spectators, meaning that demand was always far higher than supply. Puntorno’s wife recalled that he wou
ld bring home up to €30,000 after an important match – three hundred tickets sold at a hundred euros each meant that in a day, one ultra group could make more than most people’s annual salary.

  It was a strange quid pro quo. Even after the inauguration of the new stadium in 2011, the commercial development of its curtilage, in an area called Continassa, was held up by a travellers’ encampment. The club wanted to build something called the ‘J-village’, complete with a museum, medical and training facilities and so on. The presence of travellers living in vans and tents was clearly an obstacle. The ultras dealt with the problem. On the age-old and invented pretext that an Italian teenager had been raped by travellers, the Bravi Ragazzi rallied a mob of a few dozen men and set fire to the whole settlement. ‘Let’s burn them all,’ said one of the leaders. There was never any suggestion that the ultras were commissioned or encouraged by the club hierarchy but it was blatantly clear that their actions – literally clearing the ground – were advantageous to the sporting superpower.

  There also seemed to be a new-found pax ultra amongst the club’s various gangs. Italian Mafias had always known that business, and invisibility, were put at risk by open warfare, and the various criminal clans who were now intertwined with Juventus’s ultras encouraged them to put aside their feuds for the sake of business. Some of those clans were now investors, putting up cash for the ultras to bulk-buy tickets. They also taught them how to find a convincing explanation for their new-found cash: complicit betting shops would provide winning lottery tickets but not the pay-out. It was enough to explain away tens of thousands of euros in cash. In one betting shop in Cuneo, near where he lived, Ciccio Bucci had won the lottery so many times that he appeared to have amassed winnings of €200,000 over four years.