Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  People were hearing things, and repeating them, and asking questions that morphed into statements. The more people asked, ‘Has someone died?’, the more believable it became, whatever the reply. Soon – in the chaos of that evening – a rumour began that a baby had been killed by a police vehicle. Like all oral storytelling, it seemed to give sudden meaning to the group’s anxieties. It was a grippingly believable rumour.

  At half-time, the Roma ultras removed all their banners, a gesture akin to lowering a flag, a sign of respect in the event of death. Even people watching at home on TV realized something strange was going on. Fabrizio Toffolo, one of the leaders of Lazio’s Irriducibili ultras, was under house arrest. ‘When at the end of the first half,’ he said, ‘the banners in the south terrace were removed, it was a signal that something serious had happened…’ Even those who were uncertain what to believe were so incensed by the treatment they had received at the hands of the riot police that they, along with the rest of the stadium, began screaming ‘assassini, assassini’.

  There was a denial, over the stadium’s PA system, that anyone had died: ‘the Questura communicates that the news is absolutely without foundation.’ Very few believed the announcement however. Given the disturbances outside the stadium, the rumours of a baby’s death seemed every bit as credible as the denial. Within minutes all sides of the stadium were shouting for the match to be called off. ‘Sospendete la partita,’ they shouted. ‘Stop the game.’ The chant, in unison around the stadium, convinced the last doubters that something terrible really must have occurred.

  There was righteous indignation in the chant. Just ten days before, Roma had played Villarreal in the Uefa Cup. It was on 11 March, the same day in which 192 people lost their lives in Madrid in the Al Qaeda bombings. The fans had been adamant that the match should be postponed as a mark of respect but nothing – not even that horror – could stop the show business. This time, on their own turf, they were determined that the show shouldn’t go on.

  The second half kicked off. The game was nil–nil but the atmosphere was so strange that even the players seemed reluctant to go on, deliberately kicking the ball into the stands. At 21.34, in the fourth minute of the second half, the referee blew his whistle and suspended the game. Three Roma ultras were on the pitch and Francesco Totti, the iconic Roman captain, went to talk to them.

  ‘Francé,’ said one of the ultras, ‘you have to stop the game. Give me your word of honour. Now go and tell the others.’

  ‘But the speaker,’ Totti tried to push back, ‘said that no child has died.’

  ‘I’m telling you that’s the way it is. Even his parents have called from home. The game can’t be played.’

  As he was walking away, Totti looked over at his teammates and club officials and said: ‘If we play on, they’re going to kill us.’ Interviewed by police, Totti denied having been threatened but said that ‘a heavy atmosphere had been created which left one to guess that something serious could have happened if the game had continued…’ At 9.59 p.m., after a phone consultation with the head of the Italian Lega Calcio, Adriano Galliano, the referee decided to postpone the game.

  The iconic non-match was given the ironic title, ‘the Derby of the Dead Baby’. There had been no death, but tellingly more people were convinced by a rumour than by a reality narrated by the authorities. It was an indictment of the lack of trust in the police and Carabinieri that the vast majority disbelieved the truth and gave credence to an invention instead. Perhaps it was just an indication – as the ultra-watcher Diego Mariottini put it – that in Italy ‘the truth is less true than elsewhere’.

  Many didn’t believe that it was merely a rumour that got out of hand, however. They thought that there had been a deliberate design behind the evening. It seemed an eerie warning from the ultras as to what could happen if either Lazio or Roma were to go bankrupt (less than a week before that non-game trade in Lazio shares had been suspended). As always in the ultra world, it was hard to disentangle self-righteousness from arrogance. The menace the ultras could conjure up seemed deliberately overpowering, as if they were sending a message to the super-rich sport: ‘We’re still here, and we can veto your money-making enterprise. We can put a stop to all this unless you cooperate with us.’

  Many groups were, by then, enjoying a parasitic relationship with their club. The ultras could call a ‘fans’ strike’, refusing to go to the ground for a period. But the main tool they had in order to force club owners to compromise was related to what was called ‘objective responsibility’. According to Italian law, if explosives or racist chanting were present within a stadium the club itself was held responsible, invariably being subjected to large fines, docked points or stadium closures. It was, for ultras, an open goal. If the club presidents didn’t provide the ultras with what they wanted, a few racist chants or objects thrown on to the pitch could bring them to the table. The figures demonstrate just how powerful the ultras’ bargaining position is: between 2014 and 2019 fines due to ultras’ actions cost Roma €1.2 million, Napoli €524,000 and Juventus €364,000.

  What the ultras wanted was usually very simple. Merchandising concessions and donations towards the cost of material for operatic choreographies were the bare minimum. What they really wanted were tickets. Few clubs didn’t come to an arrangement. Some gave the ultras free tickets, others sold them. But even when they had to pay for tickets, the groups could double their money by fleecing their fellow fans, increasing the price as high as demand would allow. They actually helped keep ticket prices expensive. And the bigger the club, of course, the higher the demand and the greater the profits. One police investigation in Napoli overheard one man saying to another: ‘We live on tickets, we live on Napoli football club.’

  Over time, the grey area between football clubs and their ultras became normalized. Whilst both sides – owners and ultras – were often scathing about the other in public, in private they formed a symbiotic relationship. The ultras could threaten public disorder on behalf of club presidents when legal, sporting and judicial decisions were pending. In 2003 various Serie A clubs, including Lazio, were so seriously in debt that it seemed likely many would go bust. It suited the clubs to have thousands of ultras on standby, as it were, ready to riot if their beloved clubs were made extinct by the application of the law. Fear of rioting (and the political cost of losing voters) encouraged the government to pass what was called a ‘debt spread’ law, allowing repayment of evaded tax over many years. ‘In this way,’ wrote the criminologist Vincenzo Scalia, ‘a financial problem is turned into a public order one, thus urging a political intervention.’

  Writing in 2007, Alessandro Dal Lago noticed this shift whereby they became the foot soldiers of the club’s interests: ‘… the ultras (certainly, not all of them, not always, not in all the stadiums) ended up being used for internal struggles within clubs, to support this or that president, to impose an increase in the price of tickets or simply to sustain the politics of the new signings…’

  But it was at Juventus that the relationship between ultras and club was most entangled. The deal was that the club would supply the various ultra groups – Bravi Ragazzi, the Drughi, Tradizione, Vikings – with hundreds of tickets as long as the behaviour inside the ground caused no difficulties for the club hierarchy. ‘The compromise was this,’ the former commercial director, Francesco Calvo, later told investigators: ‘to guarantee a safe game, I gave in regarding the tickets, knowing that they were making money. I maintained that a mediation with the organized fans was, however, a good solution for everyone.’

  Before the start of each season, the various capo-ultras would request hundreds of season tickets from the complicit club. Since tickets, by then, were sold to named individuals with ID cards, the touting could only work with the connivance of stewards on the turnstiles, who turned a blind eye to the discrepancies between the name on the ticket and the name of the person holding it. It was common to see the tough ultra crews crowding around stewards f
or the hour or two before every game, making sure that they were behaving themselves.

  As well as season tickets, additional tickets were also given to the ultras for every game. One Drugo, for example, later revealed that his gang would request 300 tickets per game. Sometimes they were given for free but, more often, they were just given on credit and in bulk. The ultras paid the club back after the match, once they had sold the tickets at profit. The various ultra outfits had effectively become, with the blessing of the club itself, subcontracted ticket offices.

  It was an arrangement that made them vast sums of money. The Turin Carabinieri estimated that ticket-touting by Juventus ultras yielded between €13,500 and €15,000 per game. ‘Tickets which were bought at face value, or even received for free,’ their report said, ‘were being sold on with a mark-up of €100–€200.’

  Present Day: Another Game

  Brescia’s ground is hemmed in between the foothills of the Alps, with fog drowsing between the peaks. But it’s mostly empty. There are only 5,000 spectators for a big Serie B game.

  Now Cosenza are back in Serie B, the team is playing many games in the North and it’s a chance to show how they deal with hatred. Donata Bergamini is here, and Elastic leads the singing in memory of her late brother.

  ‘Fuck off Cosenza,’ chant the Bresciani. In their knee-jerk outrage at this unoriginal insult, many Cosentini offer the same chant back. Elastic scowls furiously, enraged that any shout from our midst has arisen without his say-so. ‘We don’t give a shit what they do,’ he screams. He pulls himself tall on the railings and there’s a hint of a smile to his snarl.

  ‘You’ – he’s got the megaphone to his mouth and is bouncing his forehead backwards to the Brescia ultras 200 metres away – ‘are Catanzaresi.’ It’s a chant of hatred and humour at the same time. We’re accusing these proud Northerners of being Calabresi from Catanzaro, somewhere they probably couldn’t even find on a map. But we know what it means and keep it going, even though the stadium announcer reminds us that ‘territorial discrimination’ (basically internal racism) will be penalized with the appropriate sanctions. ‘You are Catanzaresi,’ we keep chanting, defining ourselves by what we’re not.

  Then, to show it’s just fun, we rattle off the line that ‘the Lombard League said we [southerners] were a bastard race’. The chorus is a way of shrugging it off: SkinnyMon, Chill, Vindov and I link arms, bouncing left as the row in front of us is bouncing right, ‘la-la-la-ing’ to the Speedy Gonzalez melody as if we had our fingers in our ears.

  2005, Genoa

  In the spring of 2005 Alberto Lari, a Genovese magistrate, suspected that the Genoa ultras were receiving information on match outcomes from within the club itself. Lari sought permission for his men in the Carabiniere flying squad to wiretap some of the staff of Genoa football club, including the phone of the president, Enrico Preziosi.

  It was a very sensitive stage of the season. Genoa needed three points for mathematical promotion to Serie A and there were two games left. The club had a scowling manager with a voice like a Vespa – Serse Cosmi – and a reliable goalscorer, Diego Milito.

  Piacenza was the penultimate game. It was 5 June 2005. Fifteen thousand Genoa fans made the trip across the Apennines. Some middle-aged men even ran there in a relay. It was an exodus of cars, bikes and vans, all decked out in red and blue and with the yellow griffon. But the game didn’t go as planned. As time was running out, Giorgio Di Vicino, a Neapolitan journeyman on loan to Piacenza, scored a stunning free kick from 30 metres out, curling it left-footed into the top corner of the goal. It was his first and only goal for the club. The thousands of Genoa fans were silent. They barely heard the raucous insults from the other end of the stadium. After a season of brilliance, the squad seemed to have run out of steam, or luck, at the business end of the season. Everyone was suddenly sober. The team had blown its match-point.

  The final game of the season was at home, against a Venezia team that was bottom of the league and going bankrupt. Lines of red and blue balloons hung on parallel wires between palazzi. Plastic flags were taped to the plane trees of the long boulevards and onto lampposts. That iconic date of 1893 was spray-painted onto walls. It was Genoa’s biggest game for a generation. ‘Old griffon,’ said one banner above the traffic lights, ‘open your wings. It’s time to fly.’

  The innocent hope of fans contrasted with the cynical certainty of people who already knew the future. Police had placed a bug in the Novotel hotel in Genoa where the Venezia players were staying before the game. One of them had played in Ternana when a current Genoa Sporting Director had been there.

  ‘Will you send flowers to my wife?’ the Venezia player asked the Genoa official.

  ‘Don’t worry, there will be flowers and fine wine for everyone,’ the club official replied. It seemed an obvious code for the financial rewards of letting Genoa win the game.

  Just before kick-off, at 12.58, two Carabinieri monitoring the phone-tap listened in on a phone call from Enrico Preziosi, the Genoa owner. He was speaking to one of the team managers of Venezia, Franco Dal Cin.

  ‘It’s all OK,’ said Dal Cin, ‘we couldn’t have done better than this.’ When the team line-ups were announced, it seemed strange that many of Venezia’s star players – Esposito, Savino Guidoni, Andersson and Collauto – were absent.

  In the stadium the choreography was stunning. One side of each stand waved red flags, the other half blue. Each stand was perfectly divided into those two colours. The game kicked off and Genoa played decent football. But early in the game, a long, diagonal ball came to Gonzalo Vicente, the Venezia attacker, unmarked at the far-post. It was a simple tap in.

  The Carabinieri listened to Preziosi’s phone conversation with Pino Pagliara, a Venezia staffer, in the midst of that turbulent half. ‘What the fuck is happening?’ screamed Preziosi. ‘What are those guys doing? They scored by mistake. We had an agreement.’

  Genoa kept coming forwards, shooting from all angles, but the ball just wouldn’t go in. They hit the crossbar. Milito went close. Then Marco Rossi crossed from the right and Milito jumped slightly, bending his right leg so that he almost stamped the ball in with the outside of his right ankle. The energy then, the euphoria and relief, were almost libidinous. People were screaming, jumping, hugging. ‘Milito!’ screamed one commentator for the local radio, again and again: ‘Milito! Milito! Milito!’ It was one-all.

  At half-time, the two Carabinieri monitoring the phone-taps listened in. Preziosi was still furious, screaming at one of the Venezia staff: ‘What the devil are they doing? It wasn’t supposed to go like this. We had an agreement.’

  ‘Stay calm,’ the Venezia man replied, ‘we’ll sort everything out.’ Venezia’s Czech goal-keeper, Martin Lejsal, was replaced by a nineteen-year-old rookie, Riccardo Pezzato. Within a few minutes of the restart, Rossi tapped in after the Venezia keeper had blocked a shot with his legs. It was even more raucous now. No neutral could remain unmoved. Luis Oliveira equalized with a header for Venezia but then a cushioned header put Milito into the penalty area and, drifting between two defenders, he smacked the ball into the roof of the net. Even in slow-motion the ball moved fast. The score ended 3–2 to Genoa.

  There were riotous celebrations that night. As Enrico Preziosi walked the streets, he was hugged by fans. ‘Grazie, Presidente,’ said one, ‘grazie, grazie.’ He was given a crown made out of gold card and a flag that said ‘The King of Genova’. Car horns sounded throughout the night. It was a contagious cacophony. Even the next morning, as people went to work, there were still dazed fans wandering the streets and sober-seeming commuters honking their horns and reigniting the noise.

  The day after the match Pino Pagliara phoned a colleague from Genoa: ‘Oh, what’s happening?’ Pagliara asked. ‘Deals should be respected.’ He was told to go to Cogliate, the headquarters of Enrico Preziosi’s Giochi Preziosi empire on Tuesday at 10 a.m. When he emerged from the building that Tuesday morning, police moved in and found that the bag
he was carrying contained €250,000. Pagliara stuttered that it was for the sale of a player but the evidence against both clubs was overwhelming.

  As the story emerged, Preziosi – like many presidents – tried to turn the threat of ultra unrest to his advantage. ‘If Genoa is demoted to Serie B,’ he said, ‘there will be another G8.’ The club was actually demoted to Serie C. Fans were, understandably, furious but they were uncertain whether their anger should be aimed at their scheming president or the Italian FA. Riots ensued throughout the city. Wheelie bins were burnt and windows and cars smashed.

  Some wondered, however, whether the ultras were, like ordinary fans, the victims of the stitch-up or, like Preziosi, the beneficiaries of it. Genoa’s ultras were indignant that they were associated with the match-fixing. From their perspective it was all hearsay. Many fans, they said, come up with phrases that might sound like certainties: ‘We’re definitely going to win this’, or ‘It’ll be 2–0, don’t worry.’ It was just, Puffer told me, ‘bar chatter’.

  But the investigating magistrate had recordings of conversations between ultras which seemed to suggest that they actually had inside information on matches. He was repeatedly threatened, receiving a trigger in the post. Graffiti against him was left outside his daughter’s school. When one journalist reported on the story, he was given a police escort. For the entirety of the following season, there was a banner in the gradinata nord saying: ‘We don’t buy the Secolo [the city’s newspaper]’. The paper’s windows were smashed and other graffiti urged execution of the editor. Years later the editor offered me a succinct analysis of the ultra world: ‘For the most part it floats in the borderland between legality and illegality. It often slides onto the wrong side.’