English Hooligans and Violent Italian , culture and national policy narratives

Introduction

Why is it that in England, the once undisputed market leaders in this field, the late-modern phenomenon of football is often described today as being broadly concluded – as something fixed in the past - while in Italy violent sections of ultras’ groups continue to be very much part of the present, influencing general public attitudes to calcio (football) and outcomes for many elite Italian clubs? In this article we try to analyse the shifting conditions and the policies put in place over the past 50 years in these two leading European football nations, policies which have been aimed, with very different levels of success, at stemming domestic hooliganism. We focus here mainly on legislative change but also on a raft of recent cultural and administrative shifts and official inquiries and reports.

Facing down hooliganism in England: British policies against organised violence

In summarising recent developments in England1 Alexandra Veuthey and Lloyd Freeburn (2015, p.205) have argued that:

The effects of English hooliganism in the 1970s and 1980s [….] led to the introduction of widespread reforms by both the government and the football authorities to combat the problem. These reforms have often been referred to as a model framework for managing crowd violence. While the problem has not been completely resolved and it is not possible to be absolutely definitive, it does appear that greater regulation and control from the relevant authorities and entities has contributed to a decline in the level of hooliganism.

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We think the picture is more complex, of course, but there is some validity in this view. In this first section we investigate how British policies at football have moved towards a more intelligence-led and intensive crowd management focus in a substantially reconfigured sport in England, thus isolating and containing the phenomenon of hooliganism. But this approach has taken some considerable time and expenditure, has wider social costs, and has depended on a number of uniquely transformative events and processes.

The history of English football is littered with studies and inquiries concerned, in some way, with football and its fans. The first was produced as far back as 1924 (the Shortt Report, prompted by

Home Office intervention) and perhaps the latest in 2001 (the report of the Working Group on

Football Disorder, known as the Bassam Report, also promoted by the Home Office). Three reports were commissioned in just two years, between 1968 and 1969: the first of two Chester Reports in

1968 (on the future of the game and on managing football crowds in England); the Harrington

Report in 1968 on the underlying condition and motivation of football hooligans; and the Lang

Report in 1969, on better managing the emerging hooligan problem. The first of these reports was compiled on behalf of the Department of Education and Science, the second produced by a psychiatrist at the behest of Denis Howell, then Labour Minister of Sport, and the third was chaired by Sir John Lang, GCB for the Ministry of Housing and Local Affairs (now Ministry of

Housing and Local Government). The different origins and approaches taken here perhaps illustrate the flailing, early confusion and concern in England about the general health of the game and the problem of identifying the roots of the emerging hooligan problem (Dunning et al, 1988).

Academic work by sociologists and historians would later dispute the periodicity of the hooligan phenomenon in Britain (see Dunning et al 1988; Lewis 1996). However, these early official post- war reports reflected much of the uncertainty and even lack of basic knowledge about its ‘causes.’

Hooliganism was essentially seen, either as an example of individual pathology or a societal 2

‘sickness’, or else as a social order problem requiring ever more intrusive and invasive forms of management and discipline in and around British – especially English - football stadia (Bebber

2012). The violence and disorder of football became a policy focus from the late-1960s, but by the early 1980s territorial, ‘’ hooliganism among well-dressed ‘casuals’ in England seemed entrenched as part of the fabric of the professional game. The media focus here was intense and distorting (Hall, 1978) and the English game lost millions of active fans because of fears about hooliganism, including many female fans (Jones 2008; Pope 2010). In the period between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s league attendances fell by 8.5 million, around one- third of the active audience figure in England. Meanwhile, three more official reports were on the horizon: the Popplewell Report of 1986 (after a disastrous fire at Bradford City and English fan hooliganism in and Birmingham), and the two Taylor Reports of 1989 and 1990

(following the disaster). The last-named inquiry dealt, mainly, with the fatal outcome of poor stadium design and maintenance, and the mismanagement of football crowds, both of which, however, had been shaped by prevailing assumptions in England about the prevalence of crowd hooliganism (Williams 2014).

From the mid-1970s onwards as managing, particularly English, football crowds became deeply problematic, UK legislators began to get very busy. The Safety of Grounds Act emerged in

1975 to promote better fan safety inside stadia. It was followed by the Sporting Events (Control of

Alcohol etc.) Act of 1985 to restrict in-stadium drinking, and the Public Order Act of 1986; the Fire

Safety and Safety of Places of Sports Act came in 1987, following the tragedies of Bradford and

Heysel, respectively; the Football Spectators Act 1989 (Hillsborough); the Football Offences Act of

1991; the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994; the Football (Offences and Disorder) Act of 1999; and, finally, the Football (Disorder) Act of 2000. As can be seen from this already lengthy list, it was in the twenty-year period between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, initially under

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Labour governments but later under Conservative administrations, that fan behaviour in England really began to move centre-stage in terms of its perceived importance and policy significance.

This public concern accelerated under Thatcherism in the 1980s and on 13 Lord Justice

Popplewell was appointed to undertake the latest in a series of public inquiries on the various

‘problems’ of English football, with the following terms of reference:

To inquire, with particular reference to the events at Bradford City and Birmingham football ground on 11 May, into the operation of the Safety of Sports Grounds Act 1975; and to recommend what, if any, further steps should be taken, including any that may be necessary under additional powers, to improve both crowd safety and crowd control at sports grounds (Popplewell 1986, p.1)

His reports analysed the dynamics of the (non-hooligan) Bradford stadium fire disaster in which 56 fans died, but also the serious hooligan clashes at the Birmingham City club on the same day, which left one fan dead due to a wall collapse. Such events underlined wider problems of public provision and due care in a Britain shaped by neo-liberal ideologies and market policies (Ian Taylor

1991). While the committee chaired by Popplewell was already working on the two domestic cases assigned to them, the involving misbehaving Liverpool fans in

Brussels occurred, thus bringing significant new material into the public domain. The events in

Belgium, captured live on television for a global audience, ended with 39 mainly Italian fans killed after a crowd panic and wall collapse before the European Cup final. They undoubtedly marked a new low in terms of the image of English fans and their international public disgrace, leading to a five-year ban on English clubs from European football (Gould and Williams 2011).

Significantly, the parliamentary debate in on the findings of the Popplewell Report was dominated by a discussion of crowd violence rather than fan management and safety.

Popplewell’s recommendations covered the licensing of grounds, the introduction of video surveillance systems, more seating, and a possible national membership (identity) scheme for all 4

English spectators. In his Interim Report of 1985, strangely, the judge had been rather less fixated on the fact that thousands of people had fortuitously escaped a devastating fire in a poorly maintained wooden stand at Bradford by using the playing pitch as their main exit route – the same prospect might usefully have applied at Heysel days later - and more on the need to maintain perimeter fencing in England as a guard against hooliganism. He thus called for: ‘a standard, efficient perimeter fence with proper exits [which] should not be difficult to design’

(Popplewell 1985, p.48). This advice, seen as perfectly reasonable at the time given the primary focus in English policy circles on managing hooliganism, was later shown to be ‘fatally flawed’, as the tragedy at Hillsborough in 1989 confirmed (King 1998, p.84).

Nevertheless, legislation around football in Britain in the 1980s continued this regulatory theme.

Prohibition of the sale and consumption of alcohol, not only in but also in coaches and on trains carrying fans, was enacted under the Public Order Act of 1986, which also allowed for the control over entry into sports grounds of fans with hooligan records; if banned, they were required to report to their local police station when matches were being staged. The new law provided for five types of offence against public order applicable to football. But crucial here were the new subjectivities involved: that such persons must use, or threaten to use, unlawful violence of such a level as would cause a, ‘person of reasonable firmness to fear for their personal safety.’ This particular, highly subjective, form of phrasing was one that reappeared throughout the Act, thus placing the police and the courts firmly in the box seat in terms of interpreting and judging cases of football-related and other disturbances.

Part three of the Act included provisions relating to stirring racial hatred at football and elsewhere.

Racism was, and is, a problem in football in both England and Italy, but to draw any simple correlation between hooliganism and would be a mistake (Back at al 1999). Accordingly, we do not propose to discuss racism in football at any length in this current paper. However, it is 5 also important to point out that in the 1950s and 1960s academics and policy makers in Britain had already discursively positioned the Black migrant as a ‘dark stranger’; as members of a cohesive ‘out-group’, defined against the national ‘in-groups.’ (Waters 1997, p.222). As far-right political parties evacuated formal in Britain in the late-1970s, so overt racism became increasingly identified as a common feature of English football culture, both on the field and off it

(Garland and Rowe, 2001). Britain had also experienced a number of so-called ‘race ’ in the early 1980s, thus accentuating public anxiety in this area (Solomos 1988). In this general context of perceived growing public division and indiscipline, the new Act also took the opportunity to extend police powers in relation to controlling group behaviour in non-football contexts - such as public demonstrations - including provision for police powers to apply to the local authority for an order banning public processions.

Hillsborough and the new consumption of football in Britain

Following widespread disorder by England fans at the European Football Championships in

Germany in 1988, the UK Conservative government’s 1989 Football Spectators Act initially proposed radical plans for a national membership (identity) scheme for all football fans in England and proposals for new restrictions on fans following clubs or the national team abroad. However, the facts of the events which occurred at the Hillsborough stadium on 15 April 1989, when 96 fans were crushed to death on fenced standing terraces after police mismanagement inside and outside the stadium, dramatically redirected matters away from this largely disciplinary frame.

Proposals for a compulsory membership, or identity card scheme were shelved – as it turned out, permanently. Most critics argued that that membership cards would probably have made matters worse at Hillsborough by slowing down the process of getting supporters into the stadium. Lord

Justice Taylor agreed with them.

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But coverage of Hillsborough also had other, wider, impacts. Firstly, it confronted non-football supporters, the general public in England, with a new narrative about the sport – English football fans as a group of diverse and innocent victims (R. Taylor, et al 1995). Secondly, it forced the

British political class to question again how best to manage football supporters while controlling the problem of hooliganism and improving the general safety and condition of stadiums in Britain.

Thirdly, it threw an investigative spotlight onto how poorly the English game was being managed and led and opened up space for a public voice for fans. Fourthly, as an unintended outcome, it became a catalyst for the structural reorganisation and eventual hyper-commodification of the

English game (Williams, 2006).

Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government of the 1980s – no lovers, or even followers, of football - decided to entrust the analysis of the game’s future to an inquiry chaired by a high court judge, the surprisingly independent Lord Justice Taylor, Baron Taylor of Gosforth. Taylor was pressed by the football authorities and elite clubs in England into recommending a radical new direction for the sport by advancing the view that converting to seats standing terraces at top stadiums in both England and was a key requirement for improved safety. Taylor, himself, saw this strategy not as a cure-all, but as a means to eliminate or minimise both hooliganism and risk. It did so by puncturing the culture of mass youth participatory spectating at

British football and by attempting to re-align relations between fans, clubs and the police. Taylor did not directly recommend the dismantling of perimeter fencing – the British police had enduring concerns about managing hooligan fans inside stadia - but the impact of Hillsborough and the introduction of seating to replace standing areas made it virtually impossible for top clubs and the police to resist this course.

The aim here was to create a more pacified, less embattled and much less febrile atmosphere inside top football stadia in Britain: it was a disciplining mechanism for those who went to games, 7 couched in a new rhetoric which meant a: ‘higher priority given to the safety and well-being of spectators’, with a new emphasis being placed on the customer comfort of fans (Waiton 2014, p.208; Williams, 2001). Taylor (1990, p. 75) also emphasised ‘improved arrangements for crowd control and better training of police and stewards to achieve it’, thus highlighting the need for a new power differential and a change in attitudes on the part of control agents and clubs, perhaps especially towards travelling spectators. As journalist Owen Gibson put it 20 years later for The

Guardian newspaper (13 April 2009), in this context, ‘Out of the ashes of Hillsborough, modern

[English] football was born.’

Taylor also made the point very clearly that, in his view, seating alone would not necessarily

‘civilise’ English football supporters – he was no simple environmental determinist - but that the associated actuarial processes of ticket supply and acquisition, monitoring fans, and stadium surveillance could offer further reassurances to ‘ordinary’ spectators by individualising and de- anonymising offenders, while also increasing the confidence and security of the main body of non- hooligan fans. He argued:

Apart from comfort and safety, seating has distinct advantages in achieving crowd control. It is possible to have disturbances in a seated area and they have occurred, but with the assistance of CCTV the police can immediately zoom in with a camera and pinpoint the seats occupied by the trouble-makers as well as the trouble-makers themselves. Moreover, if numbered tickets are issued to named purchasers, the police have a further aid to identifying miscreants (Taylor, 1990, p. 12)

Taylor was well aware, of course, that his recommendations could have a transformative impact on the traditions of the English game, especially on the experience of spectating. However, he also sensed that the generally traumatic climate prevailing around English football post-Hillsborough was one likely to be conducive to, and expectant and accepting of, major change. As if to sugar the message for football clubs – and to committed fans - he suggested various forms of financial

8 aid to accelerate the stadium work that had been unevenly underway since the introduction of the

Safety of Sports Grounds Act back in 1975. Taylor observed that two existing national agencies, the Football Trust and the Football Grounds Improvement Trust, should now come together to assist in allocating public funds for ground reconstruction, and that a percentage of the various betting taxes in the game might be redirected to help top British clubs part-fund new stadiums and redevelopment (Kelly 1999). Stadium licensing and inspections would be tightened up and

Taylor also supported new commercial opportunities, such as ground relocations, if buyers – predatory supermarkets for example – were willing to purchase existing club land at a decent price

(King 1998, p. 101).

Historically, English football clubs had long been skilled at avoiding regulation of their activities, arguing that they, not politicians or the State, were best placed to manage fans, stadia and the game (Johnes 2004). But the sheer scale of what had happened at Bradford and Hillsborough in the 1980s, English football’s chronic financial problems, and the enduring question of crowd misbehaviour, seemed to have substantially changed the terms of this debate. Serious money would certainly be needed to transform major British stadia between 1989 and the turn of the century. By 1997 almost £500 million had already been spent in England and Scotland on major improvements or new stadia, with the Football Trust contributing around 30% of this total cost.

Taylor, clearly no expert in the field, had initially estimated total costs might be around £100m.

Where else did money come from for this national stadium modernisation programme? Some came from the sale of old stadia and land; some came from new sponsors; some came from club owners and from local authorities, as partners. Finally, new riches from satellite TV would continue to help fund stadium redevelopment, though they would not defray the rising cost of attending top level football in England (Williams, 1994; Boyle and Haynes, 2004).

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Gradually, opposition to this ‘modernisation’ programme grew, especially from organised fan groups. Assurances demanded by Taylor, for example, that ticket prices should not rise exponentially because of seating were soon trashed by elite clubs as the ‘new moralities of consumption’ kicked in inside stadia (Brick 2000, p. 159). Under pressure from supporters’ organisations, as early as 22nd December 2000 the libertarian Labour Sports Minister Kate Hoey expressed her ‘personal view’, on BBC's TV Weekend Watchdog programme, that the game in

England might consider experimenting with the return of limited standing areas to help increase fan access and reduce prices. Her bosses in government soon quashed the possibility that they might turn the clock back – though a ‘’ area has been successfully introduced by

Celtic FC in Scotland in 2016. Spectator organisation disquiet continued in England about the passive nature of the stadium experience and by 2018 pressure was growing again for the provision of limited standing areas. In June of that year Conservative UK Sports Minister Tracey

Crouch said that her ‘mind was open’ on the issue, as she commissioned an official review (BBC

Sport 2018).

Back in the early 1990s, yet more new legislation followed the , supposedly to build on the more positive climate developing after Hillsborough and the slowly improving behaviour of those England fans present at the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy. In the Football Offences Act of

1991, for example, the British police were given legal powers to arrest football fans and seek prosecutions for more minor offences, such as verbal violence, and those related to the use of obscene language or racist chants. The Criminal Justice Act, 1994 was aimed at eradicating ticket touting, but it was also criticised by some supporter groups because it criminalised individual supporters who wanted to sell on unwanted tickets. The Act also provided police with new powers of stop and search and also in relation to aggravated trespass. The latter disturbed some football

10 fans, who felt that their right to peaceful protest - for example against unpopular directors or managers - might be endangered by the new legislation (Greenfield and Osborn 1996).

As approaches to access and managing fan behaviour began to shift at domestic matches in

England, difficulties were still being experienced involving English fans abroad. Thus, the Football

(Offences and Disorder) Act of 1999 made sure that the new legal regimes successfully banning

‘troublesome’ fans from British stadiums was extended for games played abroad. Fan ‘restriction orders’ were renamed, in this context as, ‘international football banning orders.’ Fans banned under the latter we required to surrender their passport to the police for a ‘control period.’ Such bans were also extended for up to 10 years in the case of a conviction for a serious offence. The

Act extended the definition of a ‘football-related’ offence - from one occurring two hours before a match to 24 hours before, or after, a game. These were considered to be offences framed by football rivalries if not directly provoked by the staging of matches. Finally, local judges (or magistrates) who did not want to impose a banning order on spectators brought to court were obliged to explain why they did not think such a ban would help reduce disorder in the future

(Veuthey and Freeburn 2015, p. 217).

The Football (Disorder) Act of 2000 was introduced, probably as a direct result of the exaggerated media outrage caused by disorder involving English hooligans following the national team at the

European Football Championships in and the Netherlands in that same year. The law - tightening continued: magistrates’ courts were now allowed to enforce banning orders on the basis of a police recommendation or complaint (not a conviction or an offence), where the court believed that such an order would help to prevent future violence or disorder. Critics argued that this approach attacked civil liberties and was ‘hopelessly over-inclusive’ by giving police free rein to restrict travel to anyone they suspected who might be troublesome (Liberty 2000, p. 2;

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Williams, 2001). Court appearances to enforce a football banning order were also speeded up, in some cases to just 24 hours.

Summary: a new England?

As the elite level of English club football entered the new century the character of staging the game - its routine match-day strategies, management of stadia and its crowds - had all markedly changed in little more than a decade. New tropes about fandom and consumption were now well established (Dixon, 2014). Some younger working-class male fans in England had been effectively priced out of live attendance at elite clubs, but they were also alienated by the undifferentiated rafts of seating and the hyper-management of stadium spaces in the new English

(EPL) (Conn, 2011). Paradoxically, live televised coverage of football in English pubs was now increasingly an option for those fans seeking a more affordable and more volatile and ‘traditional’ match-day experience (Weed, 2008). Serious hooligan incidents in England had largely relocated from inside or immediately around major stadia in the wake of powerful new legislation, intensive surveillance regimes, comprehensive professionalised stewarding, and wider – if exaggerated - changes in the EPL audience. What else had changed in the English game between its deep crisis period of 1985 to 1989 and its apparent ‘recovery’ from its hooligan emergency by the early

2000s?

Firstly, public and media attitudes in England towards football had shifted somewhat; the narratives emerging around the had altered public perceptions of travelling football fans in England, from mainly aggressive young men who required harsh management and discipline, to that of a much more varied cohort of late-modern supporters, or even customers who deserved safety, some comfort and reassurance in the face of sometimes heavy-handed and intolerant treatment by the police (Scraton, 2004). As a result, the previously intensely

12 authoritarian and largely unaccountable police routines for managing English football fans in the

1970s and 1980s slowly shifted towards a more nuanced, less aggressive approach, even as legislation proliferated. Managing fans inside grounds was now largely performed by professionally trained club stewards, who matched spectators to seats. Safety, rather than control, had become the new stadium rhetoric in England, sometimes to a suffocating extent

(Williams, 2001).

Secondly, following the Taylor Inquiry, stadiums in England had been forced to ‘modernize’: perimeter fences were removed at all elite club venues, new stands and stadia were built, and powerful CCTV systems were made mandatory, thus offering comprehensive surveillance of all spectators. All this served to pacify stadium spaces, producing a ‘securitisation’ of the supporter experience, not always to the satisfaction of all fans (Giulianotti 2011; Brick 2000). English football hooligan groups had no strong leverage with clubs or collective voice or identity away from football, so these new constraints at the game had a major impact on hooligan cultures and formations. Violent hooligan activities, now closely monitored via intelligence-led policing, increasingly occurred away from the stadium (Ayres and Treadwell 2012). Prior to Hillsborough there had been no major campaign in England to modernise grounds, banish standing terraces or remove fences inside stadia; it was assumed by the authorities – and by many fans - that they would always be necessary to manage the hooligan threat. Now radical change seemed imperative.

Thirdly, seating, new ticketing and new pricing regimes in England helped further to filter out and/or marginalize hooligan groups. By increasingly requiring fans to purchase away tickets online based on ‘loyalty’ or membership principles, this disciplining technology could now more easily identify and secure potential risks at elite levels. The make-up of away match fans also changed, over time, from groups of largely younger male supporters – including hooligans - to a more mixed 13 group by age, ethnicity, sex and , who were more sensitively managed by stewards as the EPL attempted to market and redefine itself as a high-status, global consumer product

(Williams, 2006). The sight of vast police escorts moving snakes of visiting male fans to and from stadia has not completely disappeared in England but it is a more occasional, rather than a routine, experience today.

Fourthly, alongside these wider fan management, attitudinal and cultural shifts, a raft of new legislation clamped down hard on spectator misconduct when it occurred in and around football grounds: there has been considerable stick, as well as carrot, involved in the English

‘transformation.’ As repeatedly emphasized by Lord Justice Taylor, central to this intensively commodified version of the sport was that a more peaceful and familial social climate be created within and around football stadiums in England, offering a ‘civilising’ effect on potential miscreants. The full force of legislation was central to producing the new ‘social control discourse’ inside English stadia, irrespective of fan resistance and the obvious negative consequences of such changes (Turner 2017).

Many countries and governments with hooligan problems have looked, simply, to the legal changes which have occurred in England since 1989 without fully understanding the combination of repressive laws and the wider cultural transformation of the fan experience at matches in a new generation of highly priced, modernized and sanitized stadia. Oversimplified, this means that at some of the more expensive and well controlled football locations in England today that you can show up at the stadium five minutes before the kick-off, enter your e-ticket, go to your seat in the elevator, get a perfect view, and then go home (Foot 2013). It has also meant that the informal, vibrant and participatory youth supporter cultures that are still prominent on the continent are largely absent today from English stadia. This is well noted by the British media today when boisterous and loud away contingents come to England to follow their continental clubs in the 14

Champions League. Much has been gained, in terms of displacing hooliganism, perhaps, but much has also been lost in England in terms of youth engagement, stadium ‘atmosphere’ and a sense of the participatory football carnivalesque.

So, how has the Italian game attempted to handle its own ultras and hooligan problem? It is to the

Italian experience we now turn.

The Italian experience: the game against the Ultras?

Could Italy adopt and adapt the English model of change in the management and disciplining of fans in its elite level football cultures? The question was recently posed by an English writer in the influential online blog Mondocalcio Magazine. Its answer was ‘Yes’, but it also called for more understanding of what it was that had actually made the English model seem to work:

Repression is not enough, as seen in the last ten years. It is useless to introduce stewards if you do not change the and do not eliminate the fences. We need stadiums where the public can see and hear the game (and the players see and hear the fans) as human beings, not animals. It will take at least 20 years and it has not even begun. Maybe it's utopia, but it's worth trying to change things. Remembering that Mrs. Thatcher has nothing to do with it. (Foot 2013)

Following the events at the Heysel Stadium in May 1985, under the aegis of the Council of a convention was established aimed at managing the hooligan and ultras phenomenon across

Europe, producing a text that was ratified on August 19, 1985 in Strasbourg. This convention provided for coordination between the various security forces of the European Union and at point

D of section 4, article 3, of the European Convention on Spectator Violence and Misbehaviour at

Sports Events and in Particular at Football Matches we find a provision: ‘To exclude from, or forbid access to, matches and stadia, insofar as it is legally possible, known or potential trouble-makers,

15 or people who are under the influence of alcohol or drugs’ (Council of Europe 1985). At this point

Italy did not have legislation specifically concerning the world of the ultras. This was not because of some lack of cases of serious hooliganism, far from it. In fact, Italy’s hooligan fans were becoming increasingly organised, hierarchical and calculating at exactly this moment.

As ticket prices fell in the 1960s in Italy, so younger fans had started to attend football in numbers and groups of them began to organise, almost as wannabe paramilitary groups, giving themselves names that made them sound like fearsome insurgents: Commandos, Guerrillas and Fedayeen.

Such named formations probably began around 1968 when some AC fans gathered to found

La Fossa dei Leoni (‘Lions’ Ditch’), an organized group of young fans who created their own flags, songs and tazebaos (hand-written banners) after the fashion of the Chinese cultural revolution

(Scalia 2009; Jones 2018). The heritage of fascism and the political instability which existed in Italy in the 1970s meant that far right groups reorganised as bands of terrorists or urban guerillas and groups from the far left and political right began to exchange violence in Italian cities, culminating in the Bologna station bombing of 1980 that killed 85 people (Ferraresi 1996). ‘Ultras’ was never co-terminus with ‘violent hooligans’ in Italy but, ‘Violence, rivalry, politics and powerful displays of fandom are some of the unifying themes that describe the ultras form of fandom.’ (Doidge and

Lieser, 2018, p. 834).

This is the wider socio-political context in which the late-modern Italian ultra movement emerged

– very different to the much less overtly political hooligan landscape in England. By the end of the

1970s, groups of organized, ‘politicised’ supporters had been founded across Italy, focused on stadium choreography and carnival, but also with some violent outgrowths. Most ultra groups in this period borrowed the images and slogans of the far left, some even using the names of partisan brigades from the Second World War (Jones, 2018). But, in time, right wing, sometimes overtly racist, formations also emerged (Kassimeris 2011). As supporter rivalries and football- 16 related violence intensified in the 1980s in Italy – often stimulated by the highly publicised performances of English fans on the continent – opportunities for intervention, domestically, were either missed or ignored:

Political parties, local administrations and police forces made little effort to contact them [ultra groups] or to establish any formal or informal rules of interaction. As a consequence of this, they lost the chance to gain a deeper knowledge of ultras sub-culture, as well as the possibility of working out any possible strategy to solve the negative aspects of organized football support. (Scalia 2009, p. 45)

The first Italian fatality of the new era – a young fan had previously been shot and killed at a

Salernitana versus Potenza match in 1963 – came in October 1979 when a 33-year-old father of two and motor mechanic SS Lazio fan, Vincenzo Paparelli, was struck at the Rome by a signal rocket fired from the Sud area housing Roma fans. The game went on despite chaos in the stands, as supporters – including Paparelli’s wife – tried to extricate the rocket from his stricken body. Lazio fans repeatedly tried to invade the pitch to stop the match while missiles rained down and police struggled to keep order. Only the intervention of the Lazio captain, Pino Wilson, managed to calm the Lazio ultras enough to allow the game to finish, thus avoiding an eruption of violence outside the stadium. Giovanni Fiorillo, an 18-year-old Roma ultra and unemployed painter, was later identified as the perpetrator. Paparelli’s death remains the only recorded killing of a fan inside an Italian soccer stadium, but since his death another 23 fans and police officers have died in Italy, directly as a result of hooliganism around domestic football club events (Testa

2018).

Even though the reputation of the English for hooliganism was formidable in Europe, the figures for fatalities at club football in England are much lower. A Blackpool fan, Kevin Olsson, was stabbed to death in August 1974, as was John Dickinson, an Arsenal fan, during a v West Ham

United in August 1983. A 15-year-old boy, Ian Hambridge, died after a wall collapsed following 17 severe rioting at the Birmingham City v Leeds United fixture in May 1985. But since then there have been no recorded hooligan-related fatalities around English club football.2 However, the latest hooligan-related killing in Italy occurred as recently as June 2014, when a Napoli fan, Ciro

Esposito, was shot dead by a Roma ultra. This relative lack of fatal violence may be part of the reason why football hooligan personas in England haveoften been seen as one of a substantial

‘basket of selves’ made available to late-modern male subjects for the mobilisation of expressions of aggressive solidarities at appropriate moments. In such anthropological and similar accounts, much alleged soccer hooligan activity in England is actually about performing satisfying and entertaining collective non-violent rituals - confrontation, posturing and the public expression of performative masculinities - more than it is demonstrating violent and classed solidarities

(Armstrong 1998; Marsh 1978). Although fans did get injured, as Giulianotti and Armstrong (2002 p.217) have put it, in England at least, ‘hooligans do not engage in confrontations with the intention of seriously harming their opponents.’ In Italy the situation seemed different.

Not all the football-related killings in Italy took place in or near the sports stadium. Two Roma ultras in different years - the first (Andrea Vitone) in 1982 and the second (Paulo Stiroli) in 1986 - died in fires in shuttle trains, started deliberately by rival ultras. There is also the case of an ultra from Sambenedettese, Giuseppi Tomasetti, who was stabbed outside a disco in December 1986 by an Ascoli supporter some hours after an Italian Cup match. These deaths, because they occurred far from stadiums, together with an increasingly complex political and social period for the Italian state, initially made the hooligan problem a secondary one on the political agenda of the governing parties in Italy. Moreover, it was hooligan fans from England who were then the pariahs of Europe and in the international courts in the 1980s because of the deaths of Italian fans at

Heysel (Gould and Williams 2011). But in the 1990s the Italian ultras phenomenon increasingly moved to the political far right and took on a more extreme ideological form, one in which

18 victories over opponents were becoming less significant than generating threatening, anarchic violence which was ‘beyond the state’ and aimed primarily at its agents, the police (Ferraresi 1996;

Dyal 2012).

The first Italian law on the subject, which followed the lead of the European Convention, was that of

December 13, 1989 n. 401, which came into force on 2 January 1990. It officially introduced the

DASPO in Italy through Articles 6, 7 and 8, for enforcing stadium bans. Article 6 authorized public security officials to deny access to stadiums to people carrying weapons. The prohibition was also valid for subjects convicted or investigated for incidents in such contexts, or with precedents for the incitement to violence through verbal or written actions. Article 7, on the other hand, provided for an administrative fine or sanction for those who disturbed or prevented the regular performance of a sporting event. According to Article 8, if a person is subject to an arrest in the commission of a crime, they can be prosecuted using a fast-track mechanism (Studio Legale Contucci, 1990).

Over time, the law n. 401 has undergone various changes as a result of new problems that have emerged in its application. In 1995, a modification reinforced the provision of the DASPO and also extended it to all sporting events, while introducing the obligation that those under its jurisdiction had to present themselves to the police. In 2001, through a new modification, the list of persons subject to such appearances before the police was extended (Centro Studi Sport 2001). .

If 15 April 1989 had been a crucial date in England, then January 29, 1995 was a very significant one for the Italian game and especially for the future of the ultras. Vincenzo Spagnolo, 24-year-old

Genoa fan, was stabbed to death by fans of AC Milan. Two important events followed. The first was the unusually strong position taken by Roberto Sgalla, secretary of SIUP (the Italian police union), who made an official statement accusing the ‘usual subjects’ of always underestimating the ultras problem, despite reports from SIUP outlining its seriousness. He called for a ‘real

19 analysis’ of these issues which could not be solved, he argued, simply by increasing the number of police officers at the stadium (Mariottini 2009 p.155). The second major outcome was from civil society; an emergency national fan congress, organized by the Ultra leaders of Sampdoria and

Genoa, but open to all national fan groups. Its aim was to find a way to stem, from within, the now

‘reckless and decadent’ violence that seemed to have gripped the ultras and that, according to some of its historical leaders, was likely to sink the movement itself. The slogan of the ultras meeting was ‘Basta lame, basta, infami‘ (Enough blades, enough infamy). The meeting took place on February 5 in Genoa. Participation was high and at its conclusion a powerful statement was distributed by the organisers and later published in Italian newspapers, it was said, on behalf of all

‘true’ Italian ultras:

BASTA LAME, BASTA INFAMI!

On Sunday Vincenzo Spagnolo an ultrà of Genoa is dead. The umpteenth absurd ambush makes us say ‘Enough!’. Enough with those - which ultràs are not - who seek at the expense of the ultrà world to make news, to become great while ignoring the evil done (as in this case, irreparable). Enough with the fashion of the 20 against two or three, or of the Molotovs [bottle bombs] and knives. Ultrà, the resumption of the championship awaits us, another harsh period. The police now have carte blanche; the only ones that really will forgive us will be those with these vile behaviours that we have nothing to do with. Now, if really the ultrà is a way of life, let's get our balls out. If, at other times, we turned around, thinking that, after all, they were problems of others, now we just cry out. What alternative is there? We will find ourselves among policemen just waiting to see us finished and these filthy, lurid ones who do not care about everything and everyone will continue with their ambushes, where you do not even need to be brave. Let us unite against those who want to make the whole world die, for a free and true world, with all its contradictions (La Repubblica, 7 February 1995).

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This statement made clear how the ultras in Italy had come to see themselves as a discrete social entity, a social formation with its own values and rules, and a national grouping that felt it had to make a common front against such ‘false’ friends, or ‘false’ ultras – i.e. those perpetrating extreme acts of ‘cowardly’ violence. But it also makes clear that ‘true’ ultras needed to make a common front against the real enemy, namely the Italian police. It is important to point out, too, that ultras leaders were often closely tied to Italian club owners especially when rival bidders or new investors were potentially in the frame, thus offering them a formal legitimacy never apparent for

English hooligan groups (Scalia 2009).

After this congress two, apparently antithetical, trends began to emerge in Italy: the number of serious ultra-on-ultra incidents decreased at the rate of around 40% per year, while the number of people injured per season at football - especially police casualties - increased significantly - from

400 in 1995-96 to around 1,200 in 1999/2000: ‘It is quite clear’, argued Andrea Ferreri (2008, p.41), ‘that there had been a change in the strategy of the ultras groups, which have reduced their will to clash with rival groups, but at the same time has raised the level of conflict with the public security forces.’ Nevertheless, disorder and occasional fatal incidents at Italian matches continued to be a feature of the ultras culture: in the ten years following Spagnolo’s death in 2005 a further eight people died at Italian domestic fixtures.

The Ultras Movement after 2000

Such developments in ultras’ activity continued to have an impact on the popularity of football in Italy. As elite match attendances continued to rise in England into the new century with serious hooliganism, seemingly, either displaced or broadly under control –EPL crowds averaged

35,444 in season 2002/3 and continued to rise - crowds began to fall away seriously in Serie A in

Italy, especially from the 2001/2 season, when the average league gate dropped by 12.1%

21 compared to the previous year, to a figure of just 26,019. After stabilising around the 25,000 mark, the 2005/6 season in Serie A saw a further 14.8% drop in average attendances, but the lowest point occured in the following season (2006/7), when the average Serie A gate fell to just 18,473 - only 200 or so higher than the average crowd in England’s second tier.

In 2005 the legislation concerning Italian stadiums and the minimum technical safety requirements in order to obtain an event license for hosting sporting events was changed, including the possible closure of such facilities until the stadium met the requirements. Among the main, and most important, innovations, however, was an obligation to equip all major stadia with video surveillance systems. This was clearly a lesson borrowed from England, where having CCTV cameras had become a legal requirement for major stadium licensing. However, as often happens in Italy, the law was not applied to all, thanks to exemptions or claimed exceptions (La Repubblica

2003). Meanwhile, on February 2nd 2007, a chaotic and consequential face-off occurred between ultras and the police following the derby between Catania and Palermo. The game had already been affected by crowd incidents in the stadium, but after it the nearby streets of Catania were transformed into a conflict zone involving rival ultras and the police, scenes filmed by TV crews and disseminated around the world. A police officer, Chief Inspector Filippo Raciti, died in the clashes and 87 others were injured, 62 policemen and 25 ultras. Property damage was extensive.

The dynamics or triggers of the fatal incident were not entirely clear, but after years of delay and trials, two local ultras, Antonino Speziale and Daniele Miceli, were convicted of manslaughter and jailed for eight and 11 years respectively. The incidents (and those convicted) were not forgotten in ultra circles: in 2014, the Napoli ultra leader, Gennaro De Tommaso, was arrested for incitement at the combustable Italian Cup Final meeting with Fiorentina in Rome, which had seen a near riot inside the stadium following the death of a Neapolitan fan, fatally shot before kick-off. De

22

Tommaso wore a tee-shirt as he sat perched on top a steel security barrier, calling for the release of Speziale.

Shocked into a response in 2007, the reaction from the Italian media was to call for a reduction in rivalita (intense rivalry) in Italian football, with politicians calling for a move towards the supposed

‘English model’ of greater tolerance and sportsmanship (Dyal 2012, p.93). The Italian football federation, the FIGC, suspended all competition indefinitely and the, then, Prime Minister,

Romano Prodi, called an emergency meeting to try to address the ultras situation. But this resolve was soon broken: the Italian championship was actually suspended for only one weekend, and T- shirts, like De Tommaso’s, against Inspector Raciti and in favour of Speziale, soon began to appear again among fans. The supposed ‘common cause’ among Italian ultras – and against the police - crossed local and regional boundaries and in many stadiums provocative banners signalling popular dissent started to appear, again supporting Speziale. It was then decided to make the

Pisanu Decree, already approved the previous year, fully operational.

Later in 2007, on 11 November at a gas station near Arezzo, SS Lazio and Juventus fans met by chance and violent scuffles immediately broke out. An armed Polstrada (highway patrol) intervened to try to quell the brawl and a police officer Luigi Spaccarotella fired two shots, one of which killed the Lazio ultra, Gabriele Sandri, aged 28, who was on the coach of the Biancocelesti fans. The news was not released immediately but when it was the simmering ‘rebellion of the ultras’ took off throughout Italy (Stefanini 2009). Police stations were attacked in Rome and elsewhere (Dyal 2012). Following the of police officer Raciti, a new package of measures even more restrictive than the last, the Amato Decree, was announced. This provided for an increase in penalties for those found guilty of injuring public officials or policemen and up to five years in goal for those who used flares or or displayed banners inciting violence or

23 threats. Arguably, as critics pointed out, this was more an attack on the ultras culture than a focus directly on halting fan violence (Dyal 2012. p.87).

Again, alongside this stick there was also some carrot: a crackdown on ticket touting limiting to four tickets those sold to a single person, but also selling tickets with heavy discounts and gifts for families who went to the stadiums with children under 14 years of age. Ultras often had their own ticket sources, of course, inside clubs. The DASPO – covering stadium closures and bans on travelling violent ultras - was again strengthened and was also extended to minors. The decree also had repercussions on football clubs. In fact, it was decided that the cost of improvement to the safety of Italian stadia were to be borne by the clubs. This included the controversial introduction, on August 14 2009 of the compulsory fan card for fans, one of the most disputed directives of the, then, Minister of the Interior, Roberto Maroni. By the end of 2010 the Italian coach of the England national team, Fabio Capello, was arguing that, compared to the improved situation in England, the game in Italy was ‘losing its appeal’ because, ‘football is in the hands of the ultras’ (quoted in Gould and Williams 2011, p.597).

Moreover, the fan fatalities continued to occur. Napoli fan Ciro Esposito was shot before the

Italian Cup Final in Rome in 2014 which, once again, brought the political class in Italy face-to-face with issues relating to the ultras and stadium security. The Minister of the Interior, Angelino

Alfano, decided to use the ‘iron fist’ to try to eliminate this chronic problem that was seemingly embedded in the fabric of Italian football. The DASPO was again tightened, with stadium bans of a minimum duration of three years, and it was extended even to those convicted or reported for any crimes against public order, as well as for crimes of promoting ‘common danger’ through violence.

In addition, it offered powers for the closure, for security reasons, of sectors of the stadium for games considered by the Minister of the Interior to be of high risk of public disorder. This statute is still often used. The Italian state has proceeded to a bureaucratic simplification of the 24 procedures for securing stadiums, including in relation to the circumstances of Italian and non-

Italian sports organizations (Gazza Net 2014).

Summary: a never-ending Italian tale?

Reforms in Italy have gradually become more rigid, more authoritarian, as officials have tried to deal with the violence of some ultras, mainly via legislative and control mechanisms. Arguably, they have had both positive and negative effects, but they have often been heavily criticized in ultras’ circles as unconstitutional and a restraint of basic freedoms and rights. The number of incidents near Italian football stadiums has actually dropped in professional football as the

National Observatory on Sport Events’ data shows in a recent report (2016). The number of injuries among civilians, the law enforcement agencies and stewards also fell sharply. This marked improvement in the numbers of casualties, however, may be due, at least in part, to the ban on some travelling ultras for high risk fixtures or the general decline in spectator numbers at Italian stadia – which showed a partial revival in 20017/18 to an average of 24,767, compared to the EPL average figure of 38,297. This may reflect a relative slump in the overall quality and competitiveness of Italian football and the high price of tickets but, above all, it probably also signals the wider sense of insecurity that still hovers over many Italian stadia. This is due both to the presence of the ultras, who continue to govern the stadium curves, but also to the policing and the quality of available facilities, which generally lack modernisation and do not typically provide an adequate sense of comfort and security to families and other fans.

Public ownership of most Italian stadia has arguably hampered modernisation, but one of the exceptions here is Juventus FC, a club dominant at home and still very competitive in Europe, which has presided over the building of the new Allianz Stadium, a state-owned and state-of-the- art facility which confirms, for good or ill, that major new sports stadiums in Europe have become

25 multipurpose spaces incorporating many functions of consumption and entertainment, and that watching the game is only one of these functions. The new stadium is small by international standards – capacity just over 41,000 – but has been generally well received (Palvarini and Tosi

2013). On the wider front, on 4 August 2017, a memorandum of understanding was signed between the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Sport, the FIGC and CONI, for improved

Italian stewarding, training for supporter liaison officers to improve relations between ultras and stadium staff and the transformation of the identity card for fans into a loyalty card, with the aim of facilitating the purchase of match tickets and recruiting more families to the stadium, as the

Minister of the Interior, Marco Minniti told Italian Sky Sports on 4 August 2017:

In too many cases the stadiums have had to deal with fear. Today we aim to remove this feeling from a place of celebration and joy. It is an important day…. in which we make an investment of trust that has an invalidating limit: violence. The goal is open to producing peaceful participation for all, but everyone must commit to keeping out the violence. It is clear that this path has an obvious goal: the modernization of stadium structures. Because modern and adequate facilities are not only fundamental in terms of security, they are also more functional in terms of the outcome.

While the aim of producing ‘carnival’ is dominant and the ethic or threat of violence among some ultras is undoubtedly more prevalent than violence itself, it could be argued that the Italian state and the sport’s officials are nevertheless using this narrow focus on violence to try to rid calcio of the sometimes disorderly, performative activities of the ultras. The global success of the EPL seems rooted, after all, in a new kind of increasingly bourgeois and passive audience for the sport, with fans sometimes accused of acting as mere extras for its production, increasingly, as a television-driven spectacular.

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Some conclusions

As we have seen, the Italian legislative approach for dealing with violent ultras has followed the

English route at various points, but with substantial differences, both in terms of the reforms themselves, their timing and enforcement, and the domestic wider context. In fact, among the main reforms that the British government agreed with the English FA and the EPL, post-

Hillsborough, was the national programme of ‘modernization’ of football’s facilities and the obligation that major stadia must have seats, no fences, trained stewards and sophisticated CCTV systems. In Italy, as we have seen, despite many laws on such matters they have not always been effectively enforced, which means that not all Italian stadiums have come into line with wider

European standards, something unthinkable in post-Hillsborough England. Also, the requirement to have CCTV systems in stadia was introduced in Italy only in 2005, along with seats in stadiums with a minimum capacity of 10,000. New or redeveloped stadiums are common in England, but they are still at a premium in Italy. Stewarding remains poorly developed in Italy and perimeter fencing still features at many Italian stadia.

The ‘English model’, so often referred to as a source of inspiration in Italy and elsewhere, initially introduced heavy sanctions and controls on its hooligan groups, but other matters then intervened. The British political class, in fact, learned, painfully, that it was not possible to solve the hooligan problem with the use of force alone; it was also necessary to address the rather

‘closed’ cultures of stadiums and the consumption of the game itself in order to increase its appeal and safety and to combat and marginalise hooligans. This became progressively more important, of course, as the EPL became an increasingly valuable global consumer product and brand.

A crucial feature of the context for this shift in England was, however, the stadium disaster at

Hillsborough in 1989. This meant that, hand in hand with tough legislation mobilised against

27 hooligans, changing public perceptions of football fans and football culture in England in the early

1990s synergised well with the redevelopment of stadia and the new marketization, commercialisation and commodification of the English game (Dixon, 2014). This helped, in turn, to convert crumbling and poorly operated English stadiums into highly managed, closely surveilled and heavily stewarded spaces, governed largely in accordance with the rhetoric of ‘safety’. This turned them from self-managed terrains of uncontrolled and indiscriminate exuberance - and occasional serious violence - to more intensely supervised and rather sterile spaces, where younger fans try to generate ‘atmosphere’ among an ageing and largely pacified and consumer- oriented EPL audience (Edensor 2015).

Only really with the memorandum of understanding issued in August 2017 did Italy threaten to move strongly in this direction, but there are still many differences here from the popular version of the English model. In England, the scale of the Hillsborough disaster tended to mute public opposition to transformative cultural and structural changes in the game. Indeed, the need for radical change was successfully ‘sold’ to the British public in the early 1990s as a way of ‘saving’ the sport at a moment of deep crisis. Hooligan groups had no collective voice in this exchange.

Lacking such context and constraints, in Italy in the wake of wider social change and growing problems around immigration, the ultras became increasingly willing to disrupt the sacred text – the match itself (Guschwan 2007, p.260). Meanwhile the media, government and the sport’s administrators were striving to ape the new ‘English’ vision of football which was anathema to some core ultra ideals; about partisanship, rivalry and tradition. The ultras visibly and collectively opposed the move to a vapid sport of multi-ethnic global performers recruited to entertain a seated and polite audience at a time designated by television – the derided Calcio Moderno (Dyal

2012, p.92).

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In Italy, too, there was the endemic problem of bureaucratic gridlock: the length of time the judicial system took to arrive at sentences for serious football crimes - in many cases it was years before the process even began. To this it must also be added that, on many occasions, the laws established in Italy were not universally successfully applied, causing public feelings of uncertainty and distrust in the key institutions because there is little or no reassurance about punishments, thus giving strength to those who favoured the ultras cause. As we have also seen in Italy, neither were there sections of the penal or civil code specifically dedicated to the world of sport, even if measures taken to fight violence and delinquency related to this world are included in other measures or sections. Arguably, the British macro-economic situation in the early 1990s, improving under the last period of the Conservative government presided over by John Major and then picked up by New Labour under the social neoliberalism of Tony Blair, also aided the development of the EPL as possibly the commercially successful global sporting phenomenon of the twenty-first century. Its success was predicated, at least in part, on eliminating or supressing hooliganism, or at least displacing it far from the stadium. In Italy, unlike in England where hooliganism has traditionally taken on a mainly subcultural and local form, the ultras phenomenon was, from the beginning, more institutionally embedded and linked more strongly to the world of politics (Guschwan 2007).

In Italy, especially from the late 1960s, there was a strong political characterization of younger people, who typically reverted to well-defined and precise ideological values. From the early 1980s the predominant ideological focus in the ultras’ world was left-wing, but since the early 1990s there has been a populist shift to the political right in these formations – and in Italy itself. This combination of football and politics, together with the economic and ‘political’ relationships established between politicians, ultras and football clubs, are crucial for understanding why Italy

29 has yet succeeded in curbing or eradicating the constantly morphing violent end of the ultras’ phenomenon.

Significantly, many ultras groups in Italy have recently begun to describe themselves as being

‘apolitical’ in an attempt to defer police attention and to attract as many new ‘faithful’ recruits as possible. And there is no doubting the wider significance of the ultras phenomenon and public interest in it around the world as a bulwark to the pacification and hyper-commodification of football stimulated by corporate globalisation (Doidge and Lieser 2018). It might be axiomatic to suggest that without the desperate stadium tragedies in England in the 1980s the political and civic will for change, which has transformed the character of the English game, would have been lacking. The idea that the ultras in Italy use disorder and violence as a means of distancing themselves, and the sport they attend, from the bourgeois features of Calcio Moderno, as practised in England, certainly undermines in our view the prospects for root and branch change in

Italy (Dyal 2012). Which should remind us, too, of course, that for all its glitz and promise of safe sporting consumption and local regeneration without hooliganism, ‘new’ football in England in its highly regulated, expensive new format, is hardly without its own vocal critics (Panton and Walters

2018).

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1 In this paper we often refer to British and UK policies but to England and English fans. The latter were the main policy focus in this period for concerns about hooliganism. However, the legislation and policies discussed also applied to Welsh fans and Welsh clubs competing in the professional English game, and many of them also applied to clubs in Scotland. 2 Although a Wales fan died of a heart attack in September 2011 after fighting following an international match versus England

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