Serie A becoming a sh!thole

[Suprah]

Sky Sports

Italian Police have confirmed that a 28-year-old Lazio fan was shot dead in a clash between football supporters at a motorway service station.

The match between Internazionale and Lazio at the Giuseppe Meazza stadium was called off after the incident.

Meanwhile, the evening match between Roma and Cagliari was cancelled as a mark of respect.

Fans have also started rioting close to the Olympic Stadium in Rome where the game was due to take place and the headquarters of the Italian Olympic Committee have been targeted with violence

Italian police have confirmed that the Lazio fan who was killed was shot by police in what they describe as a 'tragic mistake'.

Tragic
"This is a tragic mistake," said a police spokesman.

"Our agent had intervened to prevent the fracas between two groups of people - that had not been considered fans - degenerating into a situation with serious consequences for both groups.

"I express my most profound pain and sincere condolences to the victim's family."

Elsewhere, the match between Milan and Atalanta was called off after seven minutes, as a result of crowd trouble.

Milan defender Alessandro Nesta has admitted his disappointment at the situation.

"We all came out ready to play. Unfortunately, certain episodes happened with Atalanta fans trying to provoke the suspension of the game," said Nesta.

"But the problem is not inside the stadium. The problem is that what happens inside the stadium is a reflection of our society."

First the betting scandal on 2006, then the policeman's death when Catania and Palermo fans clashed, and now this.

I wonder what the Italian Government is actually doing in all this nonsense, and I wonder how much influence the mafia has in these matters, as bear in mind most of these hooligan groups have links to local mafias and the club officials as well as the authorities tend to be intimidated by the lot too.

Most of the stadiums in Italy are in really bad state and need modernisation desperately. The policing is already bad, and now violence has shown its ugly head time and time again.

One can only imagine if England had faced such a crisis, UEFA would have taken action already

[futbol>>>IRAN]

meh Italian football always seems to recover somehow, no matter how bad it gets!

[Suprah]

Trust me, it can and will get worse unless the government step in to avoid UEFA and FIFA censure over such things.

[futbol>>>IRAN]

No it cant

[Land of Samba]

Violence a matter of national importanceRoberto Gotta
Archive

There is no easy way out of the conundrum facing Italian authorities after yet another bloody and chaotic Sunday for Italian football.



GettyImages
The travelling fans react to the news that Inter v Lazio was the only game to be called off.

The facts, first: a 26-year old Lazio fan, Gabriele Sandri - who by all accounts who did not belong to any of the violent groups that have frequently soiled the Roman club's reputation - was shot dead on Sunday morning by a Police patrol officer in a service station along the A1 motorway. All reports seem to agree on a few sure facts: there had been a scuffle involving Lazio fans travelling to their team's match at Inter Milan and the Juve fans headed for Parma.

Officers in a Police patrol car stationed in the service station on the other side of the highway, four lanes away, noticed the commotion and one of them, a 31-year old whose name was not released, fired two shots, one of them hitting Sandri in the neck while he was sitting in the back of the car he was travelling in. The officer did not follow the corp's guidelines, which state that after a warning shot is fired in the air, the gun must be put away. According to reports, he instead started running along the barrier and that's when the shot that killed Sandri was fired.

Reports in Monday's Corriere della Sera indicate that the Police officer, in tears at the thought of "having destroyed two families, the fan's and mine", explained that highway patrols often have to run after drug smugglers, bank-robbers and fugitives in the woods and fields along the road and that was the reason he did not comply with the department's guidelines. A witness, who was in the same service station as the victim, told of how he heard someone shout to him to "write down" the licence plate of the car where the victim was sitting, which was apparently leaving the area after the scuffle was over.

It appears then that the police officers were trying to prevent those involved in the confrontation from leaving without being identified.

When news of the tragedy spread, fans at an early tip-off basketball match in Milan retired their banners in protest, and supporters heading for football matches around the country unified in a fierce and violent rage against the Police. The fans' ire intensified when it was decided only Inter-Lazio would be postponed; their point was that the complete Serie A program had been cancelled last February after a Police officer, Filippo Raciti, was murdered in pre-match riots in Catania, while the same decision had not been taken now that it was a fan that had been killed.

It must be said that the circumstances were completely different, and that the February incident had happened on a Friday evening, allowing the authorities much more time to make a decision. However, it did not seem to matter to those who caused the postponement of Atalanta-Milan, put Police and Carabinieri's barracks under siege and broke into the headquarters of CONI, which is not only Italy's Olympic Committee but also the top authority in Italian sports, which oversees even the FIGC, Italian Football Federation.

What can we make of this? What exactly is the enigma Italian authorities are being asked to solve, not for the first time?

There are different levels of reading into the matter. First of all, the service station incident was a tragic mistake for which the Police agent will pay a price, as he's already been charged with manslaughter.

But this will obviously not placate those who have long objected to the Police's quick-trigger finger - hardly so, in fact - and heavy-handed tactics in all instances of public disorder, as Manchester United fans who were subjected to a baton charge last April in Rome can attest to.

On the other hand, as the deputy chief of Police in Arezzo, the closest city to the crime scene, remarked today, the officer had no idea soccer had been a trigger for the punch-up. The accident took on soccer-related significance, of course, once it became known that a Lazio fan had been killed and the scuffle had involved soccer fans, but as far as the Police officer was concerned it could have been just any other instance.

“ Italians are constantly looking for an outlet for their frustrations, and soccer is often one of them, perhaps even the favourite one. ”


This makes Sunday's tragic events even more difficult to frame: the riots that flared up throughout Italy, targeting the Police, have deep roots in the intense hatred, that ultras groups (and in fact most groups of young people) have in Italy towards security forces and all kinds of authority in general.

You may remember the March 2004 Roman derby between Roma and Lazio was postponed when a rumour spread about the death of a kid run over by a Police car. The rumour turned out to be false, but the wave of hostility toward the Police had been so strong that authorities, among them then-League chairman Adriano Galliani, had agreed to call the match off on the grounds of public safety.

So should this be treated as a football, or social emergency?

Forgive me for throwing bucketfuls of cheap sociological analysis your way, but Italy is a country full of angry, frustrated people. Nothing in everyday life, least of all developments in politics, gives us any assurance that our future will be better, and the constant bickering, trading of insults and disrespect between politicians, sometimes even those belonging to the same party, hardly reassures people that they should trust authorities, many of whom have proved too corrupt and inept - or both - to be trusted.

Italians, at least too many of them, are no better than the politicians they elect, but turn on them and all figures of authority and in fact many delight in breaking the rules as a sort of revenge towards the 'evil' Government.

Call this political agnosticism if you like, even on my part, but this is what I feel is the situation in Italy, and it's not like I need to investigate much to get a feeling of what's going on.

So unless you belong to the group of starry-eyed foreigners who snap up holiday homes in Tuscany and are tricked by their idyllic relationships with neighbours and smiling, thick-chested bricklayers into believing in the old myth of Italy as a happy place - then write books about it - you know that Italians are constantly looking for an outlet for their frustrations, and soccer is often one of them, perhaps even the favourite one.

So, again, should the problem be tackled by football authorities, or the Government? The answer is both, obviously. Football chiefs could do worse than ban away fan travel, a sad measure that has already been taken this year, mostly to prevent the notorious Napoli fans from wrecking service stations - an all too common instance in Italy - and rushing the gates. Ultra groups, despite the implementation of stricter measures since last February, still play too strong a role in the politics of football clubs: after Sampdoria lost 5-0 at home to Milan, Ultras stormed the gates of Doria's training ground and confronted the players.


GettyImages
Atalanta captain Cristiano Doni tries to calm down the fans, to no avail.

Generally speaking the ultra groups have developed an over-inflated sense of themselves as flag-bearers of the true values of football, as opposed to the commercialization and the perceived surrender to TV money, so anyone who dares criticize their behaviour is subject to the same abuse and hatred as the Police.

Which may explain why the mobs in Milan attacked a building which houses a local branch of RAI, the State television, and beat up two cameramen.

This again, has less to do with football, which is only a means to channel anger and frustration, than with the deteriorating state of Italian life, where a good portion of the people have lost all perception of individual responsibility, preferring instead to live and act within a mob, literally and figuratively, and where someone will always find an excuse to justify those who break the rules.

Banning away fans may work for a while on the soccer front, but any improvement in the much more important matter of everyday life would take decades of better education at home and in schools, an increased sense of individual responsibility towards the next person, a renewed pride in doing the right thing instead of taking shortcuts or resorting to threats and blackmail. Unfortunately there's little football can do about this.

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/columns...europe&cc=5901

[taha]

italians are quite barbaric i am sorry to say....corruption is found all the way at the top (berlusconi etc) italy doesnt belong in the EU

[milad]

Serie A becoming a sh!thole

ahem.

[Iscariot]

Yet they won the world cup...

[Suprah]

This has nothing to do with Italian players and Italian style of play, hell this is a million miles in the opposite direction of Calcio as a whole.

This is to do with organised crime, government malpractice, rampant hooliganism, and social problems in Italian society that have seeped into their football and making a chaotic situation that can deeply disturb Italian football as we know it.

Apparently news is coming out that when Juve and Lazio fans were clashing on a motorway restaurant, the police intervened. But the 28 year old lad was shot when the two sets of supporters had already been separated and the fight broken up. The police say that it was during the fight that some of their men were firing in the air to disperse the crowd and that was how the lad got shot. Others maintain that the boy was in fact on his way out of the already ended fight in a car when he was shot dead.

Some are actually saying that this killing wasnt an accident as the police is explaining.

[PersianMadrid7]

Politically, socially and econimically Serie A is a sh!t hole.

However this makes the EPL look even worse. With so much money going into the EPL, Serie A and La Liga still stay on top of them.

[1Heesham1]

lol ^how'd u work that one out?..

[Arashi_Washi]

It was a shithole long before it started to become one

[Suprah]

Politically, socially and econimically Serie A is a sh!t hole.
However this makes the EPL look even worse. With so much money going into the EPL, Serie A and La Liga still stay on top of them.

In La Liga, most of the revenue generated goes directly to Real Madrid and Barcelona - the rest of the clubs have a budget a mere trickle of what these two earn. Hence Barca and Real tend to buy the big names coz they get the bulk $$$ irrespective of their season standings, while in EPL money is more evenly divided among the sides.

That's why the likes of Valencia and others are merely mickey mouse teams - make some noise and dont do much - and quite frankly since Juande Ramos left Sevilla, they too will become another Spanish 'mickey mouse' team.

Mafia influence in Serie A has been there ever since football began in Italy.

[mf_doom]

In La Liga, most of the revenue generated goes directly to Real Madrid and Barcelona - the rest of the clubs have a budget a mere trickle of what these two earn. Hence Barca and Real tend to buy the big names coz they get the bulk $$$ irrespective of their season standings, while in EPL money is more evenly divided among the sides.
That's why the likes of Valencia and others are merely mickey mouse teams - make some noise and dont do much - and quite frankly since Juande Ramos left Sevilla, they too will become another Spanish 'mickey mouse' team.
Mafia influence in Serie A has been there ever since football began in Italy.

That mickey mouse team recently just beat real madrid.

I lost all respect for serie a after the matchfixing debacle. The league is boring, the same clubs win and the players are divers extradionnaire (with the exception of a few, i.e. kaka etc)

The problem with la liga is the fact that the refereeing is piss poor. La liga cares too much about where the refree is from rather than how good they are. Right after the sevilla loss, the always classy schuster said:
'He is Catalan? There is nothing more to say."
And now whats going to happen? The refree is probably going to be examined like his a new disease of some sorts.

Epl is the best league now because it has great organizatn, great players, great rivalries and a great atmosphere. Instead of racists chants or retarded hooligans filling the stands you got great amounts of true soccer fans.