Serie A Must Use Spain Tragedy as a Spur to Improve Safety
Tragedy struck the world of soccer on Sunday when a Deportivo La Coruna fan died in what Goal.com reported was allegedly an organized brawl between four sets of "ultra" fans near the Estadio Vicente Calderon in Madrid.
The death of the fan—whom ESPNFC's Gabriele Marcotti named in his weekly Monday column as Francisco Javier Romero Taboada—has sent the Spanish game into a state of shock.
Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti told reporters that it is "important to condemn violence in football" and called for the league to control its ultras as Real and Barcelona have. Spanish Secretary of State for Sport Miguel Cardenal told media that radical ultras are set to be banned from Spanish stadiums altogether.
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It is a truly unfortunate incident, one that shows the ugliest side of the sport we all love. It should also be a wake-up call to the country farther east along the Mediterranean Sea, where a similar tragedy is still an open wound.
The 2014 Coppa Italia final will unfortunately be remembered not for what happened on the field but for what happened outside the Stadio Olimpico before the match. Napoli and Fiorentina fans clashed violently near the stadium, throwing firecrackers and other missiles at each other. Tragedy struck when a Roma fan, Daniele De Santis, shot three Napoli fans. Two, according to a Sky Sports report, sustained wounds to the arms. The third, Ciro Esposito, was shot in the chest and died in a Rome hospital after nearly two months in intensive care.
It was the latest in a series of events that have plagued Italian soccer over the years—the worst of which being the 2007 riot in Catania that took the life of police inspector Filippo Raciti. That incident prompted a series of reforms aimed at making Italian stadiums safer and reigning in the more extreme ultra groups.
As evidenced by Esposito's death, Italy still has a long way to go.
In many countries in the south and east of Europe, ultra groups—who proportionally represent a very small segment of fan attendance—possess a staggering amount of power.
Sometimes they wield that influence in ways that do no harm to anyone. Last season, Lazio ultras organized a large-scale fan boycott of the team's home games in response to what they thought was owner Claudio Lotito's mismanagement of the club. The only thing harmed in that situation was Lotito's pride, and maybe his pocketbook.
Ultras are also key cogs in the often beautiful choreography that graces Italian stadiums in the moments before kickoff. They certainly play a key role in what makes Italian soccer special.
But all too often that influence erupts into racist chants directed at players, ugly messages on banners and violence in and out of the arena.
The scene last May at the Olimpico shows just how insane things have gotten. In attendance that day were several Italian lawmakers and various high-ranking Italian soccer officials. But the decision to start the match—which had been delayed because of the violence outside—rested with a man named Gennaro De Tommaso.
One of the heads of Napoli's ultras, he refused to allow the game to continue unless, as the aforementioned Sky report stated, the Partenopei supporters received word on the condition of their fellow fans.
Violence was threatened if they were not satisfied. Flares were thrown onto the field, injuring one of the firefighters tasked with removing them.
It was an embarrassing tableau. Instead of good soccer, the enduring images of the match will be smoke and De Tommaso—who, as Beppe Severgnini wrote in a New York Times op-ed this spring, has alleged ties to organized crime—sitting on the security fence while police and Napoli captain Marek Hamsik pleaded with him to allow the match to go ahead.
The icing on the cake? De Tommaso was wearing a shirt that read "Speziale libero"—a call to free Antonino Speziale, the man who was convicted of delivering the blow that fatally injured Raciti in 2007, from prison.
What sort of punishment did De Tommaso get for all this? As of September, authorities were investigating his role in inciting the violence that led to Esposito's death, but as of yet all he has received is a five-year ban on attending sporting events.
The conditions brought on by these kinds of ultras are obscene on their face, and the tacit acceptance of such displays is one of the reasons Serie A is in such decline.
As Severgnini points out in his Times piece, such behavior from a small group of fans is badly affecting attendance. Serie A lost nearly a million attendees between the 2011-12 and '12-13 seasons, and the losses are only getting worse.
Attendance has also been affected by Serie A's dilapidated stadiums—and fixing that is one way that Italian clubs can start solving the problem.
After the brand-new Juventus Stadium, Serie A's newest stadium is Sassuolo's Mapei Stadium, built in 1995. After that, the newest ground is Cagliari's Stadio Sant'Elia—built in 1970 and not exactly the picture of good condition.
In fact, nine of the 15 stadiums in Serie A this season opened in 1933 or earlier. There have been renovations, especially before the 1990 World Cup, but the fact is that Italy's soccer infrastructure is crumbling. That decay has invited similar rot in the behavior of the fans.
In countries like England, France and Germany, where many stadiums are either brand-new or extensively modernized, more fan-friendly environments have seen a decrease in the kind of loathsome behavior that has plagued the Italian game. In Germany in particular, ultra culture still thrives without causing disruptive incidents.
New stadiums will also give clubs and authorities the ability to enhance security, both to deny entry to known agitators and to expel anyone who makes problems inside the stadium.
The enhanced ability to deal with troublemakers will help authorities with the second thing Italy can do to deal with their behavior problems: institute an English-style zero-tolerance policy against hooliganism.
English authorities have enforced these protocols since the 1985 Heysel disaster, when 39 Juventus fans were killed in a human crush incited by Liverpool supporters. The result? The Premier League dominates the rest of the world as a financial entity, and the sort of incident that caused the deaths of Raciti, Esposito and Romero is nearly nonexistent.
The legal mechanisms for such policies are already in place in Italy. It simply comes down to authorities stepping up enforcement rather than watching passively while the worst ultra groups act like savages.
Not all fans are ultras. Not all ultras are disruptive. The reason I am writing today is not to advocate the removal of ultras but the removal of hooligans. There is a difference, and that difference is important to stress.
But those who are ruining the game for law-abiding fans and ultra groups must be dealt with. Italy needs to be proactive rather than reactive and clamp down hard on the people who are destroying the sport. When that happens, the true recovery of Italian soccer can begin.
