Soccer hooligans rage against the police

last updated 8 January 2015

Italian soccer fans are “completely uncontrollable,” said Julius Mueller-Meiningen in the Munich Süddeutsche Zeitung. Not content merely to beat up fans from rival teams, they have now resorted to rioting against the police. Last weekend, they turned the Italian capital into a war zone. The cops, it seems, had broken up a brawl at a highway rest stop between fans of Rome’s Lazio and fans of Turin’s Juventus by firing a warning shot into the air. By a freakish accident, the shot killed Gabriele Sandri, 26, a Lazio fan who was sitting quietly in a car at the time. As news of the shooting spread, the hardcore soccer hooligans known as “ultras” took to the streets to take revenge on police. In Milan and Bergamo, ultras smashed windows of police stations. In Rome, they set police cars on fire and stormed police barracks, injuring dozens of officers. The irony is that stadium violence was down this season. Authorities were just beginning to entertain the idea of relaxing some of the stringent restrictions enacted last year, when a policeman was killed in a soccer riot.

Now we’ll hear “more talk of zero tolerance,” said Gigi Garanzini in Milan’s Il Sole 24 Ore. Unruly fans can already be banned from stadiums for up to five years, and those who throw rocks or fireworks can be put in jail. Now Sports Minister Giovanna Melandri has proposed a moratorium on league play for several weeks, until new measures can be adopted—possibly including a total ban on fans traveling with their teams to away games. Will that help? It’s hard to know what, exactly, motivates the ultras. Did they really believe that the officer killed a 26-year-old in a car on purpose, out of malice? It was obviously “the tragic error of an instant.” Yet it “became the excuse for hours and hours of madness.”

The point of the violence was simply violence, said Mario Sconcerti in the Milan Corriere della Sera. The rioting ultras were “not acting out of respect or concern for the boy who died.” They were just being the hooligans they are, fighting “the forces of order” merely to show that they still can. Their rage has nothing to do with soccer and everything to do with anarchy. Now “the state must answer—without emotion, but with firmness.” We all saw the ultras committing crimes live on television, burning public property and assaulting police officers. “The perpetrators must be identified and arrested. Otherwise, they will have won.”