While there have been proposals about ‘azionaraito popolare’ (popular shareholding) for several years and at various levels of the Italian football pyramid, Thursday’s event was the biggest step forward so far for supporter ownership in Italy.

The launch meeting, held incongruously in the heart of the fascist-era EUR district, was a chance for organiser Walter Campanile and his team to reveal their plans for the first two years of activity. The priority from the start has been the purchase of shares to give supporters a voice in the running of the club, but other ideas include improving communications (notoriously poor at AS Roma), reworking ticket sales arrangements, promoting initiatives which will get young fans more involved, and trying to solve the problems created by the government’s fan ID card proposal, the controversial ‘Tessera del Tifoso’. One of the key aims which Campanile has identified is that of involving overseas supporters: Roma fans can be found in France, Greece, the UK, Indonesia, Australia, the USA, Saudi Arabia… why not involve them too? Many overseas fans would jump at the chance to get involved in running the club they love. Of course they will strengthen the project financially but beyond that, the trust aims to build a genuine sense of a global supporters’ community. The international dimension influenced the name chosen for the trust, MyRoma, which was selected by users of the website.

Antonia Hagemann, of Supporters’ Direct Europe, had flown over from London to participate in the meeting (while I got the chance to practice my English to Italian interpreting skills, endeavouring to turn her speech into some kind of comprehensible Italian for the audience!). Her first observation was that this was the most elegant occasion of its kind she’d ever attended to: no replica shirts here, just chic Italian tailoring all the way! She spoke about the importance of pressure on clubs over governance both from below – ie through Supporters’ Trusts like MyRoma – and from above, through SD itself and from bodies like UEFA and the European Commission. Support from SD has been vital for Campanile’s team and it is very clear that while many distinctively Italian – or even distinctively Roman – touches have been incorporated, the basic model to be adopted is one imported from abroad. The lawyers have closely studied other European structures, in particular those from Spain and Germany, and Campanile has been on a variety of visits both to the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust and to an international conference in Brussels to meet other fans further down the same road.

Inspiration and encouragement came from Jens Wagner, vice-chairman of the trust at HSV Hamburg (where the club is 100% owned by the fans), who spoke about the ways in which trusts can improve relationships with the club. Beyond the obvious priorities of stability and good governance, he addressed issues like rights for disabled fans, programmes for attracting young supporters and the role of fans in upholding & maintaining club traditions. His experience was clearly fascinating for the assembled fans, demonstrating the potential that supporter ownership really offers. On the other hand the audience were perhaps a little disconcerted by Wagner’s casual, indeed rather deadpan announcement that the Hamburg trust’s measures had included the creation of a dedicated supporters’ graveyard. That might be an import too far.

As for the 83 founder members who made up the Constituent Assembly (one for each year of Roma’s history), these were romanisti chosen from all walks of life to create as representative as possible a cross-section of the club’s support. The name which grabbed most attention was that of legendary player Giacomo Losi, nick-named ‘Core de Roma’ (386 appearances for AS Roma, 1954-69). The list includes members of parliament, presidents of fan clubs, office workers, computer programmers, actors, shop owners, lawyers, barbers, singers, graphic designers, air traffic controllers, playwrights, factory workers, university professors, historic leaders of the main ultras groups from the Curva Sud: all these and more besides are represented among the 83 founder members, to reflect the democratic, inclusive aspirations of the Trust.

Next up come practicalities: the association needs a headquarters, a bank account and some kind of secretarial services before it can start enrolling paying members. In the short term, MyRoma will be run by an appointed steering committee of lawyers, accountants and administers, with Campanile as President. Once the association is up and running, elections will be held for all roles. The impression given right from the start has been that this is a serious project, and a large group of people have volunteered considerable amounts of their time and expertise already. Annual membership doesn’t come cheap, at €150 per adult (though there are reductions for overseas members and under-18s). While this is understandable given the need to raise cash to buy shares, it’s possible that this may prove a deterrent to some possible members, especially given the tough economic climate in Italy at the moment – and it’s worth noting that at Hamburg, members only pay €48 a year. Only time will tell whether this pricing policy works out or whether it proves simply too expensive – let’s hope not.

After the meeting and a brief Q&A session the new trust’s board and founder members adjourned downstairs for a short ‘brindisi’ or toast. As local press photographers milled around in the spring sunshine, we were offered nibbles and a prudent half glass of prosecco (well, it was only Thursday lunchtime). A cautious and low-key celebration perhaps, but one which reflects the reality that we were celebrating only the beginning of something, and as yet nothing more. In many ways the hardest work still lies ahead.

The new Trust’s website is at MyRoma.it but is still being assembled. Complete documentation is online in Italian, English versions are imminent, with French and Spanish translations to follow.

In recent years the model of fan ownership exercised through supporters’ trusts has been increasingly high-profile in British football, not least thanks to the sterling work of the national body Supporters Direct (SD). Meanwhile, very different yet nonetheless successful models of fan ownership exist across the continent, as seen throughout the Bundesliga or alternatively with the ‘socio’ model as at Real Madrid or Barcelona. Though the scale varies along with the specifics of the structure, all of these systems share the basic features of greater fan participation in the running of the club. But until recently few projects of this kind have been found in Italy. Now at last that might be beginning to change.

The reasons for the Italian situation, which is in some ways anomalous, are many and varied: the traditional model of club ownership has always been that of the wealthy industrialist family (car makers, oil barons, shoe manufacturers, food processing plant owners, bankers, newspaper magnates, shopping centre owners, building giants, the list is endless). Club presidents and chief executives are simultaneously running other major commercial enterprises, while their boards are stuffed with wives, brothers, cousins, aunts… incidentally, Italy has been more open to female club presidents or directors than you might expect – when they’re the daughters of original buyers.

In this paternalistic model, where fewer clubs are quoted on the stock exchange than in the UK, fan ownership has rarely been seriously discussed until recently. Moreover the legal situation in each country differs such that models are not universally transferrable: in Italy cooperatives may be the most helpful way to structure collective ownership, but many Italians have feared that the idea is impracticable here.

In the last decade, though, there has been a continual stream of clubs going into administration or disbanding entirely at all levels of Italian football from Serie A through to D, and an increasing resentment among fans at the caprices of the wealthy few at the expense of the many. Perhaps the moment for supporters’ trusts has arrived.

Modena Calcio and AS Roma

Modena Calcio, currently playing in Serie B, are leading the way in this regard with a project for fan ownership, launched in December 2008 by former fanzine editor Andrea Gigliotti. The project in Modena is currently raising funds in order to buy shares in the club while also developing closer ties with the current administration. Meanwhile the Modena Sport Club Cooperative also hosted the first Italian conference on fan ownership – known as ‘Azionariato Popolare’ or ‘popular shareholding’ in Italian. Supporters’ Direct Europe is also helping them out: this is a section of SD dedicated to helping clubs across Europe to set up Supporters’ Trusts, created with the encouragement of UEFA and the European Commission. With the assistance of SD Europe, similar moves are afoot in other Italian clubs like Bari and Pisa, but the largest club where this idea is currently being discussed is Roma.

Burdened with over €300 million of debts incurred not by the club but by its parent holding company, Italpetroli, Roma has been in trouble for some time now. The current owners, the Sensi family, have resisted approaches from several foreign buyers in their efforts to hang on to the club which remains one of the family’s main assets; they are also notoriously incommunicative. The club has had little or no cash to spend on the transfer market for several years – making its performance in the Champions’ League in recent years particularly impressive – but supporters’ patience is exhausted. This is the ideal backdrop for motivating people to set up their own Supporters’ Trust, since the values of accountability, transparency and democratic decision making which fan ownership promotes are precisely those qualities most lacking at Roma right now.

The project coordinator Walter Campanile, however, is keen to emphasise that his project is “pro-Roma not anti-Sensi”. Rightly, he emphasises that long term stability and participation should be the goals of a supporters’ trust, rather than quick fixes. A website has been created to gather potential members and lawyers are investigating the Italian legal implications of the model. In theory at least there is no reason why a system which is successful at Bayern or Barcelona can’t work in Rome as well, a city of over 4 million people of whom at least half would claim to support the Giallorossi (at a conservative estimate!) Perhaps the greatest obstacle will be public scepticism: Italians are convinced that their country is special (it is) and uniquely difficult (it isn’t) and that Italian football is entirely unlike any other football anywhere in the world (hmmm).

At this stage Campanile is simply recruiting moral support through online and media campaigns, and slowly but surely interest is being generated within Rome and, just as importantly, elsewhere. I should here declare my interest: as the official English translator of the project I am not precisely a neutral observer. It was impossible for me not to support the idea, as an AFC Wimbledon sympathiser and a believer in direct democratic action. It is true that there are lot of ingrained interests at risk in Italian football, from political connections to ultras’ groups, which may make it harder to promote the supporters’ trust model here. But it wasn’t precisely easy in England to begin with, and few things worth doing are ever easy. Watch this space.

The tessera del tifoso is the brainchild of the Osservatorio Nazionale sulle Manifestazioni Sportive (ONMS), the department of the Ministry of the Interior which is responsible for security & public order at sports events. The final proposal was approved in April 2008, and is yet to be fully implemented, but current Minister of the Interior and Lega Nord charmer Roberto Maroni is extremely enthusiastic. In fact he is endeavouring to turn what was initially supposed to be a voluntary scheme into a compulsory one, in the belief that this will effectively stamp out football violence. It is due to be imposed not only in Serie A & B but also, potentially, in the Lega Pro 1 & 2 (the old Serie C1 & C2) – where average gates rarely get above 2000.

The main idea is simple: in order to buy match tickets you will need to present your tessera del tifoso, an electronic ID card which contains all your personal details (name, date of birth address, identity document number). It is issued directly by the club, so your Milan card will allow you to buy Milan tickets only, and so on; this way there is no chance that fans of one club can buy tickets for another. To be more precise, it guarantees that away fans can’t circumvent a ban by buying “home” tickets.

Obviously fans with a banning order (DASPO, they are called in Italy) in place won’t be issued with the all important card. The equation is simple, apparently: fans subject to DASPO = violent hooligans, so football + tessera del tifoso = a peaceful paradise. The ONMS website suggests that any DASPO or “stadium-related offence” in the last five years will not be allowed into the scheme, while many other sources have suggested that ANY penal precedents will prevent the issuance of the card. In other words, convictions never expire, meaning that a ban is for life, irrespective of the actual original sentence (banning orders range from 1-5 years, most commonly). If as a hot-headed idiot aged 18 you committed a one-off stadium offence and were unlucky enough to get caught (unlucky in the sense that many people get away with all sorts of offences all the time), then you can forget about taking your kids to a match twenty years later. This may or may not be constitutional.

Apparently, the system should simplify the process of buying tickets and of entering the stadium through the creation of dedicated turnstiles, along with (potentially) the concession of privileges and/or benefits to card holders on the part of participating clubs. It’s also possible that there will be no restrictions applied to the sale of tickets for card holders (i.e. on those occasions when away tickets are not on general sale under ONMS safety measures). Indeed the head of the Lega Pro claims that the tessera “will increase overall attendance figures” since no more matches will have to be played behind closed doors, a fine example of spurious reasoning. The overall aim is apparently ‘to reward virtuous behaviour of fans’ through ‘a process of customer loyalty building through the creation of a new profile for fans, as “representatives” of their Clubs, and a reinforced sense of belonging to a “privileged community” of “official supporters”.’

There are a number of potential practical problems with the scheme: what if you are an occasional fan or if you just happen to fancy going to a game one weekend, do you have to go and apply for a card which can’t be issued til the local police approve it? What if you like to regularly go and watch more than one team? How is the scheme to be effectively administered? The idea is even more impractical at lower levels, since the expense for clubs will be not inconsiderable and the necessary infrastructure (in terms of electronic turnstiles) is often absent.

As a plan to defeat violence, the tessera del tifoso ignores the single most important feature of all contemporary hooliganism: it doesn’t take place inside the ground. Not since the 80s – and maybe even before that – has football violence in Italy taken place primarily inside stadiums. When it happens, it takes place in areas around the ground, around train stations and (above all) at motorway service stations. Stopping hooligans going into the game will do nothing to stop hooliganism for the simple fact that the game is separate from the violence – indeed some of them don’t even try to go to the game at all.

So, it’s impractical and won’t meet its purported objective. It’s also profoundly objectionable in terms of civil rights: what other group of people are collected onto a police index in order to pursue a leisure activity?  Are they going to draw up a police-approved register of people permitted to enter nightclubs? Because, you know, people go and get drunk and fight in and outside nightclubs every weekend?  It’s massively unpopular with ultras across the country and with many ordinary fans as well. Protests have been many and vigorous, and later in the month a major national ultras’ meeting is planned to demonstrate against the plan.

Above all many people are troubled about the language in which the project is couched and the supposed advantages listed above: the scheme ‘follows the logic of customer loyalty schemes’ in the words of the ONMS. It can include a Visa or Maestro feature, it can act as a points-collecting card to earn fans discounts or prizes, it in every way conceives of the fan as primarily a customer to be “fidelizzato” or incentivised to display (financial) loyalty.

This year Milan (curiously supportive as a club of this government initiative) have been running the scheme as a trial: the “Cuore Rossonero” card offers a rechargeable Maestro payment facility, earns you “Star Points” which prove how loyal you are and earn special offers, and also allows you to collect points towards rewards like a tasteful key-ring or, a black and red hand-wash dispenser. If you collect enough points you could earn discounts on tickets, a day at the training ground or even dinner with the team. And points can be collected with specially selected commercial partners, so while you are buying petrol or trainers you are saving up for an exclusive branded cup and saucer set! Be still my beating heart.

It’s pretty easy to see the potentially vast economic incentives for clubs, and equally that the system will be able to effectively penalise those which don’t chose to sign up (if, for instance, only clubs with the tessera are allowed to sell tickets to certain high-risk matches). Meanwhile Hellas fans at a service station were recently assaulted by a group of over 70 hooligans returning from watching…. yes, Milan.  Good to see the fruits of the scheme in action. It’s pretty hard not to be cynical: is this really about public order or an exercise in state control dressed up in crude commercialization? Just what football needs.

Read more from Vanda Wilcox at her blog, Spangly Princess

Photo credits: Vanda Wilcox; AS Roma Ultras

Padania have won the second Viva World Cup, for non-Fifa affiliated nations, beating the Aramean Syriac side 2-0 in the final yesterday. The goals came from midfielders Alberto Colombo, who plays for Serie D side Merate, and Giordan Ligarotti, from Este who play in the Eccellenza regional leagues.

Organised by the Nouvelle Fédération Board (NFB), the tournament involved just 5 sides: alongside the eventual finalists were Provence, Kurdistan and the hosts, the Sápmi, representing the Sami people who occupy parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia, and who had won the inaugural Viva World Cup in 2006. For a variety of reasons – logistic, political, footballing – many other teams involved either in the 2006 edition or in other NFB games chose not to take part: Occitania, Tibet, Zanzibar, Greenland and Northern Cyprus, to name but a few.

Padania waltzed to glory with comfort, winning their group stage games 6-1, 2-1, 2-0 and 4-1. And Lega Nord leader and founder Umberto Bossi, taking time out from the minor task of being Minister for Institutional Reforms, was there to cheer on his team’s victory. What it means when a government minister of one country claims to identify with the national team of another, albeit unrecognised, nation is a mystery… Anyway, Bossi made his way onto the pitch at the end to celebrate with the players and the 40 or 50 Padania fans who had made the long trip to what we’re not supposed to call Lapland.

The NFB are hopeful that the competition will continue to grow in strength and status, so perhaps a wealthy, first-world victor is no bad thing from their perspective, if it raises the profile of the competition. As for the quality of the actual football, that’s anybody’s guess: I can’t find a proper match report anywhere. But then it’s a competition where symbolism is more important than goals.

This organisation, sometimes known as the “Non-Fifa Board”, is a body led by the famous former lawyer of Jean-Marc Bosman, which works with FIFA in the hope that it and its 22 members are merely in a temporary situation prior to some kind of full recognition.

The NF Board includes sides such as Wallonia and Chechnya, along with Monaco, Northern Cyprus, Occitania and the Romani nation in Europe. Further afield, there’s Somaliland, Zanzibar, West Papua, and Tibet. These are nations or peoples who for one reason or another are not represented and recognised by FIFA: either for political reasons (Chechnya, Northern Cyprus, Tibet) or for even thornier issues of definition – what constitutes a nation, in the case of the Roma people or of the Occitans?

Tibet’s status as a nation is less controversial, at least to most of the West. This week’s football game was an opportunity for Tibet to garner further attention and capitalise on the Olympic flame protests in a new sporting context, by playing… Padania.

Those readers who have wisely chosen to eschew the doomed and futile endeavour of trying to understand Italian politics may not know what Padania is. Padania is a politically-loaded term for northern Italy, in which a right-wing separatist movement called the Lega Nord (Northern League) sprang up in the 1990s. The Lega Nord are part of Berlusconi’s ruling coalition, Il Popolo della Libertà, and won an unprecedentedly high share of the vote in northern Italy in the April elections. Padania as a concept is one with little coherent geographical, political or historical basis, but the economic focus of the Lega has recently won them support; and they have a football federation, Padania Calcio, with a singularly rubbish website.

Lega Nord leaders Umberto Bossi and Roberto Maroni were present, along with crowds flying the green and white “Sun of the Alps” flag chosen as a Padanian symbol. Maroni commended that the match had been organised in a sign of “solidarity with the Tibetan struggle”, while Bossi spoke of his “hopes for a democratic solution to the situation” there. A small crowd of Tibetans, including a number of monks, waved national flags behind a banner proclaiming “Tibet Freedom Curva Sud”.

On to the actual football: Padania, wearing distinctly Celtic-like green and white hoops, won by a convincing 14-2 on the night. Well-known names were few and far between, perhaps the best known player being Maurizio Ganz, now 40 years old, who played up front for half of Italy: Samp, Brescia, Atalanta, Inter, Fiorentina, Modena, to mention just a few of his former teams, as well as Milan with whom he won a scudetto in 1999. Bologna legend Carlo Nervo, still playing in the lower leagues, played in midfield alongside former team-mate Fabian Valtolina, previously also of Venezia, Piacenza and Samp. The majority of the team were young amateurs or part-timers, playing in Serie C2 and D.

The Tibetan side were mostly made up, it appears, of students, exiles, whoever could be rounded up and encouraged to play – not the regular Tibetan national side after all. The ref was Paolo Silvio Mazzoleni, usually to be found directing Serie B games; he comes from Bergamo, a good solid Padanian city if ever there was one, with a solid 20% Lega Nord vote. The two sides will meet again in the Viva World Cup to be held in Sweden this summer; this was in some senses a classic pre-tournament friendly. Whether it represents the first step on the road to “freedom” for either side is another question.

Personally, seeing Padanian separatism endowed with some kind of moral equivalence to the Tibetan struggle for independence has left me open-mouthed: at the sheer cheek of the thing, if nothing else. On the other hand, raising awareness of the situation in Tibet and demonstrating support and solidarity is never a wasted gesture, so I shall try to keep a lid on my cynicism. Certainly, harnessing the idea of an independent Padania to that of an independent Tibet is a masterstroke of political spin-doctoring. And in a country where the name of the Prime Minister’s party is a football chant, what better way to do so than via the (not-so) beautiful game? The evening was a fine example of the role of politics in sport, and sport in politics, and the extent to which the two are intertwined in Italian culture.

Images courtesy Calcio blog

In particular, the public were scandalised in February by the publication of an “adjusted” league table. Based on the conclusions of the six main national papers on refs’ decisions on penalties given or denied, offside goals wrongly allowed to stand or onside goals incorrectly ruled out, a new league table was drawn up based on what results “should have been”. Leaving aside the many inherent problems with this approach – since when, in any sport, has unchallengeable perfection ruled? And how can we know what other effects a different decision might have had on a game? – the results were surprising, to say the least. In the first 24 games of the season, 171 points had been wrongly won or lost across the league. The Serie A team most penalised by referees this season? Juventus.

I don’t think this is an effort to compensate for past corruption. I don’t even think it’s a conscious attitude. I think, rather, that since calciopoli referees have been anxious not to permit any hint of favouritism towards Juve appear, and in an effort to show that they are not corrupt, they have ended up being unfair. This is similar to the theories that used to abound about pro-Juventus decisions, before we knew about Luciano Moggi and his amazing phone habit. It used to be held that refs were unconsciously influenced by the power, the tradition, the aura of invincibility that surrounded Juventus. Some feel that this deferential tendency has now been transferred to the new pre-eminent power in Italian football, Inter. One way or another, Pierluigi Collina’s job improving standards has got a lot harder since these revelations.

I’ve been musing recently on the connections between the current debate in Italy and that in England. What is the relationship between the quality of refereeing decisions and respect for the referee? If referees are put under pressure by players, fans and the media how far does this (consciously or otherwise) affect their judgement? Brian’s recent post on the issue, and the discussion that followed, highlighted some of the tensions around it: we, as fans of the sport, need to believe that the game is fair but when at the same time, as fans of a team, we become invested in one side or another, we also want our side to win.

Here’s the crunch question: how happy are you for team to win unfairly? Obviously this depends on how unfairly: I don’t think that when the calciopoli scandal broke that any Juventus fans were happy to learn what their club had been up to. But how about winning from a dodgy penalty: does it take the gloss off the game? What about if an opposing player is sent off in dubious circumstances – can you honestly say you’re not even a teeny bit relieved, in your heart of hearts? Maybe it’s the Arsenal fan in me – or maybe the cynical Italian – but there’s a part of me that thinks “Well, a win’s a win, right?” And if you beat your local rivals 1-0 through a wrongly given penalty in the 92nd minute: come on, you’d laugh and laugh, wouldn’t you?

So my feeling is that as fans we don’t always whole-heartedly support the referee at all times. For players the issue is a little different – it should, in theory, be more clearly in their interests that refereeing be universally, consistently impartial. But the desire to win often gets in the way. How often do players protest if they are awarded a penalty they know they don’t deserve? Not exactly often. Does this matter? I think it does: lack of respect for the referee can’t help but put added pressure onto already fraught decisions. But of course the problem is circular: the more frequently referees make bad decisions – and the more these errors are highlighted – the more likely it is that players will feel free to argue with the ref, to question his judgement, to challenge his authority.

Last night’s commentators on the Liverpool-Arsenal match on RAI, the Italian state TV, took this analysis one step further. Highlighting the lack of protests by Arsenal players against the penalty denied them at the Emirates, and the similar acceptance of the (equally wrong) penalty decision against Arsenal at Anfield, pundits speculated as to the cause and consequences of this failure to argue with the ref. The cause, it was widely agreed, was English sportingness and fair play. (Try not to laugh). The consequence is a more interesting question: pundits hypothesised that the referee’s job is easier and that his decisions are of a better quality where he is accorded respect, or at least unquestioning obedience. The better the referee is able to direct the game, it was argued, without challenges to his authority, the more likely he is to run the game fairly, effectively and with balanced and accurate decisions.

I think this is an interesting argument, if not wholly unproblematic. It emphasises the psychological dimension of refereeing at the expense of simple human error, which is after all universal. Nor does this approach solve some other issues arising. If referees are fair, impartial, skilful and respected, then players and managers might have to take a bit more responsibility for their own successes or failures.

In the run up to the World Cup in 2006, hard on the heels of calciopoli, a satirical song, in a southern dialect, became an unexpected smash hit across Italy. Like the best satire, it cuts so close to the bone that it is perhaps the best expression of the very ideas it satirises:

“Cornuti, siamo vittimi dell’albitrarità /a noi contraria / ecco che noi cerchiamo / di difenderci da queste inequità / così palese / grande Luciano moggi / dacci tanti orologi agli albitri internazionali / si no co’ cazz’ che vinciamo i mondiali.”

“We are the unlucky victims of refereeing biased against us. That’s why we try to defend ourselves against this manifest inequality. Great Luciano Moggi, give plenty of watches to the international referees, or else how the fuck will we win the world cup?”

This song became the anthem of the Azzuri’s World Cup victory. Respect for the referee? Confidence in refereeing standards? Support for impartiality? Give it time.

Photo credit: Melhus Fotball on Flickr

The debate about supporting your country’s other clubs in international competition is an old one, both in Italy and the UK. Part of the problem is that watching any match in any sport is more fun if you have a preference as to which team you want to win. And indeed often, if you start to watch a game between two sides in which you have no previous investment, you will develop over the course of the game some kind of preference for one over the other. That’s the point of competitive sport.

So if you’re going to watch a game you need someone to support. This is a debate wholly created by TV, of course, since before games were televised it was much rarer that you would be watching a game which didn’t involve “your” team. Now we are regularly offered televised matches involving teams which are not our own, and yet the psychological need to support one against the other remains. TV commentators tend to assume that everybody is pulling together in an outbreak of patriotic spirit, which if anything is deeply off-putting to many people. Not least because is illogical to spend most of your time loathing, say, Man Utd, and then be expected to support them suddenly just because they’re playing some previously innocuous Other. Especially when Clive Tyldesley is telling me to.

Football is all about Us v Them, but in international club games the lines get rather confused. Who is the ‘Us’ in a modern club side, and who the ‘Them’? Perhaps when the European Cup saw 11 Germans vs 11 Spaniards, or 11 Russians vs 11 Scots, (if, indeed, that was ever the case). At least then a patriotic argument might be about temporarily adopting a domestic rival for the night. But in the 2006 Champions’ League final, nearly as many Spaniards took the field for Arsenal as did for Barcelona (3 vs 4): who then should the disinterested Spanish fan support? (And that’s leaving aside the vexed Catalan question). Or, more pertinently, what’s so Italian about Inter that any non-nerazzuro Italian fan should wish them well in Europe?

In Italy the matter goes one step further, since not only is the idea of supporting rival Italian clubs in European competition largely unpopular, but there is on the contrary a tradition of actively supporting their opposition. The rather wonderful verb gufare means to support against, to wish bad luck upon. It comes from the noun gufo, meaning owl, since the owl in Italy (and Spain) is a symbol of bad luck. So football fans “owl” for another team.

Far from supporting other Italian clubs, then, large numbers will be gufando instead. Across Italy, Arsenal’s win at San Siro was greeted with delight and amusement by fans of Inter, Juve, Roma, and many more besides. It can be almost as important to gufare your rivals as to support your own team. Patriotic solidarity? What’s that then? In a country where the very question of national identity is so fraught, complex and frail, and where regional and local identities are so important and enduring, the appeal to support other Italian sides is perhaps doomed to failure. Club rivalries even impinge upon loyalty to the Azzurri. In the run-up to the 2006 World Cup, when calciopoli broke and enveloped Juventus in scandal, t-shirts went on sale featuring a photo of Juve hero and national captain Fabio Cannavaro under the legend “This is not my captain.” Anti-Cannavaro sentiment had two main bases, it seemed. Neapolitan: bad. Juventino? Worse.

The main exception to this phenomena seems to be in ex-pat Italian communities. My impression is that Italians, or more precisely those of Italian descent, living in the USA, Canada, Australia or wherever else, are more likely to support any Italian club vs any non-Italian club. This says something interesting about ex-pat identity, I think, which backs up a lot of sociological research suggesting that national identity and loyalty to the “home” nation is often strongest amongst emigrants, for a variety of reasons including the erosion of regional & dialectal divisions (and a different way of constructing Us V Them, of course).

But here there will be plenty of people gufando Inter against Liverpool (speaking personally, I couldn’t bring myself to actively support Liverpool… but that’s the beauty of it, when you gufare you focus on the team you want to lose, and can safely ignore their opponents). The importance placed on wanting your rivals to lose is by no means only an Italian concept (I would put money on Evertonians supporting Inter tomorrow, and Reds backing Fiorentina). But the Italians are blessed by a word for the concept. Perhaps it’s a reflection of a problematic national identity, or perhaps just of the many and bizarre superstitions which still abound, but that’s how much of Italy will be watching Inter’s crucial game. With a little bit of ill-will and a whole heap of schadenfreude. And an owl or two.

Photo credit: floridapf on Flickr

Among all the hysterical media discourse on Italy’s hooligan problem over the last twelve months, I have read few more absurd assertions than that by a journalist in an Italian daily paper, who claimed that “Violence is directly related to the singing of cori contro — in England nobody sings songs against the opposition any more.” The English tradition of cori contro is of course alive and well, and I don’t imagine that efforts to eradicate them over here will have any success either.

Most numerous, and most vitriolic, is the category of songs against one’s direct derby rivals, but many of these are rather uninteresting, revolving around the general theme of ‘you’re shit and we hate you’. There are occasional flashes of comic genius though: Roma fans, who like to stigmatise their Lazio rivals as ignorant country bumpkins, once threatened during the derby “We’re going to steal your flock of sheep.” Meanwhile Treviso threaten their rivals Venezia that “We’ll burn La Fenice [the famous Venetian theatre] and chuck you in the canal.”

Clubs’ symbols are fair game for insult: the Roman wolf is berated with various songs asserting “you’re not wolves but just bastard dogs”. And so are clubs’ owners: an anti-Milan song attacks owner Silvio Berlusconi and Canale 5 (one of his Mediaset TV channels) along with a more familiar symbol of the rossoneri, Gianni Rivera. Meanwhile the classic anti-Juve chant insults both the fans and the club’s owners, the FIAT-owning Agnellis: “On a Monday morning, what humiliation, going to the factory to serve your boss; Oh Juventino, you suck the dicks of the entire Agnelli family.”

Juve are notorious for having fans from across Italy, especially in the South: Cagliari sing “Sardinian Juventino, you’re even shittier than the ones from Torino.”

Juve themselves sing what I am forced to admit is quite a funny ditty at the expense of Inter, who in 2001-22 thought they had won the Scudetto only to throw it away at the last minute in a hilarious fashion losing at Lazio. The bianconero song, entitled “5 May 2002″ runs as follows:

The fifth of May went rather badly
For Moratti and Internazionale
You were all in Rome, expecting
Celebrations, but forgetting
That the league is won in May
Not in July’s dreamy days,
And while there were tears from Ronie
Bianconeri began to party
And think of all you interisti
Down in Rome all sad and twisted
Oh interista, you know what we’ll do?
Put our hands in the air and sing for you…

INTER MERDA, INTER MERDA

[OK, this is my first and last effort at retaining some kind of poetry in the translation]. Inter can retaliate very simply by taunting Juventus with “Serie B” – Inter are now the only club never to have played outside the top flight.

There are of course some deeply unpleasant chants around. Italy has its own equivalent of the Munich air disaster, and very similar opposition songs attached to it. The Superga tragedy of May 1949, in which 31 people including 18 players were killed returning from a European game against Benfica, devastated Torino in a way which Munich could not destroy Manchester United. Sadly this is today acknowledged by rival chants about “that magical aeroplane”. Incidentally, for Toro’s 50th anniversary in 1999 they held a friendly against an all-star Italian League XI. I wouldn’t like to gamble on the likely consequences had the Turin derby fallen that week, but I’m not sure Juve would have behaved as well as Man City fans did, since they sing that “you only made history at Superga.”

A large proportion of cori contro are aimed less at a specific club, than at a city or a region. Some chants are generic and multipurpose, like the old favourite “Roman/Milanese/Torinese/ Catanese mothers are whores” or simply “Odio Bergamo” [I hate Bergamo] or Napoli or Genoa or any other three-syllable placed name which can be made to scan (Manchester, for instance). Insults can apply to whole regions. Tuscany has the most clubs of any region in Serie A, so a one-size fits all approach is useful: “Tuscan women are whores, whores, whores, and their sons are rabbits, rabbits, rabbits”.

The rabbit is a traditional emblem of cowardice.

Sampdoria fans get told “Genova stinks of fish and it’s sea is polluted” (part of the Italian ultras’ well-known campaign for cleaner beaches, perhaps.) Meanwhile fans of the Milan and Turin clubs are taunted over their bad weather: to the tune of Guantanamera, “Solo la nebbia! Avete solo la nebbia!” – only fog, you only have fog. Not something for which any part of the British Isles could safely mock any other area.

Violence is frequently present in these songs — not that many people are likely to actually have the hand-grenade suggested in the short rhythmic chant “Bomba a mano su Milano!” Roma fans suggest that Milan should be torched – “Milano in fiamme” – while Juve fans sing exactly the same song but substituting Florence in flames.

But it’s Napoli, and Naples as a city, which really bears the brunt of regional prejudice. “Come on Vesuvius, clean them with fire” is a typical sentiment, while local rivals Cavese update things slightly by urging Osama Bin Laden to direct his plane towards Napoli Central Station. Meanwhile the classic chant runs:

Smell what a stench, even dogs flee
The Neapolitans are arriving
O cholera and earthquake-afflicted
You’ve never seen soap in your lives
Napoli are shit, Napoli [have]cholera
you’re the shame of all Italy,
Neapolitan, dirty African
Sooner or later we’ll stab you.

This delightful ditty combines all the worst stereotypes about Naples — poverty, dirt, disease — with a garnishing of racism and violence to boot. Though it’s not only northerners who look on those south of them with contempt. Bari fans, safe in the knowledge that they are all of 150km north of their hated rivals, call Lecce fans “Africans.” If this is irony, I struggle to appreciate it myself. Given that both Bari and Lecce are part of the same region, this shows how closely integrated racist and localist discourse are. But by and large though most cori contro stay within the bounds of acceptability and humour.

Next time out, I’ll conclude with a quick look at political chants and protest songs.

The first major difference from the English game is that nearly all clubs have their own official Hymn. This isn’t a song which has been adopted, in the fashion of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, but a specially written dedicated piece, usually by some prominent singer-songwriter who is a fan of the club in question. And they are almost without exception spectacularly cheesy, both musically and lyrically. Though I am of course entirely biased, I think that Roma has one of the best (below), though Inter’s is not too bad (and has the merit of acknowledging the team’s inconsistency in its chorus “Crazy Inter” – a new celebratory version was recorded last year). The hymns of Lazio, Juve, Milan and Napoli are perhaps more representative of the typical awfulness of most such efforts. The lyrics are essentially banal sentimentalism of the laziest kind expressed with a sprinkling of local dialect, accompanied by cheesy europop beats and a climactic modulation to create a sense of emotional elevation. But if it’s your team and your anthem, it is almost guaranteed to give you goose-bumps when belted out by 40,000 people.

Roma Roma Roma

There’s no compunction about stealing other people’s national anthems. The Marseillaise, curiously, gets used from time to time, and you’ll also hear John Brown’s body – the Battle Hymn of the Republic – usually known to Italians as “Glory Glory Hallelujah.” It’s sung at Lazio, as “Forza Forza Grande Lazio” and on the other side of the fence as, you’ll be amazed to hear, “Forza Forza Grande Roma”. Some groups are also unable to resist the compelling tune of the Red Flag, even when they violently disagree with its political sentiments. British visitors will find plenty of other familiar tunes – rather bastardised versions of “Sailing”, “Bread of Heaven”, “Guantanamera” and so on. Meanwhile Roma sing anti-Lazio songs to the tune of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, the Popeye theme tune and best of all, Old Macdonald had a Farm. Verdi is always a favourite, with both “La Donna è mobile” and the triumphal march from Aida cropping up across the country.

The international language of cheesy pop is of course a major source of musical inspiration. OMD’s “Enola Gay”, “That’s the way I like it” by KC and the Sunshine band and of course “Go West” are universal favourites, while several clubs also use “Yellow Submarine”. Plenty of classic Italian pop songs also get an airing. I often have the disconcerting experience of learning a song in the curva and only subsequently hearing the original version (which is usually a terrible disappointment). Juve sing a version of “Andavo a 100 al ora”, a 1962 hit by Gianni Morandi which is great (below), while Marcella Bella’s 1972 song from the San Remo festival of Italian song “Montagne Verde” is also used at Reggina and elsewhere. The shock of encountering Raffaella Carrà’s 1978 masterpiece “Quanto è bello fare l’amore” in a tacky nightclub was considerable given that I had only ever heard a rather different version asserting that “there’s no priest or woman for me, in my heart is only you: AS Roma”.

New tunes are picked up from the charts or often from adverts on TV: the “kinder chocofresh music” (Inter), the “Grana Padano parmesan advert” (Roma). And of course fans borrow from one another. In February 2006 Roma played away at Bruges in the UEFA cup. The visiting fans were impressed by the Bruges’ supporters use of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and the following week back home they adapted it to their own ends: PO-PO-PO-PO-PO-POOOO-POOO, making an anti-Lazio modification by adding “biancazzurro bastardo”[blue and white bastard] to the end. It became a Roma favourite in no time but quickly spread beyond to become the theme of Italy’s 2006 World Cup campaign (without, obviously, the anti-Lazio addition). Roma, of course, abandoned it once it became associated with the Azzurri.

If the tunes are a combination of the familiar and the more obscure, the words cover more or less the same themes as football chants the world over. In two-club cities, songs tend to exult the status of one particular club in the city. Juve fans sing “Torino, what a beautiful city! Torino is our city! Torino is black and white, and black and white it will always be!” (This song is mendacious on at least two counts). Chievo sing “We are not Hellas! We are Chievo!” which I suppose is at least straight to the point. Sampdoria sing “We are Genova” while Genoa retort “How the fuck can anyone support Samp?”

Another universal theme is the impossibility of staying away from your club. Torino fans sing “Torino… always at your side… I know why I won’t be staying home.” At Empoli, it’s “I’ll never grow tired of you, you’re the most beautiful thing there is,” a statement which stretches the boundaries of credibility if you take a look at their defenders Richard Vanigli and Vittorio Tosto. For Cagliari, simple geography makes loyalty a bit more demanding: they sing “We’ll take the ship and follow you.” Genoa (and others) sing a song as if by a resentful girlfriend: “Why do you leave me alone every Sunday to go to the stadium to watch the match? Because… because I support Genoa alé alé!” comes the answer.

Of course, a major part of any club’s songbook consists of chants against other teams. This links into the regional prejudice I’ve mentioned before, and will be the subject of my next post.

Italian texts for many songs can be found on tifonet.it

However I am willing to hazard a few guesses about the conclusions to which small boys playing football usually come when they lose a match. And my gut feeling would be that by and large they don’t include paranoid conspiracy theories. We are constantly being told, here in Italy at least, that children are the soul of football, its last hope, its glorious future, the true keepers of proper sporting values, the enemies of cynicism, cheating and corruption.

Well, let’s take a look at that.

Describe a game of football between your class’ football team and another class’ team…

Ciruzzo’s shot went out and not in, but the referee was under the influence of the teacher, so the teacher won the cup. Us, our class, we should have won, but instead it was Professore Esposito’s class what won, because he gives him Christmas presents and my teacher who is poor doesn’t give him any. But it’s not right.

Then Professore Esposito when he had won the other games against the other classes was acting like the cock on the rubbish*, but if we’d been there there’d not have been any rubbish.

If Capretto hadn’t pissed that ball away we would have won the cup in the end but the referee made Professore Esposito’s team win if not he wouldn’t give him any presents any more.

But it’s not right. Now I don’t know whose tyres to let down, the ref or Professore Esposito.

* Traditional Neapolitan expression for bragging, acting the big-shot over weaker opponents
(From “Io speriamo che me la cavo”, ed. Marcello D’Orta, 1991)

This is a genuine primary school essay from a kid in a suburb of Naples, taken from a book I’ve been discussing over on my own blog. As well as being terribly funny – my translation does no justice to the beauties of the original – this story is really rather alarming, on several counts.

Is the idea of bribing referees really so deep-seated in Italian football? And regardless of the accuracy or otherwise of the allegations against Professore Esposito, is it axiomatic that when your team loses, it must be the ref’s fault? I would also draw your attention to the inherent threat of violence against referees and opposing managers with which our narrator concludes. Best slap a banning order on that lad pronto.

More seriously, this reminded me of some of the reactions to the calciopoli scandal. While outside Italy some expressed surprise at the idea of leaning on referees to influence matches, here the only surprise was that something was being done about it. In Italy it’s not cynical to think biased refereeing goes on; it’s hopelessly naïve to think that it doesn’t. If even small boys playing in primary school tournaments take for granted that teachers are bribing the ref, how can we doubt that it goes on in Serie A where, after all, the stakes may be higher? (though the chance of having your tyres let down is probably the same). After all, at Christmas in 1999 a number of leading referees were given brand new Rolexes by owner Franco Sensi (Roma’s very own Professore Esposito, it would seem).

Here on a daily basis we accuse one another of cheating and corruption. Rarely of outright bribery, nothing so crude; but of intimidating the ref with status and power (see the furore over the penalty Inter was given against Parma last month) or of improperly using financial clout and big-club status (see Palermo president Zamparini’s lunatic diatribe against Roma’s ball-boy last week). Being “furbo” – sly, cunning – is a positive attribute, a vital element of the winning mentality. It’s part of the normal, even essential, daily discourse of Italian football. And perhaps things have changed since 1990, but if not, these attitudes permeate all levels of footballing culture, right down to primary schools.

Italians are notoriously bad losers, often redefining gracelessness in their petulant refusal to accept defeat. But that makes perfect sense if you think that everything is most likely a fix. This mentality especially applies to the national side. When the Azzurri lose, it’s everyone’s fault but the team’s. Is this paranoia, though, or the cynicism born of experience? Domestically, everyone “knows” that’s how the “system” works. At an international level, some supporters in other countries naively think that matches are determined solely on the pitch, and fail to take seriously Italian conspiracy theories.

The true problem is that such paranoia becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if everyone else is doing it, then you better join in, or you really will miss out. Far worse than the reality of corruption in Italy – and it is present – is the perception of its ubiquity. Italian football is a system from which trust has been eroded completely.

Photo credit: mirkocorli