On the pitch, such is their panache and style that the Italians, current holders of the World Cup, have regularly found themselves lauded as the finest footballers on the planet. On the terraces, too, the fans are known for revelling in their style, their passion, their knowledge. While England had no option but to introduce all-seater stadiums and CCTV cameras to curb crowd violence, in Italy football was a sport supported by families.
But no longer. Yesterday the football terraces of Italy were empty, the turnstiles silent. To Italy's eternal shame it has become the first European country forced to suspend the sport indefinitely after a 38-year-old police officer was killed during serious rioting at the Sicilian derby between Catania and Palermo.
For more than two decades, success on the field at both international and club level has merely disguised the truth: that Italian football has been plagued by corruption, mostly involving match-rigging scandals, allegations of drug-taking and referee-nobbling. The escalating series of convulsions that have shaken the country's game to its core have, despite last year's World Cup success, all but shattered its sporting self-confidence.
In the early Eighties, AC Milan and Lazio were both relegated for match-fixing, and only last summer soccer authorities worldwide were shocked when the corrupt antics of Luciano Moggi, the general manager of Juventus, were revealed. Not only had he bribed referees but, when his club lost a match he believed he had rigged, he locked the referee and linesmen in a changing room to harangue them.
To add to the country's disgrace three more famous clubs - AC Milan, Lazio and Fiorentina - were discovered to have employed the same tactics, while Reggina was accused of "sporting fraud" in six matches. All five clubs were convicted, with Juventus stripped of their 2005 and 2006 Serie A titles, relegated to Serie B and docked 17 points.
Friday night's violence, however, has eclipsed even those shameful incidents. The announcement by Luca Pancalli, the commissioner of the Italian Football Federation, said it all. "I have demanded a stop to all football in Italy," he said, his face sombre. "Enough is enough. It's a situation I cannot speak of. To lose your life at 38 is incredible. This is not a sport. Unless dramatic measures are taken, the championship will not restart."
North American sports experience rare and short post-game riots and occasional bribery or game-fixing scandals, but even at the international level there is nothing resembling the off-pitch colour of soccer. Uncontrollable hooliganism, anti-semitism, defiant and open racism, grand scale corruption, political intrigue, murdering referees and players, and even the occasional war seem to attend the beautiful game on a depressingly regular basis. Whoever has heard of a country shutting down an entire sport? It’s natural and easy to assume it has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with homegrown culture, but the rot is so geographically pervasive and so historically enduring that at times one is forced to conclude either there is something intrinsically feral about those 1-0 snoozefests or North America is simply a more civilized place.
9 comments:
Its the guns.
Another example of (North) American Exceptionalism!
It seems the brief post game riots of which you speak are becoming vanishingly rare.
Have there been any in the last five years?
They were much more common when Detroit and Chicago used to win championships.
There was one at the U of M several years ago when they won the NCAA hockey championship.
Well it depends. This is one of those issues where I feel like I'd have to go back about 100 steps to even get to the beginning.
If you're suggesting it's anything to do with the actual game that involves 22 men kicking a ball for 90 minutes, then the answer is obviously "No, that's among the silliest things anybody has ever said about anything." After all, the Swiss love soccer but don't have a violence problem. (Wa-hey, another example of Swiss Exceptionalism!)
The explanation is clearly in the tribalism created by following a historic soccer club in a league. In some places, this manifests itself in gentle, good-natured rivalry, in others, as an excuse for outright warfare.
So you have to look at each case, because they are all different. In Glasgow, for example, the two teams are divided along sectarian lines and the rivalry is seriously ugly. In Liverpool, families are divided at random between Liverpool and Everton FCs, and the whole thing is more about traditional banter.
Italy has a unique counter-culture of the 'Ultras'. (They are not much like 80s English hooligan 'firms', which were primarily about fighting each other. Ultras are the heartbeat of the tribe, the audience and the halftime entertainment all at once.) This particular violence was about an unusually vicious clash of Sicilian Ultras.
Is North America more 'civilised' than Italy? That's a way, way bigger question than the soccer violence one and obviously the answer is in some ways yes (MLS has no hooligans), and in other ways, no (Crips v Bloods; KKK; school massacres etc).
I read that a growing percentage of those foxy numbers at the World Cup are often plants - or at least, self-planted. They are opportunists who go along in the micro-gear, have no interest in the game, but then when the cameras come near they get up and dance, whoop etc in the hopes of getting on TV - thus depriving genuine fans of much-coveted tickets.
Anyway, going back to soccer and crowd violence - and this is why I have to go back so many steps - in Britain, that vicious tribal attitude is exclusive to football. Rugby and cricket are much more family-friendly, rivals-all-mixed-in-together affairs, like with Canadian or US sports.
This time, the reason is class-based. Football in England is traditionally the working man's game. The roots of football club support are these: factory closes at noon on Saturday, all the men pile into the local, have a few pints, then off to the football and home for tea. No women, no children, packed terraces with no seats, drunken singing. Add growing tribalism to the mix and...you get the idea.
Cricket and rugby on the other hand are the genteel middle-class sports.
A key reason why football hooliganism was eliminated in English football was the gentrification of the game when it was bought up in the early 1990s by Sky Sports: all-seater stadia, high ticket prices, family friendly.
Better all round, yes, but something has been lost for all that, in terms of atmosphere. And much of the tribalism remains, even if it is less physically violent. The internet football chatrooms are vicious.
Brit:
The KKK hasn't been a real factor in America since the 70s, although some misanthropes like to play at being "Klan".
It's almost all sick fantasy and idle words, now.
I think you've hit on the operative principle here, which is class, or the perception thereof. Having grown up in the most bourgeois nation in the world, I've never understood this disdain for middle class life coming from the Left. I understood why aristocrats would show disdain, but isn't, or shouldn't it be every working class slob's dream to buy a house in the burbs and send their kids to college?
But there is a lot of resistance to upward mobility from many working class people, particularly in the traditional class-based societies in Europe. Grievances are addictive, as are class identities. Why give up all that delicious rage just to become master of your own fate? It's much better to let others master your fate, so you can blame them for all your woes. It's much better than looking yourself in the mirror and blaming yourself.
We Anglosphere bourgeois types overrrate the appeal of individual autonomy, and underrate collective identity.
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