Ultra by Tobias Jones review – Italian football and the far right

What to do about violent youth? Violent young men that is. Their thirst for action, extremity, conflict, heroism. Their cruelty. Perhaps the army? But soldiers are expensive. There’s sport of course, channelling adrenaline and competitiveness into spectacle; but few of us have the stuff of athletes.

One idea that took off in the late 19th century was to corral rowdy men together in stadiums to support their local football teams, directing their negative energy towards the urgent rivalry of the players on the field. They might yell obscenities, invade the pitch and get into drunken brawls with opposing supporters, but with rare exceptions the mayhem was safely circumscribed; the police knew where the bad boys were; they could be frisked for weapons at the turnstiles; and their very thirst for transgression galvanised the stadium experience for everyone. Brutishness was satisfied, contained and even exploited.

Every European country had its variation on this solution, according to its values and traditions, a morphing of local folklore in the age of commercialised sport. In postwar Italy it eventually produced the phenomenon known as the ultras, a name suggesting people who were “beyond” – oltre – or outside normal society, purists, fundamentalists. In what sense? In their celebration of their club, their colours, their community, ultimately themselves. Italian society has historically tended to put family, corporation or region before such considerations as merit or moral probity. The ultras take that propensity to extremes. Week after week, home and away, at great expense of effort and resources, they form the core fan support behind the goal, leading chants, hanging up banners, looking for fights with opposing supporters, filling the atmosphere with wild energy. Needless to say, those fans who actively oppose them or won’t come on board will very likely be intimidated. Tobias Jones seeks to offer both a history of the ultras and a feeling of what it’s like to be among them.

In large part his book enacts a clash of values, a fabulously extended equivocation. Jones has written two previous non-fiction accounts and three novels about life in his adopted country, all of which focus on the “dark heart”, as he calls it, of Italy – corruption, murders, cover-ups – and once again in Ultra ethical concerns are to the fore. Together with the many stories of violence, graft and racism that fill the book’s pages, he explains that he is “drawn to ultra groups” because they “offer a unique vantage point to understand how and why fascism has re-emerged into the mainstream”. This is “one of the most urgent topics of the early 21st century”.

This solemnity is reflected in the team he decides to follow. Jones lives in Parma, which has its Serie A team, its “Parma Boys”, its historic rivalries with Pisa and Genoa. But he chooses to get his experience of ultra life 1,000km to the south, in the much smaller Cosenza. Fortunately, he tells us, bad behaviour is “only partially representative of the ultra world”. Cosenza’s ultras have a reputation for being antifascist and determinedly good, “giving beds to hundreds of immigrants and destitute Italians”, opening “a foodbank for the poor,” and creating “Italy’s first play-park for disabled children”. Since Jones’s “non-Italian” book A Place of Refuge tells the story of how he and his wife turned a patch of Somerset countryside into a retreat for people in crisis, there is a noble continuity here. He wants to celebrate the good. He is fascinated by the fact that during the 1980s, Cosenza’s ultras were largely taken over by an eccentric monk, Padre Fedele, who pushed them to do charitable work, sought to bring together the country’s ultras in a pact of nonviolence and with frequent appearances on Italian TV became, Jones claims, “a spiritual guide to the ultras of not just Cosenza but of Italy”.

As I learned in my 10 years in the Verona curva what matters for the ultras is setting themselves apart, making themselves visible. They will collect money for a victim or demand that a game be stopped after a fatal accident, because it shames the authorities. But they may equally well swing into racist chants, or unfold a banner to celebrate a group member jailed for racial violence. Them and us is everything. Jones gets this – “The ultras,” he says, “seemed to be looking for that vanishing grail of modern life: belonging” – yet continues to think of them in terms of good (left) and bad (right) and earnestly wishes they would behave better.

Jones introduces a lot of characters with typically odd nicknames – Left Behind, Elastic, Vindow, Mouse – but they rarely come across strongly enough for us to remember who’s who. When he describes them fighting or insulting opposing fans he speaks of “them”, when it’s time to celebrate a goal he switches to “we”: “Ettore Mendicino … turns and, as he’s falling backwards, volleys the ball into the net. We away-supporters go berserk: hugging, screaming, jumping.”

Jones is more at ease working from books and newspapers to trace the development of the ultras, ambitiously interweaving their metamorphoses with the shifting political scene over the past 50 years. We read about young, often orphaned men from underprivileged backgrounds seeking community among the ultras and finding themselves drawn into thuggery, drug dealing and ticket touting, or simply falling victim to mindless violence. A man is run over by an SUV as Milan fans attack Neapolitans. A fan launches a nautical flare that kills a man behind the opposite goal. A policeman dies in a scuffle in Catania. Another policeman shoots at a car across a motorway and kills a fan. A young fan is beaten up and dies of a heart attack. A policeman ultra turns armed robber, kills a fellow policeman then shoots himself. Two or three men “kill themselves” very probably under duress. Since an ultra group is essentially a core of raw energy with no particular direction, there are tales of those who seek to take over the group and push it this way or that.

“The stadiums only offered bulletins of deaths,” we’re told at one point. But an article in Corriere della Sera in 2014 counted 22 deaths in 50 years of football violence. On average the same number die on the road every weekend in Italy. In the UK, where stadium violence has been tamed, knife deaths in 2018 reached 285 and, in general, Britain has twice as many homicides as Italy.

Related: Inside Italy’s ultras: the dangerous fans who control the game | Tobias Jones

“The northern city [Verona] was nationalistic to put it lightly,” we hear of one game, “whereas the Cosentini were so anti-nationalist that they chanted “Zaire” after the African country had beaten Italy 4–0 in the Seoul Olympics in 1988.” In fact few fans are less nationalist than the Veronese, who taunted Italy’s and Juventus’s goalkeeper, Stefano Tacconi, mercilessly after that surprising defeat, which was to Zambia not Zaire. The following year the Veronese caused a scandal when the national team played Uruguay in Verona and were whistled throughout. Only local identity is meaningful.

“Ultras were the yeast in this rapidly rising far right dough,” Jones tells us of political developments in 2004. But a minority hankering for authoritarianism is a constant in Italy with its paralysed politics and powerful criminal organisations. The carnival provocations of some ultras, disgraceful as they may be, bear no comparison with the grim and systematic violence of the fascist squads of the 1920s. Fascism, alas, has no need of the terraces.

Jones is interesting when he talks of the “religious” aspect of ultra movements, their attachment to sacred objects and determination to celebrate the dead. Banners remembering fans who have died or chants drawing from liturgical sources fascinate him. The parts of the book where he reflects on these are the best, allowing a rare glimpse of the author and the position from which he views the ultra phenomenon.

• Tim Parks’s books include A Season With Verona (Vintage). Ultra is published by Head of Zeus (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.