Ultras. Youth subcultures in the stadiums of Europe (1994)
Year after year, the football championship regularly features dramatic and sometimes fatal events. These events bring up the age-old issue of violence in stadiums, which is linked to a question that has been debated for years by the media, authorities and operators in the sector: are hooligans fans who make mistakes or hooligans tout court? And does this violence directly concern football, or is it more generally attributed to the distortions of our society? In short, there is a lack of understanding of a complex phenomenon that takes the form of a youth subculture, which is the subject of this report. The research aims to define the peculiarities that unite the ultras across the continent, tracing the ‘thread’ that links the young Russian ultras to the Portuguese, the Danish, to the Greek. To achieve this objective, the movement’s entire history is reconstructed from its earliest origins, and the many theories produced by the various sociological schools on the subject are subjected to the test of reality. With this report, Eurispes intends to offer information operators a complete work tool, which contains both a detailed historical-phenomenological reconstruction of the ultras movement in Europe and, more specifically, in Italy from its birth to the present day and an exhaustive exposition of the most general and accredited theories on violence in football. A path away from quantitative sociology has been chosen to pursue these objectives, preferring an approach that uses the paths of historical reconstruction and forms of participatory research that allow the quality of the academic elaboration to be verified.
Index
Contents
Presentation
Chapter 1
The sociologist and the ultras
Studies on football hooliganism
Introduction
A movement of resistance
“Aggro”, or violence as ritual
Blood, sweat and beer
The need to appear
Some empirical analyses: Germany and former Yugoslavia
Conclusions
Chapter 2
England 1890-1990: A Century of Hooligan Subculture
The English Specificity
The Victorian Boy
A fictitious truce
Youth alert: “teddy boys” and “mods”.
The ‘boot-boy
The early 1980s: the swastika on the curve
The movement grows: the strategy of hooliganism
The styles of the curve: from the “skinhead” to the “casual”
The nineties: the strategy of the commands
Chapter 3
The ultra movement in continental Europe
Germany, Austria and Switzerland
The Benelux
Northern European countries
Latin countries
Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans
Aegean area
Outside Europe
Chapter 4
Italy 1900-1990: from the supporter to the ultras
Radio Derby
Football, year zero
The new century
The post-war period
Mass support
The young person: consumer, subversive, hooligan
General protest: the Sixties
The styles of Italian youth 177
The birth of the ultra movement
The political question and the transformations of the ultras model
The advent of the hooligan model
Football violence in Italy: what to do?
Ultraviolence in Italy: what to do?
Chapter 5
History of the ultras movement in Italy
The birth of the movement
The ultras movement in the early eighties
The post-Heysel period
The ultras movement in the 1990s
The black curves
Relations with the institutions: law enforcement, federal authorities, society
Beyond violence: positive activities and communication tools
Chapter 6
History of the ultras movement in Italy
The behavioural sphere of the supporter
The two ultra models
The ultrà culture
Advent and fall of the “English model” in Italy
Appendix
Chronology and mapping of the ultra movement in Europe and Italy
Bibliography