Although I love football – playing it, watching it, talking about it – I’ve always thought the fans were more intriguing than the players. Maybe it’s an ideological inclination towards the masses rather than the elite; or else a belief that the meaning of sport resides not in the champions, but in those who are being championed.
In many ways this story isn’t about football at all, but a portrait of an enduring Italian subculture inspired by it. For more than 50 years, the ultras have turned the curve (the “curved” ends behind the goal) into fairground mirrors of Italian society, offering both a reflection and a distortion of the country. The ultras are a fascinating way to understand not football as such, but why it means so much to people and why a mere rectangle of grass can inspire religious fundamentalism. They are often compared to punks, Hells Angels, hooligans or the South American barras bravas, and there are elements of all those groups within the evolving movement. But in truth, it’s a thoroughly Italian phenomenon drawing on much deeper influences within Italian history.
It is, though, the antithesis of a national movement. The foundation stone of every ultra group is topophilia (love of place) or campanilismo (the attachment to one’s local bell-tower). An ultra is a patriot of his or her patch, of a specific town, city or suburb. It’s about rootedness and belonging: the sort of pride that persuades people to boast that their forgotten nowhere is actually caput mundi, the “capital of the world”.
For decades the ultras have been connected to murders, missing persons, bank jobs and drug-dealing, quite apart from the almost routine punch-ups and petty thefts that happen on match days. Yet those cronache nere – “black chronicles” – are only partially representative of the ultra world. I actively sought out a curva, or terrace, which might balance the scales, which might even offer some “white chronicles” as well. I had heard that Cosenza, a small, ignored city in the deep south, was a place where the ultras squatted buildings confiscated from the mafia, giving beds to hundreds of immigrants and destitute Italians. The Cosenza ultras had opened a food bank for the poor and created Italy’s first play-park for disabled children. One of the most influential fans in the curva was a Franciscan friar. In an era when so many terraces find inspiration in fascism, Cosenza was devoutly anti-fascist. If anyone was looking for a place to find a counterbalance to the ultra stereotype, Cosenza was clearly it.
At a match with the Cosenza ultras…
Siena v Cosenza
Lega-Pro (Serie C) final, June 2018
Ciccio Conforti is overlooking a horseshoe of 12,000 Cosenza fans from high up in the curva. He’s in his mid-50s now, with curly grey hair and aviator shades. His pregnant partner is by his side. Back in the glory days of the 1980s he was one of the brains behind the Cosenza ultras. In any other city he would have been called a capo, a “boss”, but Cosenza is too anarchic and egalitarian for bosses. He’s just known as Zu Ciccio (Uncle Ciccio).
Almost all his old gang are here for this massive game. It’s the grand final to reach the promised land of Serie B, Italy’s second division. It’s a hot evening in June and there’s a sense that this year, at last, luck is on the side of the small Calabrian city. There are ultras from Genoa and Ancona here too, to support the Cosenza groups with whom they’re twinned. The only ones missing are the diffidati, the “mistrusted”, who are excluded from the stadiums for years at a time.
“Diffidati sempre presenti!” Goes up the chant, repeated throughout the game with a handclap echo of the syllables: “The distrusted are always present!”
Ciccio’s group was called Nuclei Sconvolti (the “Deranged Nuclei”). It sounded deliberately like a sleeper cell of stoners. Their symbol was that spiky green leaf so well known to tokers. But beyond all the provocation, they felt that there was something profound to what they were doing.
“For me ‘ultra’ was a sacred word,” Ciccio says wistfully. “I would have done everything and more for that world. I was an ultra long before I was a fan.”
The word “ultra” meant, originally, “other” or “beyond”, like the Italian altro and oltre. To be an ultra implies that you’re an insurgent, a revolutionary, a brigand, a partisan, a bandit, a radical and a rascal. To the bourgeois, an ultra is way beyond the pale, the wrong side of the tracks and then some.
Marco Zanoni (one of the leading figures in Verona’s Yellow-Blue Brigade) once said: “I think that someone who frequents the curva is an idealist. At the end of the day, he goes to support the team of his city and we know that an idealist can, in certain circumstances, become a tough, even an extremist.” That’s the other meaning of ultra: “extreme”, as in the English “ultra-hardline”. The ultras are the extremists, the guerrillas, of Italian football.
Of the 12,000 in the curva this evening, probably only a few hundred are ultras (official estimates suggest there are about 40,000 ultras in the whole country, although ultras themselves say the figure is far higher). They’re the ones at the centre of the curva, singing incessantly to dissipate the tension: “Oh, la vinciamo noi”, they sing repeatedly (“We’re going to win”).
The game kicks off. Immediately, Siena are putting Cosenza, playing in white with a red-and-blue trim, under pressure. Siena’s midfielders are running beyond their bearded striker, pulling the Cosenza defence this way and that.
“Sono puliti, cazzo”, says Ciccio. (“Fuck, they’re neat.”)
If you look at the clothing, it’s obvious who is an ultra. “You’ll never have us as you want us,” their T-shirts say. The ultras say they’re fighting brutal state repression, and that their insurgency is a quasi-sacred act: “la fede non si diffida” say many of the other T-shirts, meaning “you can’t mistrust the faith”. Most of their headline concepts sound strangely spiritual: “congregation”, “sacrifice”, “presence’.
Weirdly, one of the ways to spot the ultras is that many aren’t paying attention to the game. The skinny man leading the singing with a megaphone is called Lastica (Elastic) and he has his back to the game, as do almost all his lieutenants. They are watching the troops. The more long-in-the-tooth ultras work the curva like hosts at a party. They chat and argue on the walkways, often only looking over each other’s shoulders at the pitch every now and again to see what all the noise is about. Being an ultra isn’t about watching the football, but watching each other: admiring the carnival on the curva, not the game on the grass.
The contrast between their self-perception and what the bien-pensant say about them could hardly be more marked. The vast majority of Italians consider the ultras degenerate fuck-ups who have nothing decent to contribute to society. They are often described as subhumans (“animals” is a common insult, as is pezze di merda, “pieces of shit”). The president of Genoa FC, Enrico Preziosi, in one prolonged rant, once said that “certain ultras should be wiped from the face of the earth”. In 2009, when he was England manager, Fabio Capello complained: “In Italian football, the ultras are in control.” Throughout their 50-year history, the ultras have been, critics say, masked and violent criminals, sacking cities at every away game. They embody suspect or dangerous traits: blind loyalty, tribal affiliation, omertà towards the police, caveman masculinity and brute muscle. At worst they have become the willing foot soldiers of both organised crime and of Italy’s fascist revival.
The ultra world is so contradictory that there’s truth in both portraits. Those contradictions are constantly in evidence. They are football fans who don’t much care about football. They’re adamant that politics should be kept out of the terraces, and yet many terraces are profoundly politicised. It’s a druggy world which has, however, often helped people stay clean. The ultra milieu overlaps with the mafia, but the ultra world has, far more often, been a sanctuary from it. The ultras are intolerant but can also be incredibly inclusive. Violence is integral to them but so is altruism. They are responsible for acts of great charity at times when the Italian state has been, as it often is, absent. The ultras embody many of the themes that intrigue us as humans: they’re obsessed by loyalty and affiliation and belonging; they reflect solidarity and cohesion as well as crime, violence and greed. They constantly seem to be asking the question of what it is to be a man in a world in which muscle and manliness are, for understandable reasons, considered suspect.
Suddenly, a goal. The stadium is going berserk. There’s a forward surge, and people fall forwards, catching each other and hugging all at once. The goal was at the far end, a simple cut-back from Tutino (on loan from Napoli) and Bruccini stuck it away. People are bouncing now, jumping up and down, rewinding the songbook.
“Che bello è, quando esco di casa,” we sing (“how beautiful it is, when I get out of the house…”), “per andare allo stadio, a tifare Cosenza…” (“to go to the stadium to support Cosenza…”). The simple, stirring music was taken from the chorus of a pop song by the Italian singer Noemi.
There are dozens of ultra groups in Cosenza but they come together in two different umbrella groupings: the Curva Sud 1978 and the Anni Ottanta (a tribute to the glory years of the 1980s). They have been feuding and fighting all season. Claudio, one of the wise heads of the city with friends in both camps, says that “ultra” means superunismo (“super-unity”). But despite that, almost all stadiums are divided into different sectors for warring ultras who support the same team. The splits occur for all sorts of reasons. The main factor is simply the defining stance of the ultra: it’s all about being intransigent, uncompromising and unflinching. You never step backwards. “Mai in ginocchio” is another slogan (“never on your knees”). And so, just like Italian politics, groups splinter and fight each other. Today, though, there’s a peace agreement. In this showpiece game for the big prize, there’s an armed truce between the rival groups.
Something astonishing happens after half-time. The action is at the far end where Siena have a free kick. It comes to nothing and suddenly Tutino, way inside his own half, has brought the ball down with the outside of his left foot and is sprinting towards us. No one’s near him. Two, three touches, lunging forwards. Still no one near him. A couple more nudges, he’s outside the area but fuck it, he smacks it so hard with the outside of his left boot that it bananas away from the Siena keeper and into the very top corner of the goal. 2-0.
The rush of adrenaline and love and ecstasy is intense. Another friend, Chill, is shaking his fist at me, as if berating me for not believing. Everyone is hugging, singing, reaching for their phones to call friends and send videos, trying to capture this once-in-a-generation moment when fate is smiling on the absolute underdogs.
The ecstasy doesn’t last long. Siena are awarded a penalty and it’s 2-1 before you’ve even caught your breath. “This whore of a team,” the man behind us is saying, “has betrayed us so many times.” The black shirts of Siena keep pounding away at that goal, so far away from this end that you can barely see what’s happening.
It’s suddenly tense but not as tense as it should be. The ultras are singing and singing. I can see a mate, nicknamed “Left-Behind”, screaming like it’s his last night on earth. That’s their way of dissipating their dread that the dream is over. They really thought it was their year. And now it’s slipping away and all they can do is bear witness to their presence by being as loud as possible.
This new song is an old favourite, apparently started by Torino ultras. To the tune of the Beach Boys’ Sloop John B, we’re singing what has been an anthem all year: “It seems impossible/ that I’m still here with you/ this is an illness that never leaves. I want to go away/ away from here/ but I can’t survive far from you.” It’s a song that seems to encapsulate much of what this ultra life is like: it’s an addiction or illness, something you can’t do without. The “here” is less about the team than the terraces.
Everyone says that being an ultra is a way of life. But it’s a way of life that has evolved, mutated, regenerated and reinvented itself. And it’s the evolution of the ultra world that makes Ciccio so melancholic.
“It truly, truly hurts me to see what happens on the terraces now,” he says, ignoring the game. “It makes me suffer greatly. Because I know we’re responsible. It was us who created this world. But the thing has got out of hand. There’s been an escalation, and we’ve gone from fist fights to knives, from knives to flares, from flares to ambushes, to Molotov cocktails, to bombs and to pistols. It keeps getting worse.”
It’s still 2-1 with 10 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.” But the desperation to win is only vaguely related to football. If Cosenza were promoted to Serie B, the team would finally be playing in a national league, not just a southern division, and all the Cosentini living in the north could see old mates regularly once more. If the team were to win, that collective triumph would bring people back together, maybe even the team’s warring ultra groups.
A victory would be political too. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the vast majority of Italian 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 after the first world war – Benito Mussolini. But a Cosenza victory in this final would offer a distant, maybe naive, hope: that the definition of those extremist words – ultra, oltre, outré, other – can’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 totalitarian order and racial intolerance on the terraces. A victory for this almost unknown Calabrian city, against a stunning Tuscan town that was once instrumental in the founding of capitalist banking, would show that football is still able to do something miraculous: to invert the established hierarchies and give succour to the underdog.
Before a match with the Blood & Honour ultras…
Boxing Day 2018
Just a few months later a very different side of the ultra underworld emerged in Milan. Dede was in the usual pub, Cartoons, on Via Emanuele Filiberto in Milan. Cartoons was an English-style boozer, with dark, shiny wood and framed cartoons on the walls. The place was packed now with Inter ultras. It was only a couple of hours until the match kicked off against Napoli.
Dede wasn’t an Inter ultra. He was a 39-year-old tiler from Varese, 60 kilometres north-west of Milan. He had a wife and two kids and worked out in a martial arts club where he had won a few tournaments in “short-knife fencing” using daggers. He had 10 years of stadium bans behind him. He was there with other ultras from Varese, part of a group called Blood & Honour that was twinned with Inter ultras. They weren’t the only outsiders that the various Inter ultras – the Boys SAN, the Irriducibili and the Vikings – had invited for the fight. Nice’s Ultras Populaire Sud were in the pub too, since they had a beef with the Neapolitans from a fight a few years before.
Blood & Honour is also a neo-Nazi organisation. It was founded in England in 1987 by Ian Stuart Donaldson, the lead singer of the white-power rock band, Skrewdriver. The name came from the motto of the Hitler youth, Blut und Ehre. After Donaldson’s death in a car crash in 1993, Blood & Honour became an international movement with chapters throughout Europe and America. In 1998, a new ultra group in Varese had decided to use the Blood & Honour name, in English, and employ the same Oþalan rune as their logo, a symbol that has been used by both the Waffen-SS and a banned Italian fascist organisation, Avanguardia Nazionale.
There was a ruthlessness to the Blood & Honour group that had rarely been seen even on the Italian terraces. Hammers, axes, baseball bats and knives had all been used in fights before, but now they were being backed up by a Nazi ideology in which force was the only language. Within three years, the men from Blood & Honour had defeated Varese’s traditional ultra groups and become the bosses of the terrace, hanging their banner – black with white lettering – more centrally than all the others.
But it was a gang beset by legal problems. Many members were arrested for drugs and arms offences, for bank jobs and beatings. Although one of their leaders survived a shooting, others were less fortunate: a man called Claudino was stabbed to death outside the bar where he worked, and Saverio – on the run in Spain – was stabbed in Torremolinos. One member of the gang now lived between Morocco and Spain and was involved with the ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, importing tonnes of hashish through the port of Genoa.
The Blood & Honour gang, though, had a political affinity with the Inter ultras. The “SAN” of Inter’s Boys SAN – one of Italy’s oldest ultra groups – stands for squadre di azione nero-azzurro, an echo of Mussolini’s squadre d’azione. The leader of Boys SAN was called Il Rosso (“Red”) and, with other ultra leaders, he had planned this attack on the Neapolitan ultras with precision. For weeks some of his crew had infiltrated the Neapolitan’s social media accounts. Lookouts on mopeds waited to catch sight of the Neapolitans’ convoy as it came off the ring road. Other Inter ultras sat in another pub, the Baretto, to distract the undercover cops.
When the call came through – “They’re turning into Via Novara now” – about 100 men in 20 cars raced to Via Fratelli Zoia, which runs perpendicular to Via Novara. It was the ideal place for the ambush because it was near the stadium and a couple of large, dark parks were good for getting lost in or dumping weapons. None of the ultras were packing anything: all the weapons – billhooks, lump hammers, crowbars – were being stored at the site of the ambush.
The Neapolitan ultras were travelling in three nine-seater minibuses and two cars. The attack started with a homemade hand grenade chucked in front of the first car. About 100 Inter ultras now ran onto the road. Red flares were thrown onto the dual carriageway. Both lanes were lit up by the hissing sticks. Against that glare, silhouetted men – holding bars, bats and all with faces covered by hoods, scarves and balaclavas – raced towards the vehicles.
“Come on, come on,” many were shouting, their arms raised. The noise sounded like a war cry, an ululation of playful disdain. More paper bombs were thrown. Car alarms were now going off, giving a rhythm to the chaos. Dogs were barking.
The Neapolitans piled out of their vehicles and it kicked off. Hooded silhouettes raced towards each other, punching, jabbing, kicking, jeering. Metal bars were thrown, rattling as they cartwheeled across the asphalt.
It was hard to see anything now. The firecrackers and flares created a dense fog. One of the Neapolitans’ vehicles pulled into the other lane and hit something. It felt as if the van was driving over a couple of spongey speedbumps. People were shouting, smashing their palms on the side of the van.
“He’s yours, he’s yours,” the Neapolitans screamed to the Inter ultras. “Truce, truce,” others shouted.
And there it came to a standstill. They stopped fighting as if it had all been just a game. The Neapolitans stepped back and let some Interisti through to retrieve the body. Dede’s legs seemed twisted unnaturally and his ribcage looked wrong. Three men picked him up but it was like lifting a soggy cardboard box. What should have been rigid was too soft to carry properly.
When Dede died that night in Milan’s San Carlo hospital, it was yet another death to lay at the door of the ultras. The story had everything necessary to depict them as the embodiment of evil. Here were drug-dealing neo-Nazis who had planned an almost military ambush. The fact that the Napoli defender, Kalidou Koulibaly, was racially abused throughout the subsequent match only seemed to confirm the impression that the ultras were scum.
But behind the headlines, the story was far more subtle. When police looked at footage of the fight, filmed from balconies and captured by security cameras, it became obvious that there was actually minimal contact between the groups. They mostly stood apart, insulting each other and throwing metal bars. Considering that there were about 100 Interisti armed with sharp and heavy tools used for forestry and building, the list of injuries was exceptionally short. The one fatality was accidental, not intentional. Many witnesses even said that the Inter ultras applauded the Neapolitans for handing over the dying man, as if the whole aggression was contained within a ritualistic, role-playing framework that could be paused when real life, and death, intervened.
It suited everyone to exaggerate the violence. It was a great story for journalists. It suited the police narrative that the ultras were part of a menacing mob. Even the ultras themselves tried to depict the encounter, with embellishment and bravado, as an epic confrontation in which, as one said, “we showed ourselves worthy of honour”. In speaking about “slicing up the faces of the enemy”, they made themselves feared. The ultras are actually, often happy to be blamed for what they don’t do because it adds to their reputation among the only people whose judgment they care about – other ultras.
The more you investigate, though, the more you see a conspiracy of disinformation on all sides. Nothing is quite as it seems. The story told by the police is invariably the complete opposite to the story told by the ultras. And because it’s far easier, and safer, for journalists to talk to the police, it’s usually only the official narrative that is heard. The ultras become scapegoats and they, in turn, scapegoat the police and journalists.
But for all their devil-may-care attitude, the ultras are weary of being misunderstood. Unlike Sonny Barger, the Californian Hells Angel leader who once told Hunter S Thompson “nobody never wrote nothin’ good about us, but then we ain’t never done nothin’ good to write about”, the ultras – while never denying the violence and mayhem they create – believe they have done a lot of good. But to see this, you have to be with them, to live alongside them. “You’ll never understand us,” they always say, “unless you’re with us.”
This is an edited extract from Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football by Tobias Jones published on 19 Sept (Head of Zeus, £20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6848. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
