the following is an editorial response to Fabio capello's comments that the power of the Ultras of Italian football are what is killing Serie A.
Calcio Debate: Fabio Capello Is An Ignoramus Who Hasn't Got A Clue About English Football FansThe England coach’s attack on Calcio has infuriated the authorities back home. Goal.com’s Gil Gillespie just thinks he is a poor, misguided fool who doesn't know the first thing about footballing culture in the UK...
The grass, as the old saying goes, isn't always greener on the other side.
Every time an Italian coach goes to live and work in England, they always seem to return full of glowing reports of highly organised stadiums packed with charmingly behaved fans. Even the dismissively arrogant Roberto Mancini said he enjoyed the more light-hearted, less media intensive climate of the English game, after his brief stint with Leicester City.
Fabio Capello is the latest wearer of this particular pair of rose-tinted spectacles and he has been upsetting the football academia big wigs in Italy with his outspoken attack on Calcio at Italy’s university of tactics, Coverciano.
"It's the Ultras who rule in Serie A. There is no courage to apply the laws against them," stated the former Milan and Juventus boss sharply.
"In England, the stadia are full, there is a desire to go to the stadium, nothing ever happens and the stewards do a perfect job. I am saddened with what is happening in Italy,” he added.
And, as if this outburst hadn't put enough noses out of joint, Capello then turned his ire on the dishonest practices of Calcio itself.
"In Italy the divers are praised and receive prizes - in England they are jeered.
"The Italian national team has never fascinated me like the English one," he concluded. He didn't explain why. But it is possibly something to do with the rumours that he was never going to be offered the chance to coach the Azzurri as he has spent half of his career upsetting the almost aristocratic folk at FIGC.
Capello’s state of mind is exactly like that of a tourist who visits another country, stays for a little while and is fooled into thinking he is living in a bright new paradise where none of the things he hated about the old country exist. Needless to say, his new love for England over Italy has everything to do with his delusional state of mind and nothing to do with actual reality. His comments merely prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Capello appears to believe that the Premier League blueprint drawn up by Lord Justice Taylor in response to the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters is a one-size-fits-all model that should be employed across Europe. It isn’t. No-one can doubt the necessity or the validity of tackling the terrible demons of hooliganism but anyone with more than a passing interest in the sociology of football in England can see the problems it has left in its wake. Everyone, it seems, except Capello. The Premier League is far from being the supporters haven he thinks it is.
What the FA did at the end of the eighties is to learn how to control fans inside the stadiums. Strangely, they still manage to disassociate themselves from any trouble that happens outside the ground and a compliant media are always willing to play ball. Did you hear about the seven fans stabbed outside White Hart Lane last season? No, nor me. How about the 20 Swindon baseball bat carrying Swindon fans that attacked the pub less than 200 yards from where I live prompting a massive police operation? No. Well take it from me, it happened and hospital admissions shot up.
Anyway, as a direct result of the changes the FA put in place 20 years ago, there has been a gradual disappearance of anything resembling a decent atmosphere at most of the country's biggest grounds.
The exorbitant cost of ticket prices for Premier League games hasn’t exactly helped with this either. Prices are prohibitive to the point of obscenity. As a result, the average age of fans in the English top division has risen from 23 to 43 in the last ten years. In essence, a whole generation has been excluded.
"Something really quite important has been lost," says John Williams of Leicester University's Centre for the Sociology of Sport.
In Italy, it couldn’t be more different. Football is not a hobby for Italians, it is one of the defining characteristics of Italian life. Everyone lives and breathes Calcio: lawyers, postmen, bar managers, widows, priests, teenagers and university professors. Its ability to unify is matched only by that of Catholicism.
This is why Capello’s attack on the Ultras of Serie A is, at best, misguided and at worst, downright dangerous. The multitude of supporters clans that follow every club on the peninsula are by no means perfect but their contribution to the Italian game is sacred and should be cherished. The fans’ groups insist on having their say in just about every area, whether they are invited or not.
It is typical that the 200 Lazio fans who invaded the teams training session this week and sent the players running for cover by throwing some mild explosive devices in their direction sought to explain their actions.
“They haven't even celebrated under the Curva with us, which is what used to happen in the past," said Irriducibili spokesman Gianluca Tirone. He also stated that they were more than satisfied by the clubs’ response. In an age when money has all but taken over the beautiful game, it is incredible that fans can have so much influence on their club. It is also unintentionally hilarious.
Anyone wanting a first hand insight into the staggeringly complicated, politically motivated, self-sacrificing world of the Ultras should read Tim Parks’ book ‘A Season with Verona’.
While their lager-bellied Premier League cousins sit in rows munching on prawn sandwiches or embark on their own personal marathons of abuse aimed at opposition players, the Red and Black Brigade, the Griffen Den, Juventus Fighters, Lazio's Irriducibili, Inter's Boys and a bewildering number of other Ultra groups put on the most amazing, colossal, phantasmagorical displays of noise, symmetry and colour anywhere on earth.
This is not to ignore the well-documented problems caused by Ultras, and Italian fans in general. But while any disgusting racist episode involving Mario Balotelli, Marco Zoro, or any other black player, is highlighted by the English media (and SKY in particular) at every possible opportunity, what is not reported is the equally if not more severe racist abuse directed at Premier League players by 'angelic' English fans. The Emmanuel Adebayor 'His dad washes elephants and his mum is a w**re' which is sung by opposition fans every week at least five times a match is just one horrific example. But there have been no stadium bans on clubs in England, like the one imposed on Juventus last season following the Balotelli controversy.
What is also not reported (anymore) is the havoc caused by English football fans almost every time they travel abroad to support club or country. Not so much as a column inch was afforded in Britain to the drunken escapades of Three Lions supporters during the 2006 World Cup in Germany, which included taking over the squares in various cities and blasting out in their hundreds World War Two songs like 'There Were Ten German Bombers In The Air - And The RAF From England Shot Them Down'.
After all, this would be a disaster for the Premier League's global image, which has seen them conquer vulnerable markets all over the world.
In Don Fabio's beloved Premier League, fans do not only not have any say, they haven’t even got a voice. They sit, they absorb, they go away, they boast, or they don’t boast, at work on Monday.
But Capello's suggestion that his newly adopted home is full of happy-go-lucky orderly souls who the authorities keep under control also shows just how naive he is about the culture of the people around him.
What the man from San Canzian d'Isonzo doesn’t know while he is visiting art galleries and sampling London operatic and theatrical delights is that every Friday and Saturday night in every village, town and city up and down the land there are flocks of offensively drunken idiots stumbling and fighting and flashing their arses. He may also not have heard of the term 'broken society'.
Can you imagine a news story about an Italian footballer groping and then breaking the nose of a girl who rejected his advances in a nightclub?
Capello’s vision of Britain is of a decent place where Corinthian spirited chaps stay on their feet and get a round of applause from both sides of the ground. He must wonder why Bobby Charlton never shows up at training. But today’s UK is sadly not what it was more than 30 or 40 years ago - it is actually something of a bitter and twisted lost kingdom where morals have been abandoned, casual violence is endemic and no-one can even remember what it means to be British anymore. Britain used to be a superpower that ruled the world, now it is a country that hasn’t even got one of their own in charge of the national football team.
And yet the man trying to get England to play more like Italy thinks it is acceptable to pop his head around the door and tell everyone that the thing they love so much is actually an outdated chunk of rancid old Dolcelatte.
You are not only very wide of the mark Signor Capello, you are seriously embarrassing yourself.
What are your views on this topic? Do you agree that Fabio Capello is completely wrong over the differences between Italian and English football fans, and culture in general? Goal.com wants to know what YOU think...
Gil Gillespie, Goal.com
I think this article sums up the nauseating self-righteousness of the EPL and its even more nauseating fans.
