ITALIAN FOOTBALL IS famous for its ultra scene; ‘curvas’ full of fans adding colour, choreography, passion and incredible noise to some of the world’s most famous stadiums.
Ultras enhance the spectacle that is Italian football, yet there is an element to this hardcore support which has dark origins.
Fascism was there at the beginning of Italian football, and it’s something the game there has never been able to shake across the decades since.
In the third episode of The 42’s exclusive podcast series On the Right Wing, Enda Coll explores the deep-rooted history of fascism in Italian football, the birth and growth of the ultra movement and how entrenched some of the fan groups in the country are with organised crime.
To do so, he goes back in time with Simon Martin – author of Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini – to understand how much Italy’s fascist past impacts the modern-day league.
Plus, Italian football writer Paddy Agnew explains how organised crime has infiltrated the stadiums, how they use the ultra movement to their advantage and the challenges the authorities have faced when trying to tackle this enduring problem.
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“The first thing you could try to understand what’s going on with Italian football is that whereas in other parts of Europe, clubs . . . a certain part of the fan base tends to have a very clear political label,” Agnew says. “There’re neo fascists, they’re far right, a small minority of them are on the left.
“Italy is different in the sense that the biggest political involvement and the most worrying political involvement in Italian football concerns organised crime, because organised crime, the various mafia, look on these gatherings of hundreds and thousands of young hotheads every weekend to go to a football match as a perfect recruiting ground in those parts of Italy where work is scarce and hard to find.
“It’s a systematic invasion of the pitch by organised crime.”
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