The last thing Italian football needed to rehabilitate its image for an international audience was a night like last Saturday. Napoli-Fiorentina should have been an entertaining match between the sides that, together with Roma, play the best football in Serie A. In a twist of fate, the game was as enjoyable as everyone had hoped, but what happened before nullified any technical considerations. Many newspapers and columnists - in some cases, intellectuals who know nothing about the Ultras’ world and even football - said and wrote that "Calcio should be shut" and keep considering the majority of football fans who frequent stadia as brainless, violent, fascists and outlaws.

 

Reality is different, and unfortunately, much more complicated. Clearly there are brainless, violent, fascist and outlaw Ultras, who are seemingly free to do anything they want inside the stadium. That's the institutions' fault: severe laws to fight football-related violence already exist, but Italian football doesn't want to apply them. Italy doesn't want to fight hooligans as common criminals like England did. The result is catastrophic.

 

The facts. Three hours before the game a Napoli fan, Ciro Esposito, was shot in the chest and is still struggling for his life at the hospital Gemelli, in Rome. Two other people were hit by bullets. Who fired? Several hours after the match, the press reported that it was a Roma "capo-ultrà" (one of the leaders of Giallorossi's organised supporters) named Daniele De Santis, and that he acted by himself. Apparently, it wasn't a clash between fans of rival teams but the action of a demented individual. De Santis is a well-known guy in Rome for his extreme right-wing ideas and, above all, because he was among the ultras that stopped the Roma-Lazio derby in 2004 for an alleged ‘dead child,’ killed by a police jeep. That was untrue, but he spoke with Francesco Totti - on the pitch - and his contribution was decisive in the suspending of the match. In 1996, De Santis was arrested for threats to the Roma president Franco Sensi; he - and other ultras - demanded free tickets, otherwise they would have caused clashes and deserted the stadium.

 

Last saturday, after the shots, Daniele De Santis was set upon by Napoli fans. But the gunshot also triggered a violent clash between Napoli fans and police forces (five policemen were wounded). The bad news reached all the 60,000 fans at the Olimpico Stadium. It was uncertain whether Esposito was still alive or not and the game delayed by 45 minutes. Between 9pm (the scheduled time for the kick off) and 9:45pm (when kick off was whistled), lawlessness ruled at the Olimpico Stadium. These facts demonstrate the clumsiness and ineptitude of Italian sporting institutions.

 

- Before, during and after the game, dozens of firecrackers and paper bombs were thrown. Even during the meeting between Hamsik and Napoli's ultras, some Partenopei fans threw smoke bombs towards firefighters. One was hit and wounded. Italian laws explicitly forbid bringing “any object apt to offend and suitable to be thrown.” If the law were applied, we wouldn't have heard any bursts nor seen any smoke. But it happened, and it happens every week in Serie A. We're not talking about two or three petards that policemen and stewards didn't notice. We're talking about dozens of bags. Someone played dumb, pretending not to see what hooligans were bringing into the stadium.

 

- For Italian football institutions, hooligans are the only privileged interlocutors. The majority of the fans are just cash cows, the police can search them and confiscate a alighter, or a bottle of water, while other "fans" bring dozens of firecrackers. And when a match is postponed, normal people don't have the right to know why. Napoli's captain Marek Hamsik was sent to talk with Gennaro de Tommaso, alias ‘Genny a’ Carogna’, a Napoli capo-ultrà, to explain to him that nobody died and that the match will be played. This wasn't a negotiation to decide wether or not the game would be played; the decision had already been taken. Genny's task was to transmit the message to the entire curva, and to assure that the Napoli fans wouldn't cause any clashes. De Tommaso is the son of a Camorra affiliate, and has been arrested for drug smuggling. As a Fiorentina website reports, sports director Daniele Pradè did the same thing with the leaders of Viola's supporters. Not a single word was pronounced by the stadium speaker. Normal football fans only knew that the game would have started with a delay. Without any official communication, they could only hypothesise the reasons why, and we have to consider that there was no cellphone coverage because the network was overloaded.

 

- It's not still clear whether De Tommaso could watch a game from a stadium stand. Italian Ministero dell'Interno (the Home Office) inflicted him a Daspo (a banning order preventing him from attending any sporting event due to dangerous conduct) in the past, but was this ban still effective last Saturday?

 

- Italian laws forbid "climbing on stadium structures", including a glass wall. The reason is quite easy to understand: it would be dangerous. During his chat with Marek Hamsik, Gennaro De Tommaso was astride a glass wall in front of many policemen. De Tommaso should have been - at least – fined, but the police tolerated such conduct. After a few minutes, De Tommaso climbed down and entered the athletic track. Technically, that was a pitch invasion. Again, that was tolerated without a blink of an eye. The same did some Fiorentina fans on the other side of the stadium. Lawlessness is normality in Italian stadia.

 

- Napoli fans "decided" to ban any chant during the match, in respect of Ciro Esposito who was - and still is - struggling for his life. But how can 30,000 people "decide" something within a few minutes? It's so easy: with intimidations and threats. As Vittorio Zambardino, an Italian journalist and Napoli fan reports on Il Napolista, some "deputies" of Genny a' Carogna imposed the silence, intimidating those upptried to sing.ort their team as a licit personal decision.

 

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