This is a great article! It will take you some time to read it all but it's certainly worth it!
I read it a couple of years back in a Dutch magazine and I stumbled across the English version just now:
Racist. Violent. Corrupt. Welcome to Serie A
For years it was the finest league in the world: beautiful, brilliant and glamorous. But this season a tide of scandal has swept across Italian football - and now threatens to overwhelm it
Rory Carroll
Sunday May 6, 2001
The Observer
Forty minutes to kick-off and the boys of the Curva Nord are waiting. It is an atrocious night, rain sluicing down the Stadio Olimpico's roof, saturating the pitch and front 18 rows of the stand. 'Parma vaffanculo!' yells a skinny teen, pleased to be the first. He is ignored. This is where Lazio's irriducibili gather, but it is the time for finding friends, choosing a spot, munching pizza, skinning up, flicking through damp fanzines and newspapers. Front page headlines wonder whether Roma can be prevented from winning the scudetto. Tucked inside are the other stories: a match stopped because of a riot in the stands; probes into players' fake passports; stars pleading innocence after testing positive for banned substances; referees accused of taking bribes...
Twelve minutes to kick-off and it is down to business. Paolo, a chunky man in boots and black bomber jacket goes first, stomping to the front to cheers. Another follows and another until more than 200 stand in the downpour. Their chants are picked up by the rest of the curva. 'Parma vaffanculo' becomes a roar. Fists are raised. Marco's eyes gleam. The Parma contingent, a patch of maybe 300 visitors on the opposite Curva Sud, are forgotten as the irriducibili's rage widens. 'Tutto e tutti vaffanculo!'
Everyone and everything is being invited to **** itself.
Red flares fizz overhead. Rain hardens and thunder rolls in theatrical timing as the players jog into the arena. A forest of right arms stretches upward in fascist salute. A giant screen flashes the players' names and faces. The Curva Nord inhales as one and erupts at the first black face. 'Booh-booh-booh-booh.' In staccato it sounds like thousands of monkeys. Parma are fielding four black players. A feast for the irriducibili.
Racism, hatred, violence, corruption: welcome to Serie A, Italy's Premiership. Once upon a time this was where the beautiful game was at its most beautiful. Once upon a time this was, Italians prided themselves, the most glamorous league in the world - and the best. No longer. Today the face of Italian football is bruised, contorted and ugly. The league's reputation is in tatters - and for reasons far more fundamental and disturbing than the poor recent record of its clubs in European competition.
A malaise has engulfed calcio this season. There have been ambushes, stabbings and beatings as violence has spilled from the stadiums into cities with ultras (the hard-core fans) turning Serie A, B and C into battlefields. There have been attacks on players by their own supporters, a trend that has included besieged dressing rooms, assaults on players' relatives and a firebomb attack on a team bus. There has been widespread evidence of corruption, from match-fixing and bribery, to positive dope tests and dodgy passports. Finally there has been the exposure to a disbelieving and disgusted international audience of an apparently endemic malicious racism among both fans and players that is all but tolerated in Italy itself.
Last autumn the Arsenal midfielder Patrick Vieira and his black team-mates were subjected to sustained abuse during their Champions League game in Rome, and not just from Lazio's notoriously racist fans. The Yugoslav defender Sinisa Mihajlovic repeatedly called Vieira a nigger. Vieira spoke of a 'racist atmosphere that you can almost breathe' and in the aftermath Uefa were swift to punish Mihajlovic with a two-match ban while his club forced him to apologise publicly, a microphone in his hand, shortly before the kick-off of Lazio's next Champions League fixture, against Shakhtar Donetsk.
Lazio's coach Dino Zoff was relaxed about the shoddy incident. Cursing during matches, he said, was unfortunate, but went on all the time. Last season, when the club had been fined after fans barracked Venezia's black defender Bruno N'Gotty, Zoff, the most capped player in Italian history and a former national team coach, had been even less concerned. 'I don't know whether you could really call that racism,' he said. 'It's more a question of people making fun. Fans pick on someone tall, short, grey-haired.'
Zoff's response then was echoed in the ambivalent attitude across Italy to Mihajlovic's verbal assault on Vieira. And within minutes of hearing Mihajlovic's apology combined with an appeal for tolerance, Lazio's fans produced their own response. When Shakhtar's Nigerian centre-half Izek Okoronkwo got his first touch the grunting began again. (A few weeks later it was Emile Heskey's turn during an England-Italy friendly in Turin, an incident that prompted FA protests.)
Italy's football officials say things are not so bad, that problems are exaggerated and temporary. A journey through Serie A suggests the opposite. The problems are that bad and getting worse. They are also connected. Racism, violence and corruption feed off each other.
If mentioned at all, racism is usually buried far down the match report, a single sentence about a black player being barracked every time he touched the ball. As sure as the whistle blows every Sunday players will be vilified for the colour of their skin. On that night's football chat shows, marathons of analysis and opinion, there is rarely a mention. A stadium resounding to booh-booh-booh is not a shock, not a scandal, it is merely there.
It carries with it an echo of English football 25 years ago, when black footballers could be greeted by monkey noises and bananas thrown from the terraces. But even then the abuse was not so vicious and the disease not so widespread - or so acceptable. Because in Italy today it's not just skinheads who are doing it. At January's Lazio-Inter match, Michael Fanizadeh, a coordinator of Football Against Racism in Europe, was shocked to see women and children hurling abuse. And those fans who do not join in sometimes grimace, sometimes smirk, but mostly look as if they don't hear anything. Maybe they don't. Maybe the taunting is so routine they no longer notice.
Except no one believes that. It is impossible to be unaware of the ritual. From Udine to Verona, Brescia to Rome, Naples to Bari, it zig-zags down the peninsula, relaying an unmistakable message: racism is tolerated. The nation watches as abuse rains down on some of the league's greatest footballers - players such as Edgar Davids of Juventus, Lilian Thuram and Patrik Mboma of Parma, and Clarence Seedorf of Internazionale -and the nation does nothing about it. Prejudice bubbles openly. In January Verona, who have struggled all season, were linked with a move for the highly rated Mboma, the African Player of the Year. The deal fell through. 'You need to draw your own conclusions,' the Verona president, Giambattista Pastorello, said. 'If you have fans that do these things you need to have patience.' (The club later insisted that of course Pastorello did not mean to say racists could veto signings.)
And it's not just fans. In February last year Torino's Senegalese defender Djibril Diawara had his nose smashed while playing Bari. With blood pouring from his face, Diawara confronted Luigi Garzya, Bari's captain. This was too much for Bari's coach, Eugenio Fascetti, who shouted: 'The nigger Diawara spat in Garzya's face! And the spit might even be infected! Why don't they just stay home, these niggers?' Fascetti later said he had missed his player's elbowing of Diawara and withdrew his statement. To heap salt onto the wound, Diawara received a four-match ban for spitting, while Garzya, a white Italian, received only a one-match ban for pushing him in the face.
Not that racism is a particularly recent development in Italian football. The formation of the ultras dates back to the late Sixties. At the time they found their inspiration from England and adopted English habits such as scarves and chanting. But there was also one Italian habit. Politics. In tune with those rebellious times, the ultras reflected political rivalries: Lazio were of the Right, for instance, while their great rivals Roma were communists. In those early days they even displayed the same banners that had been used in political demonstrations, turning them over and putting football slogans on the back.
These days, however, the relationship between politics and football has been turned on its head: political rallies no longer lead to riots, so football has become the most promising outlet for those itching for a fight. And, as the ultras have become more uniformly right-wing, there have been orchestrated attempts by the hard Right to infiltrate and use football to recruit members - though even that may simplify the phenomenon. Maurizio Marinelli, director of the Study Centre for Public Security, has identified three types of infiltration. The Right have targeted Lazio, Verona, Fiorentina and Inter, infusing a xenophobic, anti-Semitic agenda. Left-wing militants have targeted Livorno, Modena, Ternana and Genoa. They are less ideological but want to rebel. And finally there is an embryonic third category, a misanthropic movement called Loma which is trying to inject nihilistic individualism into Torino, Lazio, Genoa and Verona. In such ways have cities with relatively good race relations, such as Verona and Bari, acquired racist fans.
Sometimes there is even a quasi-official tone to Italy's racism. During a 1997 trip to Poland, the Italian national squad refused to accompany federation officials on a visit to Auschwitz. A journalist who wrote the story was threatened. Meanwhile Gianluigi Buffon, the Italian national goalkeeper, has worn a T-shirt sporting the fascist slogan, 'Death to those who surrender'. Buffon, who plays for Parma in Serie A, also raised a few eyebrows last year when he picked 88 as his shirt number for the new season. The decision upset Italy's Jewish community, which pointed out that the figure is sometimes used as a neo-Nazi symbol - 'H' is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 equates to HH, or Heil Hitler. Buffon denied any knowledge of the link, claiming: 'I have chosen 88 because it reminds me of four balls and in Italy we all know what it means to have balls: strength and determination.' He later changed his number to 77. When Dutch defender Aron Winter signed for Lazio in 1992, graffiti appeared welcoming the 'nigger Jew' to the club. The pea-brained authors clearly had not noticed that the player's middle name is Mohammed.
And then there are the banners - Celtic crosses, swastikas, slogans. Some are 50m long - 'Auschwitz is your town, the ovens your houses' - or a more modest 40m - 'Honour to the Tiger Arkan'. Death camps, Serb war criminals, anything goes.
When interviewed, which isn't often, black players admit to feeling isolated but tend to keep their heads down. There are very few black Italian players, though Fabio Liverani made history a couple of weeks ago by becoming the first black player to represent Italy when he made his international debut in a friendly match with South Africa. Matteo Ferrari, a black Italian who plays for Internazionale, would not identify an abusive opponent to La Repubblica. 'It was all finished after 90 minutes,' he said. 'The player in question asked for my forgiveness.' Clarence Seedorf, a team-mate of Ferrari, said his white team-mates rarely discuss the chanting. 'When these things happen I don't feel offended. I think with sadness of those people, of their education, which must be very low,' he said. In some respects he is right. Some fans are too ignorant or immature to distinguish between monkey noise and the abuse hurled at white players and rival fans. After all, bad taste is the leitmotif: burn the South, shit you are and shit you'll stay, cat eaters, earthquake victims, Juliet is a whore.
Some positive steps have been taken. Roma and Lazio officials visited a synagogue and up and down the country players sported kit with anti-racist slogans on 22 October. Stiffer penalties have reduced the number of offensive banners. Ultras have appointed stewards.
But, by any standards, the response is inadequate. Calcio's defenders usually argue that football merely reflects racism in society, which is where the cause and cure lie. They have a point. Racism has risen sharply since immigration sprinkled black and brown faces in what until 10 years ago had been an almost all-white population. Unemployment and crime are falling yet xenophobia spreads. Opinion polls show the arrivals are blamed for crime, disease and poaching jobs. Right-wing extremist groups have sprouted in many cities.
On 13 May, the centre-right is expected to win a general election on a platform of cracking down on migration. The Northern League, part of the centre-right, now bashes illegal immigrants instead of southern Italians. Calcio inevitably absorbs these influences but some believe it performs a service by allowing racists to ventilate. 'Perhaps it is better to let them shout themselves out in stadiums than to prohibit them and find them cropping up again, ominously, in city streets,' said Giuliano Zincone, a Corrierre della Sera columnist.
Enzo Bianco, the Interior Minister, thinks stadiums legitimise racism. Whether as a consequence non-white immigrants are more or less likely to be beaten up is impossible to say. But the galvanising effect on the extreme Right is undeniable. Fabrizio, an irriducibili leader, said the stadium had become the only place to express right-wing views. Groups like MS-Fiamma Tricolore and Forza Nuova rely on matches for publicity and recruitment. 'The stadium is an aspect of the social fabric where we conduct our politics,' says Roberto Fiore, the London-based head of Forza Nuova.
Paolo, the chunky skinhead who pushed to the front of the irriducibili, was a member. Marco, the trainee accountant, was not. He joined in the salute for the hell of it. Paolo's job is to nurture Marco.
Yet no politician, club or player has emerged to consistently champion anti-racism. The typical response is silence. As a result no country in Europe comes close to the frequency, viciousness and openness of the racism to be found in Italy's football.
Unlike Dino Zoff, the issue clearly upsets Arrigo Sacchi, one of Zoff's predecessors as national coach. 'We have the least habitable, the most uncivilised and poorly educated stadiums in the world,' Sacchi said. 'The sporting culture here is broadly deficient.'
In mid-December last year, following a humiliating cup defeat, an enraged Inter fan threw a Molotov cocktail outside the San Siro stadium. This was significant for two reasons. First because it suggested a disturbing level of preparation. And second because of the incendiary's intended victims. It hit and damaged the coach carrying the Inter team, in other words the highly priced players the Inter fans cheer every week. Marco Tardelli, the coach, was one of many on board badly shaken by the attack. 'I just cannot accept this type of violence bursting its way into football,' he said. 'After the Heysel disaster, this is the worst that's ever happened to me in football. Next thing they'll be shooting at us from the grandstand.'
The firebomb was just one example of an escalating crisis, with a huge increase in the number of violent incidents(see panel). One disturbing trend has been the proliferation of attacks by supporters on their own team or team officials, whether it be Roma fans ambushing players arriving at the Trigoria training ground, Brescia supporters smashing the window of a car carrying their club president's daughter, Pescara forced to train under police protection, Reggina president Pasquale Foti receiving a severed calf's head in the post, or Napoli ultras lobbing a bomb into the garden of the club's part-owner Corrado Ferlaino.
Not that the violence has been limited to fans turning on their own. In some towns and cities it has become almost routine with railway and bus stations hosting battles between rival supporters. Three Serie A clubs - Napoli, Reggina and Vicenza Ü have been ordered to play home games away from their own stadium this season as a punishment for their fans' violent behaviour.
To an extent the increasing violence can be traced to the same dynamic as the increased racism: orchestration by politically motivated infiltrators. But there are other causes. Some are banal: an early season clash between rivals almost guarantees a revenge cycle. The police, too, are often the intended victims; indeed, for many ultras the police Ü as the embodiment of authority - are the primary target. 'They want to stop me doing what I want to do,' Lorenzo, the head of the Roma ultras told Channel Four. 'So I must react violently. That's what the young guys in the curva think. The Curva is a territory that the ultras must defend.'
Sometimes opposition fans are deliberately attacked to provoke the police. Friends of a badly beaten Roma fan vowed revenge at the next match - which happened to be against Liverpool. According to one ultra, Liverpool supporters were stabbed solely to draw in police. It worked. Bottles, stones and petrol bombs rained down as soon as they arrived.
Giuliano Zincone, the Corriere della Sera columnist, provides an almost Hobbesian analysis of the racism and violence, with football providing a safety valve for a society of base, violent instincts.
'The sports stadium is the only, and perhaps the last remaining place where extreme, cruel, dirty and primitive feelings are expressed,' he writes. 'It is the open-air catacomb for the barbaric custom of wishing the greatest possible misfortune on one's rivals, cast as infidels. That's the way it is. There is, and long has been, a minority that likes to go to the stadium in order to shout disgusting slogans, to vent hostility and give voice to the aggression and antagonism that are prohibited elsewhere.
'Many people go to the stadium for the specific purpose of "offending". Unleashing the spirit of rebellion and complete antagonism is part of the modern soccer stadium just as cruelty was part of the operational functions of the Roman Colosseum. In the stadium, verbal violence can serve as a proxy for real violence.
'The stadium is the platform for an almost religious and warlike devotion to one's favourite team... the vile banners do not, as a rule, express actual political inclinations, but reflect a vague desire to "be somewhere else", to seek direct conflicts rather than languish constantly in the bland repression and pacifications required by everyday collective life.
'Cruel sentiments exist and perhaps it is better to contain them, to let them shout themselves out in stadiums, than to prohibit them there and find them cropping up again, ominously, in city streets and squares.'
'Only suckers stick to the rules if the game is rigged,' writes a Juventus fan on an ultra website. It is a refrain heard all over Italy. Rumours of Serie A corruption surface weekly, fuelling a sense that the league operates above the law.
The revelation that Lazio's Argentine star midfielder Juan Veron had a forged Italian passport shocked the league. Dozens of clubs and foreign players are under investigation for allegedly faking documents and inventing Italian ancestors to circumvent limits on non-European Union players. Prodded into action by Fifa, the Italian federation has yet to reach conclusions but stars such as Inter's Uruguayan forward Alvaro Recoba are unlikely to emerge unscathed. Time will tell whether the villains were players, agents or clubs. All protest their innocence.
Italy is not the only country tarnished by the passports scandal Ü but only Italy could come up with the Night of the Watches. Gold Rolexes given by Roma to referees were returned lest the 'Christmas presents' conveyed the wrong impression. A federation inquiry flushed out expensive offerings from other clubs, such as holidays paid by Juventus. 'Where does the fine line between a kind gift and a bribe lie?' asked Corriere della Sera. The perception that Serie A's referees are on the take is widespread, the image of it as a corrupt league, long lasting and difficult to shift.
A year ago as the Serie A title built toa nail-bitingly close climax, Juventus benefited from an extraordinary piece of refereeing against Parma. A last-minute equaliser was inexplicably disallowed, giving Juve a dubious and vital victory with one week of the season left. A tidal wave of anti-Juve feeling swept Italy including a street 'funeral for Italian football' and the front page headline on the Corriere dello Sport, 'Sorry, but this is a scandal'. (Juventus lost their final game and the championship went to Lazio after all.) This was in the same season that an Italian Serie A player wrote a letter to the Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana claiming he was bribed to lose a match. The magazine rebuffed magistrates' inquiries, saying its letters column was akin to a confessional.
Juve have been accused before. Three years ago the 'season of poison' culminated in a controversial game in which Inter were denied a blatant penalty. 'Referees don't do this on purpose,' raged the Inter president Massimo Moratti, 'it's a habit. They are afraid of hurting Juventus. It is the rule, not the exception.' The former Italian international Roberto Mancini went a lot further, saying 'the last fair championship was won in 1991 by Sampdoria'.
This season has seen new match-fixing scandals. A cup match between Atlanta and Pistoiese provoked much interest after a rush of inspired bets that the game would end 1-1, with a goal in each half - bets that proved extremely prescient. After a long investigation the allegations of match-fixing were upheld against six players who were banned for up to a year. Also this season, Perugia's coach Serge Cosmi while talking in a TV studio before an interview, alleged that the Italian Third Division (in which he was a coach last season) was a giant fix. His remarks were filmed and were later shown. They are now the subject of another investigation.
This season has seen another growing area of potential corruption Ü footballers failing drugs tests. A fortnight ago Edgar Davids became the latest, and the highest profile player to join the list. The Dutch international and mainstay of the Juventus midfield tested positive for the steroid nandrolone after a sample was taken following a game in early March. Davids insists he is innocent and the authorities are awaiting the result of a second test before deciding on what action to take.
Already this season four Serie A players (and one from Serie B) have been confirmed as failing tests, including Lazio's Portuguese international defender Fernando Couto, who was suspended 10 days ago, prior to being sentenced by the Italian Olympic Committee on Tuesday. Two players are already serving 16-month bans. There has been much talk among players about dietary supplements and better supervision of the use of prescription medicines, but a more sinister assessment of football's drugs culture came from former Parma coach Nevio Scala. 'It's a nonsense to say nobody is guilty,' he said. 'At the crucial time of the season, when results are decisive and players tired, there are people who are prepared to act incorrectly and administer forbidden substances.'
A couple of years ago the former Roma and Napoli coach Zdenek Zeman caused outrage with his claim that doping was rife in Italian football. In total, eight players have now failed drugs tests since random screening was introduced, while a further 67 are under investigation by the Turin public prosecutor's office. The response of Italian clubs? To try to raise the level of nandrolone allowed in a player's bloodstream before a test is deemed positive - a move rejected by the Italian football association who insisted on adhering to the limits recommended by Fifa.
Once again calcio is left looking sleazy. The same could be said for the country. Transparency International, a non-governmental agency, ranks Italy's corruption on a par with the Third World. Silvio Berlusconi, the billionaire opposition leader and likely Prime Minister, is sought by a Spanish court on suspicion of bribery. Football's failure to buck the trend diffuses moral pollution through Serie A. If clubs flout the rules why shouldn't fans? It is a sentiment that threads racism, violence and corruption into a vicious circle.
Churning beneath the surface of Italian football's problems is a deeper explanation. Alienation. According to the ultras, greed has swept away a golden age when officials, players and fans were united in love of their club, a bond that would last even in dark years of relegation. Satellite television's lucre has turned officials into entrepreneurs and players into mercenaries. Only the fans have stayed true.
So goes the mythology. The ultras see clubs enriching players and officials while hiking ticket prices. They see clubs negotiating huge sponsorship deals and refusing to subsidise away travel. They see clubs selling iconic players despite furious protests. They see betrayal. Throughout Serie A the theme recurs. Fans are the keepers of the flame, defenders of the faith. It is their duty to safeguard the club's integrity, with violence if necessary.
The next few weeks will decide who wins the title. Roma have led for most of the season: can they hold their nerve in the face of Juve's impressive late surge? But in many ways it doesn't matter who wins. No amount of passion and skill can cover the fact that this season everybody has lost.
Back on the Curva Nord, Marco expresses the view of many. 'The league stinks,' he says bitterly. 'You can smell the rot.'
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Quite interesting and hilarious to read at times too...
