The Italian Super Cup has been played in Washington D.C., New Jersey and even Tripoli in the past, but the early kick-off and lack of Italian television coverage this time has led to criticism, such as this scathing commentary from Four Four Two’s Riccardo Rossi.

In fact, the Football League’s decision to move the game to China has not only penalised the genuine Inter and Lazio fans, but also taken the game out of the realm of an Italian sporting event.

The League may see their coffers swell by something in the region of 2.5million euro for the pleasure of Inter and Lazio having to trek across a few time zones to feather the Bird’s Nest stadium.

However, the spectacle will be played in front of a crowd that, in all honesty, will not be too concerned who they support as long as they get full value for their 21 euro entrance fee.

“We are exporting the ‘brand’,” pleaded the League in their defence, before demonstrating a total disregard for their core followers back home by pithily adding: “fans who are interested will find a way to watch the game.”

Serie A powerbrokers are unlikely to be concerned by these views, with their focus on the branding battle as a league worldwide with the Premier League and La Liga, one Italian clubs have been losing for the past decade. The increasingly poor performance of Italian clubs in the Champions League and UEFA Cup and in their status as global brands has led to a crisis of confidence and a dramatic attempt to kickstart the top flight. Five years ago, Italy boasted two of the top five clubs in Deloitte’s Football Money League; this year, the top five all came from England, Spain and Germany.

Lega Calcio Serie A

Exporting the global brand of Italian football isn’t the only way Serie A clubs are attempting to keep up with the Premier League. In April it was announced that, much like the Premier League in the 1990s, Serie A would break away from Serie B to form “Lega Calcio Serie A”. 19 of the 20 clubs in Serie A voted in favour of the move after negotiations with Serie B broke down, and the new league is scheduled to launch next year.

Lega Calcio Serie A will sell collective television rights for the 20 clubs. Currently, the top clubs manage their own rights, but do share revenue to support Serie B. The collective Serie A sale ought to assist well-managed upper-tier teams below the likes of Milan and Juventus such as Udinese, on the fringes of Champions League qualification and likely to be able to increase their revenue substantially, which may improve the pitiful recent performance of mid-tier Italian teams in the Europa League (formerly UEFA Cup).

Though they will no longer directly sell their own rights, the Italian Champions League elite will hope the new deal will kickstart the same rich-get-richer revolution the English game has felt since the launch of the Premier League. Clubs such as Roma and Lazio are on the market for new owners and/or new stadiums, and will see this as a shortcut to solving their problems — which may be a rather too simple assumption.

But for teams less secure in Serie A, as well as those stuck in Serie B and below, the break-away is only like to exacerbate the serious economic difficulties plaguing almost every club in Italy — similar to the effect on Football League clubs that the Premier League’s breakaway had in the 1990s, instantiating a greater inequality throughout the football pyramid.

Serie B and Lega Pro

The Serie A break-away will surely only add to the serious financial crisis in lower league Italian football that has recently shredded several teams with history in the top flight; Serie B has struggled selling its television rights in the past two seasons, and it’s unlikely to get any easier now. A greater gap between the top clubs in Serie A and those below could be the final nail in the coffin for many, especially as the Italian lower league system has not been as firmly established as the Football League structure in England.

Indeed, economic crisis is already apparent in the division below Serie B, now known as Lega Pro. Four former Serie A clubs — Treviso, Venezia, Pisa and Avellino — have all dropped out of the third tier this summer due to economic difficulties, failing registration requirements. Out of Lega Pro’s two divisions (the third and fourth tiers of Italian football), no fewer than 16 teams failed the (too?) strict Covisoc financial criteria test.

Pisa, relegated from Serie B,  reportedly went bankrupt with 7 million Euros of debt and will have to start over at the amateur level.

If the Lega Calcio Serie A breakaway goes ahead, it’s surely only going to lead to more reckless spending by Serie B clubs in the scramble to be part of the jackpot television revenue one tier above them — something we’ve seen in England many times since the formation of the Premier League.  Serie B clubs may well spend more to try to reach the promised land above, even though this will mean risking their registration and relegation to amateur football should they end up failing in financial difficulty.

Fancy exhibitions at the Bird’s Nest and aping the Premier League’s breakaway and branding at the top won’t solve the deeper problems in Italian football.

Shortly after 13h renewed applause tells us that the service is over, and shortly thereafter the coffin emerges from the church. The massed ranks of ultras – black bomber jackets, baseball caps and sunglasses all round – break out into a chant of “Gabriele uno di noi” (one of us). Then a group start singing a tune I don’t recognise – la la la, they’re clearly doing the instrumental introduction – and it takes me a moment to realise that it is Vola Lazio Vola, their club song. (I’ve only ever heard it before from inside the Curva Sud, drowned out by the giallorossi around me).

The Lazio fans across the piazza begin to sing, loudly, and the woman in front of me with the ruined handkerchief starts to sing in a wavering voice, and it suddenly comes on to rain very hard. And everyone is holding their scarves over their heads and I find my eyes begin to water and the woman in front of me breaks down sobbing, and the chorus “Lazio sul prato verde vola, Lazio tu non sarai mai sola, Vola un’aquila nel cielo, piu in alto sempre volerà” seems to have been written with a funeral in mind. And I am glad I had the forethought to bring some tissues with me.

After the singing, there are a few more choruses of “Gabriele sempre con noi” and then one or two voices try to start up an anti-police chant. But it lasts only seconds before being hushed and quietly booed, if such a thing is possible, and then someone launches into the national anthem. The Irriducibili and the Banda Noantri next to me all make the Roman salute throughout, predictably, but that’s that. No political sloganeering at least.

And then gradually people start to file away, through what is now a downpour. The Lazio players pass in front of me to climb onto their coaches, and then sit in the heavy traffic waiting to move away. They wipe away the condensation on the windows, and stare out at us. Mudingayi (I think) practically presses his face up against the glass. We stare back. A small boy waves and claps. The crowds disperse almost as silently as they came, for the most part. But the group of Lazio ultras, a couple of hundred strong, set off towards the Olimpico. Up to a thousand ultras, apparently, gathered below the Curva Nord there to chant Lazio songs, before dispersing peacefully.

The mentalità ultra is many things, some good, some bad. But one of them is this. It is those ultras who travelled down from Milan, from Turin, from Udine; or up from Naples, Taranto, Palermo; who spent hours of their own time and who knows how much of their own money, to come on a Wednesday afternoon in November, to stand in the pouring rain in silence for nearly two hours, to pay their respects to a man they never knew. And after standing in the rain, and applauding the family and mourners, and chanting the name of a man they’d not even heard of this time last week, they departed peaceably. Now, you might find that barking mad. But it’s hard to see that you could find it objectionable or violent.

Read the rest here.

Today’s Lazio-Inter game has been postponed, and ultras are protesting throughout the country — rumours are circulating the internet wildly already, with claims that Sandri was shot multiple times. The Atalanta v Milan game was stopped due to fans breaking down a glass barrier, and Lazio fans have unfurled banners reading “Assassini, assassini” against the police. Many ultras are furious the rest of the day’s games were only delayed for fifteen minutes rather than cancelled altogether.

This may well all get a lot worse before it gets better. Two bloggers are on the case, Martha from the Italy Offside and in Italy, Spangly Princess.

Update: Be sure to read the comments below, with updates coming in from readers ursus and Ben.

Update 2: As I feared, things did get a lot worse: rioting broke out in Rome. Go read Spangles on the latest from Italy.

And again, “politics not football”:

Trouble started around 18h in the residential quarter on the other side of the river at the local headquarters of the squadra mobile (rapid response investigative police, who often deal with football related criminal activity). The crowd, variously estimated at from 200 to 1000 people, moved off when their initial siege was held off, rampaging around the area and finally crossing over to the stadium where they attacked the headquarters of CONI, the governing body for all sports in Italy. An incendiary device was thrown into the building, windows were smashed, vehicles and wheelie bins were overturned and set on fire, and according to some reports several hundred people broke into the building. Dozens of policemen and carabinieri have been treated for injuries of varying gravity.

It was, in essence, the pre- and post-match violence of a super fraught fixture, only without the match.

Driving past half an hour ago, the streets are littered with rubble, wrenched up road signs and abandoned 2m metal poles used as weapons. Overturned bins lie in the road. Fully armed riot police are still conspicuous by their presence. The whole area is lit up like an even less salubrious Blackpool – the stadium floodlights are on full, and as we drove northwards from the centre we ould say the whole area glowing a fierce white. The place was eerily empty of non-police. But it looked like a war zone.

Update 3: Gramsci’s Kingdom discusses the remarkably widespread and rapid response to the events, pointing to the failure of Italian state as the root cause of the rioting. As he puts it, “Today’s events, fundamentally, are not about football. They are about a society in deep, deep trouble. No one trusts authority. No one believes that any guilty party will be punished. And, without the reassurance that justice will be done, they take matters into their own hands.”

The ultra-extremists of Lazio, calling themselves the Irriducibili (Unmovables), unfurled a banner that read “Auschwitz, your country — ovens your home” at the 1998 Roman derby match against Roma. When Lazio was fined $2,250 last season after the Irriducibili, harangued Bruno N’Gotty, a black defender who plays for Venezia, Dino Zoff, who was then assistant to Lazio’s club president, said: “I don’t know whether you could really call that racism. It’s more a question of people making fun. Fans pick on someone tall, short, gray-haired.”

Here they are in action, with obligatory bombastic music.