Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  It’s mid-morning by the time we reach Ancona, that kink halfway up the Adriatic (‘ankón’ is the Greek for elbow). No one has slept but exhaustion is strangely inebriating. Most of us have been drinking all the way north, so can’t tell the difference between tired and tipsy, but even the straights seem red-eyed and wired, ready to have fun when they pile out of their vans.

  The woman in the bar looks nervous as thirty Calabrians pile in. But she sells all her pastries in five minutes and relaxes once she’s seen the cash. We loaf around on chairs, wondering whether the city’s famous white monument to the fallen – a circle of columns and steps – should be bulldozed because it was built during the ventennio, the Mussolini years.

  By then we’re refuelled and start warming up our voices. Within a couple of hours we’re in Carpi. It’s supposed to be one of the Italy’s prettiest towns but we see only the police. They’re waiting by the motorway toll-booths, and pull us over. They insist we wait until all the other minibuses are here. ‘It’s just us,’ says Rosario, playing dumb. The police don’t move, knowing others are on their way. ‘We want to get to the game,’ whine the troops. It’s almost kick-off. The police are standing around ignoring us. We hang around another twenty minutes. We’ve travelled through the night to miss most of the first half.

  As the other minibuses arrive, the police finally let us move out. The sirens are loud as they escort us to the ground. Those near the windows lean out, leering at the smart signoras in their fur coats. As we’re singing, people bang out the rhythm, bouncing empties together so hard that the bottom drops off one bottle and sends glass across the road.

  It’s only when you finally get inside the ground – we’re on a thin ribbon above what looks like a velodrome ramp – that you see how many Cosentini there are. Many of those who live in the North have rolled up. There are toughs, young kids, families, friends. Donata Bergamini, the sister of the murdered midfielder from the 1980s, is here being hugged by fans. We’ve come together far from home and it feels defiant. We’re the away fans, the underdogs, the scorned Southern ‘peasants’ – but here we are, singing loud and raising the red-and-blue flags in a foreign land. It feels like a conquest – contained and caged but a daring trespass nonetheless.

  The game finishes 1–1. Cosenza equalize in the dying minutes of the match so it feels almost like a victory. We’re still singing as we walk through the car park. As we drive past the station we can see Cosentini singing on the platforms, other passengers smiling at them as the police rush in to stop the noise.

  It’s a dizzying, exhausting experience. It’s euphoric when you’re in the midst of it but then, the weariness and headaches kick in. All the rhetoric is about defiance but perhaps there’s no rebellion to it at all. Maybe we’re nothing more than caged birds.

  *

  Ciccio Bucci’s upbringing in San Severo, in Puglia, had been unpretentious. His father was a school caretaker, his mother a housewife. He had two brothers, and the house was noisy. Bucci was always on the look-out for an opening and his parents seemed indulgent of his impish ways. They knew he was a bit of a rogue but he was always cheerful and fun. And he wasn’t a bad boy. He was in the scouts and attended a technical secondary school to study book-keeping.

  His friends called him a ‘trascinatore’, an ‘inspirer’ or ‘instigator’, and he was always coming up with a plan. Tall, thin and dressed smartly in cheap clothes, Bucci tried to be friends with everyone. He was elected college representative but also hung out with teachers, betting on football results in the bar. He was popular and persuasive, even if you were never quite sure what plan he was hatching next. The one certainty was that any time Juventus was playing somewhere in the South, Bucci would find a ticket and go and see them. He sometimes travelled north, to watch them in Turin with one of his brothers.

  Every time he stood on the terraces, he made friends. He had that salesman’s ability to make people think he was being generous to them. Soon the people he met were being generous back, offering Bucci a bed in Turin for the night or a lift to the stadium for next Sunday.

  After a few years of travelling to Turin for games, Bucci decided to move there permanently. But that first winter was tough. After the steep, cobbled alleys of the South, he found the flat, perpendicular boulevards of Turin dull. The Piedmontese seemed cold and up-tight to him. They didn’t have the easy-going good humour of his mates from San Severo. He felt they looked down on him, not just because he was a Southerner but because he had become something of a hustler.

  He hadn’t found a job as an accountant and so used his energy and imagination to make ends meet. He set up market stalls, standing on the back of trucks with a wrap-around mike, extolling the virtues of a plastic kitchen gadget or a revolutionary cleaning cloth. Soon he got into counterfeit merchandise, selling Juventus shirts and scarves sourced cheaply outside the city. He became another character on the streets and the terraces just trying to get by.

  Sourcing and selling tickets to his friends down South, and to friends of friends, was another little earner. He became a fixer to his mates from San Severo who wanted to see a game at the Delle Alpi stadium. He was an amateur travel agent, too, organizing buses and trains and cheap hotels. His reputation grew. If you wanted a ticket, everyone knew that Bucci was your man. He made friends because he was more a fun chancer than a cut-throat tout. He had started to make good money and over the years learnt to become a bon viveur in a city renowned for its fine wines, chocolates and aromatic drinks.

  Because he was trying to source tickets, he became friends with a group that always seemed to have a few to sell: the Drughi. Soon he was doing the same as many others, getting tickets in bulk and selling them on at a profit wherever he could. He started hanging in their club, three bus stops beyond the end of the metro in Mirafiori, a poor suburb to the south of the city. He loved it in there. Even the ceiling was tiled black-and-white. Everywhere, there were photos of players in black-and-white. There were fist-high piles of tickets and bank notes, a dog called Snatch and a huge poster of Benito Mussolini. The more of their tickets he sold, the more friendly they became. For the first time since moving north, he felt like he had found a family. Many of the men were from the South and all, like him, loved the ‘old lady’ of Italian football.

  There was a power vacuum within the Drughi in the late 1990s. The group’s leader, Pino Coldheart, was in prison after his botched armed robbery and so Bucci rose through the ranks fast, quickly earning himself a gold star on the beam of the group’s HQ for ticket sales. In many ways this ultra gang was akin to a sales force, with each member selling as many tickets as they were able and adding to the public, and private, coffers.

  Quite soon Bucci was living the high life. He was always on his phone – he had 3,000 contacts stored in it – and the thing would ring all hours of day and night with people begging him for tickets. He could almost name his price. He had settled down, too, outside the city, with a woman called Gabriella. They had a son called Fabio, and lived in a flat in Beinette opposite a metal recycling depot.

  9 January 1998

  Nobody called him Claudio. Hardly anyone even knew his surname was Marsili. Everyone knew him just as Cupido.

  The police knew his real name though. In over fifteen years of ‘militancy’ on the terraces, he had been arrested for theft, public disorder and drug-dealing. His rooms were covered with far-right symbols, including Celtic crosses and swastikas.

  By 1998 he was thirty-two. He had never worked but had got by doing jobs for Diabolik’s Irriducibili. He had become one of the leading figures in that firm. But he always had his own income streams too. On 9 January he arrived with a mate on a stolen white moped outside the Cariplo Bank in Largo Boccea, a main road in the west of Rome. His aim was the same as always: disarm the guard, take him hostage, bring him inside the bank and get him to open up the safe. Cupido pulled down his balaclava, took out his Smith & Wesson .38 and walked quickly up to the guard.

  This time the g
uard, from the Mondialpol security firm, was quicker on the draw. He fired his Beretta repeatedly. Cupido fell onto a car and slid to the pavement. He was pronounced dead at the hospital shortly afterwards.

  At the next Lazio game a large banner was unfurled: ‘Claudio always in our hearts.’ ‘Sangue paga sangue’ was sprayed on the wall outside the bank: ‘blood pays for blood.’ As usual, the elevated rhetoric of the ultras seemed to suggest that the criminal was the victim. At Cupido’s funeral a banner read: ‘Three villainous shots have taken away our friend.’

  Over the years a number of ultras – like Il Drago – had been involved in bank jobs. What was surprising was less the fact that there were armed robbers amongst the ranks of the football fans on the terraces, than the ability of those terraces to invert everything you thought you knew about right and wrong. The thief was legitimized and the institution demonized, so that, like Bertolt Brecht, they seemed to ask ‘What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?’ ‘I believe,’ the ultra-defending lawyer, Lorenzo Contucci, once wrote, ‘that the number of those with criminal records is higher in parliament than amongst those who frequent the terraces.’

  24 May 1999: Piacenza v. Salernitana

  It was the last day of the Serie A championship. Piacenza only needed a draw to avoid relegation, whereas Salernitana needed to win. It ended in a 1–1 draw, with the players fighting as they came off the pitch, and the ultras smashing up toilets, cars and coaches. Fifteen hundred Salernitana fans were herded onto a special train, escorted by only ten police officers. It left at 8 p.m. but it was a tortuous journey because the emergency brake was repeatedly pulled. At various stations people piled out to smash windows. A fire extinguisher was thrown at another train. By 8 a.m. the following day the train was south of Naples, entering a 10-kilometre-long tunnel. Someone lit a fire and the wind of the tunnel, coming through the broken windows, fanned it. Suddenly, the fifth carriage was ablaze. A twenty-one-year-old firefighter, Simone Vitale, went in and dragged out a few people but the last time he went in, he was overwhelmed by the fumes. One eye-witness said that the tunnel ‘seemed like an enormous cigar vomiting smoke’. Vitale and three other men – another twenty-one-year-old and two teenagers – died. Following the tragedy, a new ‘observatory’ was established: the Osservatorio Nazionale sulle Manifestazioni Sportive (National Observatory on Sporting Events). It was intended to gather intelligence and advice in order to avert any future tragedies.

  *

  The timing of a spiritual ceremony is an integral part of its meaning. A monastic day is divided by the liturgy of the hours. The rise and fall of the religious year is measured by saints’ days and feast days, each marking time, reminding us of the passage of seasons and of lives.

  Kick-off for Serie A games had always been Sunday afternoon. That was the ritual for decades, as much a part of the weekly rhythm as work, meals and, maybe, Mass. But around the turn of the millennium it felt to many football fans as if the hands had been ripped from the footballing clock. Because of the advent of pay-per-view TV in the late 1990s, games were played at ridiculous times and places.

  Two broadcasting companies paved the way: Tele+ (a French company in which Silvio Berlusconi’s Fininvest had shares) and Stream (set up by four of the most powerful club presidents). Then, in 2003, Rupert Murdoch bought both companies to found Sky Italia. To maximize viewing figures, and thus advertising revenue, Sky Italia needed a big game every evening, not all happening at the same time on the same day. Matches were now spread across the week like butter across toast. It suited everyone. Money was flooding into the game from TV deals, attracting better players, giving fans the hope of promotion or even trophies, and increasing the salaries of the suits who had once put money into clubs rather than take it out.

  Like all fundamentalists, the ultras were constantly on the lookout for heresy. They felt that their liturgical calendar had been sold to the highest bidder. It seemed as if their absolutism – presence at every game – had been relativized. You could now claim a presence, of sorts, watching the match from your armchair. You could certainly see the game better in your slippers. The old way of being a spectator – as participant in, even a rival to, the event – was being replaced by a static, stay-at-home zapper. Between 1990 and 1999 the average attendance in Serie A games had been 31,000. By the 2006–07 season it had plummeted to below 20,000. In the 1988–89 season ticket sales had accounted for 50 per cent of the income of Cosenza football club; by 1990–91 it was only 20 per cent.

  The staggered games are called, in Italian, a ‘broken calendar’ (the same word is used to describe the meat in a casserole – spezzatino). It is an eloquent description of the rupture that television created. Staggered games meant that the league tables rarely spoke clearly any more. There were now asterisks and double asterisks to explain which club had played one, or two, games fewer. The excitement of contemporaneity had disappeared, as games were brought forward (the anticipo) and deferred (the posticipo).

  For ultras, television’s ability to slot games where they wanted had many disadvantages. They were less likely to bump into rival ultras in service and railway stations, all heading across the peninsula at the same times. They were forced to travel thousands of kilometres on work days, meaning that ‘presence’ became harder for those with regular jobs and that the ‘oceanic’ away-days were a thing of the past. As numbers dwindled, it was only the radical rump that remained.

  The televising of so many games, however, had the advantage of publicizing the banners. Now one could disseminate a message not just to a half-empty stadium but to a whole nation. The Teramo ultras made their feelings clear with a banner to the footballing superpowers who moved matches with mathematical calculation: ‘Anticipate your death, postpone your funeral.’ Catania urged ‘boycott Sky to reinforce a way of thinking’. The Bologna ultras had a banner saying: ‘Football: for us passion, for you televi$ion.’

  Matches weren’t just sloshed across the week. Absurdly, the Italian Supercoppa was once played in Tripoli, in Libya, for reasons of commercial expansion. Quite often games were moved for reasons of public order. The most exciting matches – the heated derbies and grudge games between enemies – were now deliberately timetabled to make it hard for fans to be present. On 9 April 2001 the match between Fiorentina and Roma was moved – by the Prefect – from the weekend to a Monday in order to avoid the usual street fights between fans. (In Italy only hairdressers have Mondays off.) The rearranging of that match was, for the ultras, the umpteenth example of Establishment scorn. But the response was humorous. In the stadium the 8,000 Romanisti who managed to take a day off work to support the red-and-yellow of their team unfurled a large striscone saying, in dialect: ‘We’re all hairdressers.’

  One of the best banners not only lamented the shredding of the liturgical calendar of football, but also celebrated the Cosenza ultras’ notoriously erratic, rebellious timekeeping: ‘We arrived late… or maybe too early. Either way, our time doesn’t resemble yours.’ The Reggiani wrote ‘Questo calcio ci fa sky-fo’, a play on words that suggested that they found this new football ‘disgusting’, misspelling it to include Sky. The ever-eloquent Atalantini wrote plaintively: ‘Give us back our Sundays.’

  It was as if those fans who believed in presence were suddenly replaced as the customer of choice. The share of a club’s income from ticket sales plummeted as that from television deals, and thus advertising, increased. The organized fans who had always been faithful felt, understandably, cheated. They were reduced to being a colourful and noisy relish to add to the televisual offering. So it wasn’t, perhaps, surprising that in 1999 an ultra manifesto was agreed by many groups and published on the excellent ASRomaUltras website. It made many demands, most of which would appear eminently sensible to even the most mild-mannered fan: transfers should take place only in summer; games should all be played on the same day, at the same time; football owners should only be allowed to own one team; shirts should be numbered from
one to eleven, and so on.

  The trouble was that the ultras were often both the resistance to, but also a reflection of, the sport around which they gathered. Theorists have often spoken about the ‘deludification’ of football, about the ways in which play (hard-fought but fun, beautiful because pointless) can be transformed into something nastily serious (desperation for points and all sorts of secondary gains). The ultras followed a similar trajectory: the early years had been characterized by – their favourite word – goliardia. It was a playful, Bacchanalian party. Even the violence was (it was this which, they said, endowed it with ‘purity’) meaningless. But the ultra world, too, became ‘deludified’. Violence was increasingly serving the purposes it more usually does (power and money).

  Many ultras are adamant that they have never made money out of their faith. ‘Here’, they all say, ‘there’s no tripe for the cats’ – a saying that implies chronic poverty. It’s undeniably true that the vast majority lose, rather than rake in, cash. But with the industrialization of the game certain ultras realized that para-military gangs could turn a tidy profit. Over the years many businesses like ‘Punto Roma’ or ‘An Infinite Love’ would pop up offering ‘services’ – tickets, tour packages and merchandising – to fans. In Milano, having sealed a non-aggression pact, the two leaders of the rival terraces – Franco Caravita and ‘the Baron’ – opened a clothing shop together, ‘Mondo Ultrà’, in Via Cesariano.

  Nowhere was that new commercialism more evident than amongst Lazio’s Irriducibili. To begin with Diabolik and his crew were just selling their Lazio gear out of cardboard boxes and temporary gazebos. Business was booming. They had no overheads and yet they had queues of people wanting to pay for their clobber. The price differential between their counterfeit shirts and the real thing was huge, and it was, anyway, far cooler to have a Lazio shirt with the Irriducibili’s Mr Enrich logo than the Puma one. The idea that local lads from Rome were taking on a global clothing company only added to the allure. In addition, those from the streets knew what the very latest pose was. Yuri was put in charge of the marketing operation and, he said, ‘It’s a very smart management. We’re very attentive to the trend of the moment.’ Nor did they have rivals. If anyone else set up a stall without their permission, they were dealt with. One man, who knew Diabolik, says that he was all smiles until, out of the blue, he would pull out a pistol.