A recent BBC report painted Polish football as unrelentingly grim, violent and racist. Whilst there remains unacceptable behaviour that needs to be eradicated, Polish fan Michal Karaś argues the report exaggerates the issue.
Vanda Wilcox takes a second look at Italian football songs, this time explaining cori contro, songs against the enemy.
Photo Daily this week moves from Serbia to Croatia, the words for the descriptions below courtesy of a man who was a lot happier than me when Croatia beat England last month.
As we end this week’s look at Serbian football, it’s appropriate to finish with this shot of flares littering the pitch at Red Star Belgrade’s Marakana stadium, as this series was sparked (pun intended) by the attack on a policeman with flares there last weekend.
Photo credit: JonHall on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion photo pool.
Editor’s note: Most of you will have noticed that we often linked to Rome-based blogger Spangly Princess during the recent crisis in Italy. Well, she’ll now be writing regularly for Pitch Invasion, and today brings us an update on the Catania-Palermo rivalry, ten months on from the death of a policeman that marked the previous [...]
Given I’ve unilaterally declared Serbian football to be in crisis, after a policeman was burned with flares at a Red Star game along with several other problems this week, I thought we’d look at Serbian football this week.
And why not start fittingly with Red Star fans, and their love of pyrotechnics? From their derby [...]
In the second of our series on ultras in unusual places (see the first on a group of English ultras here), we look at the first ultras group in Egypt, founded just this year but already responsible for a series of remarkable choreographed displays. They support Al-Ahly, the side from Cairo, Egypt who are perhaps [...]
It’s never good when a football stadium looks more like a warzone. On Saturday, the Marele Derby (Great Derby) between Steaua Bucharest and Dinamo Bucharest in Romania descended into chaos as the game was interrupted three times when fans of both teams fired flares at each other, and lobbed smoke bombs onto the pitch.
The [...]
[singlepic=12,260,195,right]Despite being the birthplace of organised football, ultras culture, so popular elsewhere at various times, has barely registered as a style of support at British clubs.
But some are trying to grow the culture in Britain, such as Aldershot Town’s Red Blue Army. Aldershot Town F.C. were formed in 1992 after the collapse of Aldershot F.C. [...]
