The cleverness that some Roma and Brescia fans lacked

To the fans of Rome and Bresciawho yesterday offered two not bad little shows, of those capable of making even the calmest fingers of social media rise to indignation, should not be contested so much for having been violent or rowdy, but for having been foolish.

It was in 1949 while commenting on a fist fight between the fans of Orlando Rondini and those of Rodolfo Sorcinelli, after a very tight match and a confused thread of balloon with braceletThat Achilles Campanile, a writer before being a journalist, grasped what no one had grasped either then or later: “You need to be clever in disputes, especially when the dispute does not exclude violence a priori. And you have to be careful, fistfight in an alley, not in a square: vices are private by definition ”, he wrote in the Gazzetta del Popolo. Sport is a vice that brings with it other vices, such as typhus. And from there it’s a long chain, which sometimes leads to uncontrolled joy, think of the celebrations of the World Cup in Argentina or the Scudetto in Naples, sometimes in violence. That’s how it’s always been. Achille Campanile limited himself to recounting the fistfight in the center of Turin, he didn’t extend it to the fault of all the fans of the ball with the bracelet, who were then giving the last blows of a passion that at the end of the nineteenth century had been huge in many areas of Italy, he limited himself to underlining, with his usual irony, that “if you really have to punch each other, you need a little discretion, a little silence, and having quick access on ice and bandages”.

The discretion they perhaps should have had Roma fans at Budapest airport when they spat and insulted the referee who officiated the Europa League final, the Englishman Anthony Taylor. Who certainly hadn’t offered his best performance on the pitch, that perhaps something went wrong and when he did wrong it wasn’t always correct, but it had to be a matter of the pitch, of the stadium, certainly not involving the family as it happened instead. “You need to be smart in disputes”, wrote Campanile, and taking it out on a man while shaking his daughter’s hand is not smart, it is regrettable, above all it is counterproductive for football, for the fans and for that passion that still binds groups of people and makes them feel part of something.

And it wasn’t even clever to throw smoke bombs onto the pitch, very close to the players of his team, despite having just conceded a silly goal and was going down to Serie C in a way that hadn’t happened for 38 years in Brescia. Not a nice gesture, something quite tacky, especially when compared to the applause that the Gelbe Wand, the wall of Borussia Dortmund supporters in the Südtribüne of the Westfalenstadion, granted the players despite an unfortunate last game that made a nearly won championship disappear . “You need to be smart in disputes” and what we saw in the added time of the match against Cosenza meant that the usual discussions on the violence of typhus, the disgust of organized football, etc. resumed. who then it is known that they will end up parrying on how well Thatcher has done against the hooligansthen forgetting to underline that more than the truncheons and the repression it was the gentrification of the stadiums that appeased clashes and violence and made the stands peaceful places in which the accounts and economic value of the clubs could flourish.

The fans would need to get smart, as we know that there are social networks and there collective indignation becomes prevalent. And that above all the same commentators who comment on football, who underline, sometimes exaggerating, the mistakes of referees, players and coaches, are the ones who then point the finger at the fans themselves.

Clever especially not to get dragged into violent disputes by the attitudes of sports men who sometimes throw it into a racket, who fall into protest, dispute, attribution of blame to others and by doing so, they decrease the weight of their own mistakes. José Mourinho is the best at doing this, he’s not the only one.

It’s a problem to get smart individually in a complex and explosive process like the mass, especially when it’s animated by support for an equally complex and explosive sport like football. But they should make an effort, precisely to safeguard their being fans, the dignity of cheering, of all cheering. Avoiding certain things, returning the clash that is now public and exposed to public ridicule on social media to a private dimension.