The photo reads, in English, Spartak — for Спартак Москва, of course. As Jonathon Wilson’s Behind the Curtain explains, “Spartak have had a hooligan element since the seventies, when shaven-headed thugs in their red-and-white colours would rampage through city centres and daub their slogans on walls — further evidence, to those looking for it, of the club’s renowned independence.”

Read on for more about Spartak’s history.

Spartak’s origins lie in catering, and supporters have appropriated opposition taunts of ‘Meat, Meat’ to respond with “Who are we? We’re The Meat!”. And indeed, they have long been the meat of Russian football.

Spartak were the most successful Russian club during the Soviet era, winning twelve championships (Dynamo Kiev, from Ukraine, won one more). They were known as the most independent club from the regime (other clubs received funding from the Red Army and the KGB, but Spartak were only loosely funded by trade unions), and that’s one reason why they’ve never had their own stadium.

Their current home, Luzhniki Stadium (formerly Lenin Stadium), hosted the 1980 Olympic Games opening and closing ceremonies but was also home to Russia’s worst football disaster in 1982, when perhaps 340 people died in an icy stampede.

Thankfully, the stadium has since been renovated. Without Dynamo Kiev to compete with, Spartak initially dominated the Russian championship, winning nine of the first fourteen years. The last few years have been less successful, as they haven’t won the title since 2001; this year, they finished second for the third successive year, losing out to FC Zenit on the last day.

Photo credit: bcjens on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion photo pool. Much of the information in this post came from Jonathon Wilson’s excellent book, Behind the Curtain.

The violence came after Spartak Moscow’s win over FK Moscow, but far from the stadium, and the catalyst for the violence seems to be unknown. Given the dead man and his friends were all “dark-skinned”, as the newspaper crudely puts it, a racial motive was brought up as a possibility in the report.

Yet the police spokesman was remarkably quick to rule out that possibility. “This isn’t a hate crime,” he said, the curious proof being that “After all, Nikolayev is a Russian citizen.”

This statement rang a bell with these quotes from a 2003 BBC report.

“We make monkey noises, or call the black players chocolate!” one young fan claims proudly, and his friends laugh in support.

“Russia is for the Russians,” he explains. “Foreign players are fine, but only if they’re white.”

Football journalist Alexander Bogomolov says this is a common reaction.

“The majority of supporters here don’t like black players at all,” he explains.

And it comes just weeks after Spartak were fined for their fans racist behaviour, after they unfurled a banner abusing their own new signing, leading the club to ask for tolerance.

The plea comes after a group of “right-wing” Spartak fans displayed a racist banner at the club’s match at Krylia Sovietov directed at Spartak’s new Brazilian forward, Welliton. The banner read: “The number 11 belongs to Tikhonov. Monkey go home.” Andrei Tikhonov is a former fans’ favourite who wore the number 11 shirt in the 1990s.