The dark heart of Italian football
Richard Williams of Guardian Unlimited asks if the tragedy in Catania last Friday will finally bring a change to the dark heart of Italian football...
" They let Simone Barbaglia out of prison just before Christmas. Twelve years ago last week, when he was a 19-year-old apprentice gardener, he used a borrowed butterfly knife, its 11cm blade unfolded from the twin halves of its hinged wooden handle, to stab Claudio Vincenzo Spagnolo - "Spagna" to his friends - to death outside the Stadio Luigi Ferraris in Genoa, before a match against Milan.
Four days later more than 10,000 people turned up outside the church for the funeral of Spagnolo, an unemployed 24-year-old who had been among a group of Genoa supporters confronted by, or confronting, members of a gang of Milan supporters who called themselves the Gruppo Barbour, after their fondness for the British-made waxed jackets. Leaving his victim in a pool of blood on the pavement, Barbaglia swapped clothes with another member, hid the knife in a wine carton and entered the stadium.
Not until Monday morning, when he was back home in Milan, did the police arrive at his mother's apartment. By that time the entire Italian sporting programme for the following weekend had been cancelled. Only a Davis Cup tie in Naples against the Czech Republic was allowed to continue, so as not to inconvenience Italy's opponents.
Some people were critical. "This is a decision taken with the heart rather than the head - it isn't a solution," said Gianni Rivera, a Milan hero turned politician. But Italy's recently elected prime minister, Lamberto Dini, said that, if football could not reform itself, he would do the job.
In Genoa that week, having stood among the thousands of scarves and bunches of flowers left at the site of the murder, I drove to Sampdoria's training ground and talked to David Platt, who had just returned from attending Spagnolo's funeral. The cancellation, he said, at least showed that the matter was being taken seriously.
"What it actually does apart from that, I'm not sure," he continued. "The underlying feeling is that, yes, it's right to postpone the games because it sends the message that we don't support this kind of thing and that there is something bigger than football. But I don't think that by itself it's going to stop hooliganism in Italy."
A year or so before Spagnolo's death Vanessa Redgrave compared the experience of watching a big match at San Siro to an opening night at La Scala. Amid the furs and the cashmeres of the president's box you could see how she came to that conclusion. But she would have needed only to turn her head 45 degrees, in either direction, to witness scenes that more closely resembled the Circus Maximus.
The extremes of Italian football - expressed again last summer in a World Cup final victory that, as well as scenes of glory, included Marco Materazzi's provocation of Zinedine Zidane - may have something to do with the sort of tensions that exploded in Catania last Friday night, when the killing of a policeman, Filippo Raciti, prompted the latest cancellation of a weekend's matches. The roots of such an incident certainly go deeper than a simple rivalry between two Sicilian cities.
Italy has given so much to world football that it is painful to see the nightmare recurring. As any reader of John Foot's excellent book Calcio will be aware, however, the history of violence and corruption goes back a long way. The question must be whether the murder of a policeman last Friday is the incident that finally persuades Italian football to attempt a fresh start.
In England the game's second chance was partly paid for in Italian blood when the combination of Heysel, Bradford and Hillsborough achieved a kind of critical mass. The subsequent bourgeoisification of English football, accelerated by the invention of the Premiership, created the conditions in which ticket prices could be raised so high that, combined with effective security precautions, they eventually deterred hooligans, whose violent activities have largely been displaced, in a diluted form, to the lower divisions.
In Italy, by contrast, you can still turn up at a Serie A match and buy a ticket for less than a tenner. A cursory search at the turnstile is unlikely to reveal the flare taped to your inner thigh. Inside the stadium the facilities are rudimentary and your activities will be neither observed by the kind of closed-circuit cameras that scan every inch of an English stadium nor supervised by any kind of rigorous stewarding.
Municipal ownership of Italian club stadiums is partly to blame. When you don't own your home, you are less likely to mind what happens there. But one thing the Italians must do is start to police matches properly - which means more than just shepherding the away fans to the train station after the match.
The unhealthy relationship between the clubs and their hard-core fans also needs modifying. If Luca Pancalli, Italy's football commissioner, can find a way of dismantling the influence of the "ultra" groups, who receive tickets and travel benefits from the clubs and expect a blind eye to be turned to their less savoury activities in return for their loyalty, he will have taken a step towards ensuring that the tragic death of Filippo Raciti, unlike that of Claudio Spagnolo, was not entirely in vain. "
Source: Guardian Unlimited
" They let Simone Barbaglia out of prison just before Christmas. Twelve years ago last week, when he was a 19-year-old apprentice gardener, he used a borrowed butterfly knife, its 11cm blade unfolded from the twin halves of its hinged wooden handle, to stab Claudio Vincenzo Spagnolo - "Spagna" to his friends - to death outside the Stadio Luigi Ferraris in Genoa, before a match against Milan.
Four days later more than 10,000 people turned up outside the church for the funeral of Spagnolo, an unemployed 24-year-old who had been among a group of Genoa supporters confronted by, or confronting, members of a gang of Milan supporters who called themselves the Gruppo Barbour, after their fondness for the British-made waxed jackets. Leaving his victim in a pool of blood on the pavement, Barbaglia swapped clothes with another member, hid the knife in a wine carton and entered the stadium.
Not until Monday morning, when he was back home in Milan, did the police arrive at his mother's apartment. By that time the entire Italian sporting programme for the following weekend had been cancelled. Only a Davis Cup tie in Naples against the Czech Republic was allowed to continue, so as not to inconvenience Italy's opponents.
Some people were critical. "This is a decision taken with the heart rather than the head - it isn't a solution," said Gianni Rivera, a Milan hero turned politician. But Italy's recently elected prime minister, Lamberto Dini, said that, if football could not reform itself, he would do the job.
In Genoa that week, having stood among the thousands of scarves and bunches of flowers left at the site of the murder, I drove to Sampdoria's training ground and talked to David Platt, who had just returned from attending Spagnolo's funeral. The cancellation, he said, at least showed that the matter was being taken seriously.
"What it actually does apart from that, I'm not sure," he continued. "The underlying feeling is that, yes, it's right to postpone the games because it sends the message that we don't support this kind of thing and that there is something bigger than football. But I don't think that by itself it's going to stop hooliganism in Italy."
A year or so before Spagnolo's death Vanessa Redgrave compared the experience of watching a big match at San Siro to an opening night at La Scala. Amid the furs and the cashmeres of the president's box you could see how she came to that conclusion. But she would have needed only to turn her head 45 degrees, in either direction, to witness scenes that more closely resembled the Circus Maximus.
The extremes of Italian football - expressed again last summer in a World Cup final victory that, as well as scenes of glory, included Marco Materazzi's provocation of Zinedine Zidane - may have something to do with the sort of tensions that exploded in Catania last Friday night, when the killing of a policeman, Filippo Raciti, prompted the latest cancellation of a weekend's matches. The roots of such an incident certainly go deeper than a simple rivalry between two Sicilian cities.
Italy has given so much to world football that it is painful to see the nightmare recurring. As any reader of John Foot's excellent book Calcio will be aware, however, the history of violence and corruption goes back a long way. The question must be whether the murder of a policeman last Friday is the incident that finally persuades Italian football to attempt a fresh start.
In England the game's second chance was partly paid for in Italian blood when the combination of Heysel, Bradford and Hillsborough achieved a kind of critical mass. The subsequent bourgeoisification of English football, accelerated by the invention of the Premiership, created the conditions in which ticket prices could be raised so high that, combined with effective security precautions, they eventually deterred hooligans, whose violent activities have largely been displaced, in a diluted form, to the lower divisions.
In Italy, by contrast, you can still turn up at a Serie A match and buy a ticket for less than a tenner. A cursory search at the turnstile is unlikely to reveal the flare taped to your inner thigh. Inside the stadium the facilities are rudimentary and your activities will be neither observed by the kind of closed-circuit cameras that scan every inch of an English stadium nor supervised by any kind of rigorous stewarding.
Municipal ownership of Italian club stadiums is partly to blame. When you don't own your home, you are less likely to mind what happens there. But one thing the Italians must do is start to police matches properly - which means more than just shepherding the away fans to the train station after the match.
The unhealthy relationship between the clubs and their hard-core fans also needs modifying. If Luca Pancalli, Italy's football commissioner, can find a way of dismantling the influence of the "ultra" groups, who receive tickets and travel benefits from the clubs and expect a blind eye to be turned to their less savoury activities in return for their loyalty, he will have taken a step towards ensuring that the tragic death of Filippo Raciti, unlike that of Claudio Spagnolo, was not entirely in vain. "
Source: Guardian Unlimited
posted by italian calcio blog at 9:29 pm
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