Football, it is widely theorised, acts as a mirror of society. It is perhaps more accurate to say though that it is specifically the terraces which truly reflect a country back on itself, being both a product and an amplification of the times from which the fans occupying them emerge.
The rise of the ultras movement in Scotland can be seen as both this, the yearning of disaffected (mainly) young men to find a sense of belonging and common purpose in times where they feel increasingly alienated, and also the product of external influences, other football cultures whose rituals and traditions have come to impact our own.
To help understand where the burgeoning ultras scene in Scotland has come from, then, and where it may lead, it is natural to look to the country where the concept was birthed, and where it thrives to this day.
Few understand the Italian ultras scene better than author Tobias Jones, an Englishman who moved to the country initially in 1999 and then went back there after some years back home to settle into family life in Parma.
A few years ago, though, his long-held fascination with sub-cultures led him into a very different world, as he embedded himself into the matchday rituals of the ultras group affiliated to Cosenza – a relatively small and unheralded club from the south of the country.
The result was his illuminating 2019 book, Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football, a fascinating and unflinching account of the birth of the ultras movement in Italy, what they evolved to become, warts and all. But at its heart is the notion that this is not one homogenous movement at all, but groups for whom the love of their own town or city – their ‘caput mundi’, or capital of the world - is just as important as their disdain for the others.
“Being an ultra, much of it's a common human anthropological thing that when people form groups, they have enemies, that's the way it goes,” Jones said.
“Almost immediately when the ‘ultra’ was born around 1967, ‘68, you have the Years of Lead in Italy. You have the extremist political terrorism from far right and far left. So, that's a sort of a context that is unique.
“Once where there were insults, those became beatings that became death, there was this sort of revenge mechanism that was always upping the ante. If you've got a martyr that needs to be avenged, it keeps ratcheting up. So, from fistfights you go to knife fights and from knife fights to gunfights.
“I see the Italian ones very sort of embedded in what happened here. So, the shift to the far right amongst the ultras is so clearly connected to the end of the Soviet Union, the sort of discrediting of communism, if that's what it was, and the rise of mass immigration into a country that when I first came in, you never really saw one black or brown face. You've got geopolitical things happening that mean that the terraces take a very large rightward step.
“Here, you obviously had Inter, Lazio and Verona and then lots of lesser-known teams like Ascoli who've always been notoriously aligned to the right. And other ones, not necessarily well-known teams, but Livorno, Genoa etc that were more to the left.
“How that plays out, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see over the coming years or decades.”
The notion of knife fights or gun fights playing out on Scottish streets may seem a frightening one, and after the running battles between the Green Brigade and the Union Bears in Glasgow city centre prior to the New Year derby, not all that much of a stretch to imagine.
The police response to that incident – the exercising of additional powers to search fans prior to the next match between the sides at Celtic Park and the kettling of supporters outside the ground – sparked a subsequent protest at the London Road police station over the heavy-handedness of fan policing.
In Italy, the response from the authorities was on a different level altogether, meeting the escalating seriousness of what they were dealing with, but as Jones explains, the common thread of suppression runs through the psyche of ultras from Celtic’s North Curve to Inter’s Curva Nord, and strained relations with the police are a given.
“Calling the police response heavy-handed is sort of an understatement,” he said.
“The D.I.G.O.S. [Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali], the division that deals with fans, is not commonly associated with light-handedness.
“And as always, as in ultra-on-ultra violence, ultra-on-police violence, the one thing that will unite the whole ultras movement is this notion that they are the suppressed, subjugated underdog. That's natural when you have fans repeatedly dying in custody, and then also fans being shot across the motorway like Gabriele Sandri, the Lazio fan whose picture is up everywhere.
“And then you get also a policeman killed in Catania, (Filippo) Raciti. So, you know, it's incremental, this bit-by-bit increase of fear and distrust.
“And then the other thing they did, which was incredibly strategic and split down the centre of the whole movement, was the fans' identity card. You couldn't go to either at-risk games or away games, or sometimes you couldn't even get into your home stadium, unless you had it.
“I talk about it in the book that half the fans said, ‘Well, look, what's the difference? We've got to go to the stadium.’ It's like not going to church. And other people would go a thousand miles to stand outside the stadium and sing from there as a protest. It's down the middle. And as you know, if you split the opposition, you're halfway there.”
To draw alarmist conclusions from the ultras story in Italy though when considering the future of the Scottish equivalent is, Jones feels, too simplistic.
“I hope, for instance, that the real violence and drug dealing remains outside the ultras scene. I think when the head of a gang is earning tens of thousands a month, people fight for that kind of money. I don't get the impression, I might be wrong, that your groups there have got huge income streams.
“It's obviously linked to touting and all the stuff like the burger concessions, the parking concessions, sort of the petty criminal, mafia context around the curtilage of stadiums that mean that the ultras can get into those positions. And also, obviously, proper wholesale narco-trafficking.
“Here, it's extremely hierarchical. So, the one man with a megaphone decides what everyone sings. When I go to a stadium in Britain, it feels a lot more spontaneous and there's a lot of humour. Whereas here, it's kind of quite serious and frowning. You know, the next song on the hymn sheet is this.
“I say this in a good way, Scotland just feels more anarchic than Italy, which is actually quite traditionalist and conformist in unexpected ways. I just wonder whether that sort of make-up of an ultras group that is strategical, politicised, hierarchical, maybe that's not the way it'll grow in a very different country.”
Might it instead, in Scotland, follow the path of what Jones describes in his book as ‘the more idealistic origins of the movement’ that he found were still largely the guiding principles of the ultras in Cosenza, such as charity.
They may be politicised and from differing sides of that spectrum, but almost all of the ultras groups operating in Scotland collect for their local foodbanks, and try to be seen as a force for good within their communities, a common trait with their Italian counterparts.
“The first thing on the other side of the charge sheet against the ultras is that any time there's a flood, an earthquake, a drought, a natural disaster, a man-made disaster, it's always the ultras on the front line,” he said.
“Partly because the Italian state is not so nimble, it's often very slow to respond, but the ultras are always on the front line.
“I followed Cosenza for three years because they were the most altruistic of all ultras, I think. They were occupying hotels confiscated from the Mafia, opening them up to immigrants, doing distribution of food to the homeless, doing evenings of five-a-side football matches for young kids who couldn't afford a pitch, all sorts of things that again fill the gap in modern society where there are many, many holes in the safety net.”
Just as the ultras groups fill the holes society fails to in many lives. If there are lessons to be drawn then from the Italian experience when it comes to the way Scotland’s ultras scene may evolve, it is that being dismissive or wholly condemnatory of them is a dangerous game, and a stance that may allow nefarious actors to fill those voids in the lives of many of them.
“I think the warning sign isn't about ultras, but about the wider society,” he said.
“Where do vulnerable, excluded young men - because it's normally men, but women as well – find belonging and meaning and rootedness? And actually, if they find it in a football team, is it that bad a place to find it?
“So, I think the warning is actually if it's demonised and we're told from the off they're idiots we shouldn't listen to - which I think is how the ultras movement was scorned by the intellectual left in Italy in the 80s and the 90s, they started turning their back on it, saying these guys are a bunch of idiots - it created this vacuum that the far-right moved into. So, I see that as the main warning.
“But I think - and I'm guessing here, but I hope – [the Scottish ultras movement] is perhaps a reflection of that really fascinating bond between Scotland and Italy. So, whether it's because of industry, prisoners of war, shipbuilding, food or so many other things, there is this amazing link between the countries.
“I get the sense that's kind of what a lot of Scottish groups feel. You know, they’re doing something that's a bit Italian. And that obviously is a great thing, because it's a lovely country.”
