Filippo Raciti – Italy land of hypocrites

Instead of posting new channels for the rich football Sunday, yesterday I took a day off because of what happened in Sicily during the last weekend. A police officer, Filippo Raciti, died following fights between police squads and Catania supporters. The match between Catania and Palermo was to be celebrated in Serie A after several years and the Sicilian derby is a really hot match but this doesn’t explain the death of a 38 years old man.

This article on BBC clarifies the events of last Friday and gives some hints over what the authorities are gonna do about the problem of violence in Italy.

It goes without saying that in such a country you need someone to die to start thinking about problems or social issues. It could also be considered a matter of luck not to have had more than one dead in this tragic football weekend. Now the Italian Football Association has stopped matches for undetermined time and they are to take, together with politics, extreme measures against this violent phenomenon. The thing is, is it football violence in Italy something new? Well. of course the answer is no. Just one week before Raciti’s death, an amateur football match was shocked by another man’s death, Ermanno Licursi, who was part of the managing board of a team from Italian southern region Calabria. He was killed in a fight on the pitch. The reaction to his death has been to force every following match to start with one minute of silence. A very useful minute of silence, given the fact that has been observed in Catania right before Filippo Raciti’s death. How many young Italian football supporters, not necessarily hooligans, have died in the past? How many people have had their lives ruined because of something happened at a football match? There was no need to come to this point, obviously.

And what do the authorities do? The last legislative act about football has been the infamous Pisanu law, supposed to reduce violence in Italian football and whose only effect has been to keep people away from the stadia (and therefore have them seated in front of tv…). The most important effect of this law on people has been preventing them from buying tickets on the day of the match, because their names have to be printed on the tickets and then checked at the entrance of the stadium. In this way, supposedly, and together with some hell of a CCTV system inside every stadium, authorities control every single person in the stadium, because to every ticket is assigned a seat, on every seat someone whose name and surname are known. But then why names on the tickets are never checked? And even more, if the minister would had studied the situation in Italian stadia he would have known that none actually takes a seat in the hottest areas of the stadia and, even less, respect their assigned spots. Italian laws on football are so strict that there is a lawyer, Lorenzo Contucci, who on his own website affirms that they might violate the constitution. And all Italian fans are gonna get is even stricter laws, which will possibly keep them away from live football matches even more than now. They talk about applying an “English model” over Italian football but Italians are not English and not every thing goes as it should in UK football.

Maybe they should instead wonder why on a Friday afternoon there are 100 people who attack a police squad. Maybe they should investigate on people social conditions in Italy, because violence is part of the society. Maybe they should take a look at the deaths in everyday life. But now poor Filippo Raciti is, unwillingly for him and his family, the star and the case will just bring more strictness, more prison and more violence. Because football is not violent, our society is, and even more in Southern Italy.

There should also be some focus on the Italian mysteries: this policeman died and in 3 different days 3 different reasons have been mentioned to have caused his death: a powerful explosive device on Saturday, a big stone on Sunday, a metal stick today, on Monday. None of the media stream has dedicated attention to this -only in Italian, sorry-

where the doctor, who is manager of the hospital responsible for the autopsy of the corpse, states that the inhalation of the tear gas CS has been the main factor in determining his death. The doctor also says that something else must have affected the heart of Raciti. Wikipedia states about the CS:

although described as a non-lethal weapon for crowd control, many studies have raised doubts about this classification. As well as creating severe pulmonary damage, CS can also significantly damage the heart and liver.

Was it “friendly fire”?

R.I.P.

Football manager 2007

Or football manager craze 2007. During the last weeks the main characters on European football have been football managers. In Italy we have seen small episodes involving Inter FC manager Roberto Mancini, but the lights have been especially pointed at Real Madrid‘s Fabio Capello and Chelsea‘s Jose Mourinho.

Fabio Capello is the neighbour you would never want. He’s started his professional career as a manager at AC Milan and won everything possible in 6 years time (with 4 Scudetto in a row). Then he went to Real Madrid, won a Liga beating a great Barcelona and then, after an unsucessful short period back at Milan, he joined AS Roma and won the league at the second attempt, 18 years after the previous one for this club. Over there he mentored two of the best youngsters of the team, Daniele De Rossi and Alberto Aquilani. Then left as a traitor for Juventus and won two titles, none of which has been validated by the Italian football association though. He joined Real Madrid again, accidentally right after Juventus’ demotion to Serie B, and last Sunday after a dull 1-0 victory, whistled at by his own supporters, he showed what kind of gentlemen he his. There would be plenty to say about him, for example about his really poor tactical skills as a coach and the defensive attitude of all the teams he’s managed, but this gesture, addressed at the same people that contribute to make him so important, rich and famous, shows everything you want to know about this man.

Jose Mourinho is much younger than Capello but he has at least as much self-belief as the Italian manager. He’s been amazingly successful in his still short career. His teams have won the last 4 championships played (2 with Porto FC in 2003 and 2004 and two with Chelsea in 2005 and 2006) and he also shows on his cupboard a Champions League, a U.E.F.A. Cup, 2 national cups and 2 Supercups (Community Shield in England). His quotes, taken from his page on Wikipedia, says as much as Capello’s picture about him

We have top players and, sorry if I’m arrogant, we have a top manager

If I wanted to have an easy job…I would have stayed at Porto – beautiful blue chair, the Uefa Champions League trophy, God, and after God, me

We are on top at the moment but not because of the club’s financial power. We are in contention for a lot of trophies because of my hard work

He’s recently publicly complained about his club, who apparently doesn’t provide him with the financial resources he needs to enforce his team. And God knows how much money Chelsea have spent in the last 2 transfert markets and how high are its players’ salaries!

We just wish both of them a lot of success because humble, hardworking people like them deserve respect and admiration from every human being!

That is football

Independiente’s supporters – 2006 – Argentina

Julien Quemener

On Thursday 23rd of November right outside the Parc des Princes a supporter of French Paris Saint Germain was shot to death by a police officer before a U.E.F.A. match between his team and Israeli Hapoel Tel Aviv. His name was Julien Quemener.

He supposedly was part of a mob of a couple of hundred people who were chasing a Parisienne Hapoel supporter shouting at him “Dirty jew” and other racist and anti semitist chants. Or at least that is what the press says. If you run a query on Google news, trying to understand what happened, you can find very authoritative news sources reporting contradictory facts about that night. The only thing which every newspaper agrees on is that Julien was part of a racist, violent and antisemitic mob.

Julien was part of the Boulogne Boys, a famous PSG fans mob. I have some small stadium experience and most of it has been among very racist people, even hailing the infamous Italian dictator Mussolini. For this reason I went digging on their website and on others related to it, in search of some evidence of their racism. I have found none. Boulogne Boys, according to my searches, appear to be as violent and racist as any other major European football mob. They certainly have some racists and violent elements, as in most big groups of football fans. They have a lot of coreographic power, as their photo gallery shows and I haven’t found any sign of racism or antisemitism among their words and images.

So I’ve started thinking. I’ve thought that French Presidential Elections are approaching very soon. I have also thought that Paris, and France in general, has many social problems, especially when it comes to relationships between different races and religions. I have also thought that it is quite easy killing a football supporter and let it seem as “we were trying to protect innocent people” “these football fans are thugs”. I have thought that there are a lot of people interested in keeping football fans away from the stadia to let them sign up for Sky or Canal + (less troubles, more money). And these are just general, maybe superficial thoughts. In the meanwhile a very young guy (he was 25 years old) is dead, and all because of a football match.

R.I.P.