Master of Arts Thesis
Euroculture
University of Groningen……… (First semester) University of Kraków…………. (Second semester)
July, 2018
Performing the Self
Identity and Glocalism in European Football Fandom
Submitted by: Arne van Lienden 2566338 1142027 a.van.lienden@student.rug.nl Supervised by: Dr. S. Couperus Prof. dr. Z. Mach Place, date Groningen, 24 July 2018 Signature
MA Programme Euroculture
Declaration
I, Arne van Lienden, hereby declare that this thesis, entitled “Performing the Self: Identity and Glocalism in European Football Fandom”, submitted as partial requirement for the MA Programme Euroculture, is my own original work and expressed in my own words. Any use made within this text of works of other authors in any form (e.g. ideas, figures, texts, tables, etc.) are properly acknowledged in the text as well as in the bibliography.
I declare that the written (printed and bound) and the electronic copy of the submitted MA thesis are identical.
I hereby also acknowledge that I was informed about the regulations pertaining to the assessment of the MA thesis Euroculture and about the general completion rules for the Master of Arts Programme Euroculture.
Signed ………...
Date ………
Abstract
This thesis analyzes the cultural performances of four European fanatic football fan groups that call themselves ultras. The ultra subculture is a relatively new subculture within fanatic football fandom that is characterized by the staging of spectacular choreographies during the football game. These fandom performances have proven to be ready vehicles for reinforcing socio-political identifications among the fanatic football fans. The ultras reinforce their primary identification through ritualistic practices within the liminal space of the football stadium. They display banners and sing chants that are all infused with symbolic meaning and their performances are aimed at generating communitas among the ultras and at socially differentiating the fans from other forces and social groups.
Recent literature on the ultras is preoccupied with the ‘glocal’ dimension of the subculture. Some authors argue that the ultras constitute a transnational political protest movement that use the stadium to communicate their messages, other authors have argued that there is in fact no such thing as ‘the ultra’, but rather various fanatic football fandom subcultures that
appropriate certain practices from other fan groups. This research addresses this issue by empirically analyzing the cultural performances of the ultra groups at AS Livorno (Italy), Celtic FC (Scotland), FC St. Pauli (Germany), and Athletic Bilbao (Spain).
The findings of this research show that the performances of the ultras are a bricolage of global and local symbols that together are ritualistically reproduced to reinforce the primary identification of the ultras. These primary identifications are rooted in the national or local context in which the performance is staged. The ultras in this research all use similar bodily practices and similar symbolisms in their performances, but these global symbols are
syncretized with distinctly local practices in order to reinforce a socio-political identification that is rooted within a particular national or local historical context.
Table of Contents
Introduction ………....5
1. Ultras: the history, the stadium, the performance …...…………...……..11
1.1. The origins and rise of ultras in European football fandom ………...…11
1.2. Football fandom in its social and political context ………....…….16
1.3. Theorizing the football stadium ………...……...20
1.4. The ultra spectacle as a cultural performance ………...………..25
1.5. The ultras as a European phenomenon ………...27
2. Methodology ………...………31 2.1. Research methods ………...……...31 2.2. Case studies ………...……..33 2.2.1. Celtic FC ………..….33 2.2.2. AS Livorno ………...….35 2.2.3. FC St. Pauli ………....………...….37 2.2.4. Athletic Bilbao ………,..………38 3. Analysis ………..………….41
3.1. The demeanor and the stadium ………..……….. 41
3.2. Argot ………..………...42
3.3. Image ……….……...47
4. Discussion ……….………..54
4.1. Re-contextualizing the European ultra subculture ………..….54
4.2. Ritualized warfare and the ‘other’ ……….…...59
5. Conclusion ………..64
Introduction
In an article in the Financial Times Simon Kuper argued that in the Western world, where “more and more adults aren’t married, don’t identify with their job, and don’t have a clear economic class, religion, or trade union” it is fandom that increasingly provides people with a sense of identity and belonging. Being a fan of something or someone, be it a sports team or a political figure, offers a sense of community and stability.1 While Kuper is mostly concerned with the relative new phenomenon of political fandom (Trumpsters and Corbynistas), in other domains fandom has been a major source of identification for ages. One of the most
significant of these domains is football. From the inception of professional football in the late 19th century onwards it has been “dedicated to satisfy the collective and communitarian needs of citizens of urbanized and individualized communities”.2 From the moment football got embraced by the working-classes in the late 19th century, football teams have become symbols infused with meanings of local, ethnic, or religious pride. The structured and competitive element of association football became highly popular and “a primordial space for making collective identities known through confrontation” and “its success in fact proceeds from its capacity to generate group adhesions and make them known”.3 In times of social upheaval and change, football teams have supposedly remained stable anchors of collective identities and communities. In contemporary Europe, football fandom’s function as domain that can give shape to and reinforce collective social and cultural identifications makes it an interesting social domain to research how Europeans today celebrate, articulate, and reinforce collective social identities.
Football is a social domain where the global and local come together in a myriad of often complicated ways. Football is a global sport and the World Cup counts as one of the most watched events across the world. It was not for nothing that Kitchin saw football “as the only global idiom apart from science”.4 Football is played globally, and unrivalled in popularity in most parts of the world. Football has also increasingly become a transnational affair, with an
1 Simon Kuper. “Trumpsters, Corbynistas and the rise of the political fan.” Financial Times 20 July 2017, accessed, 10 May, 2018.
2 Ekain Rojo-Labaien. “Football and the representation of Basque identity in the contemporary age” Soccer & Society 18 no. 1 (2017): 65.
3 Ibid., 66.
4 Eric Dunning. “Towards a sociological understanding of football hooliganism as a world phenomenon” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 8 no. 2 (2000): 141.
increase of international tournaments and cross-border transfers of players, managers, and chairmen. Games that are played in the most prominent leagues - England, France, Spain, Germany and Italy are regarded as the ‘top leagues’ – are broadcasted all over the world and the rights to broadcast these games involve astronomical sums of money. In his widely acclaimed book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 historian Tony Judt argued that notwithstanding the integration of European nation-states and the subsequent European Community’s attempts at fostering a European identity, no one could deny that what “really united Europe was football”.5 Football may be a uniting force among European citizens, but at the same time it is a domain where local identities are celebrated and reinforced in a way that “can license the most egregious forms of tribalism at the level of club and the ugliest
nationalism at the level of country”.6 Football is thus a domain where the global and local exist next to each other, and where they clash, coalesce and influence each other.
For football fans who see their team as embodying a specific local identity, the globalization and commercialization of football in the last three decades is often perceived as a threat to the local dimension of football. Some writers on football fandom also saw the emergence of global football fandom as something that “sanitized and anaesthetized the experience of being a football supporter” and prevented football fans from imagining “themselves to be something more than the sum of increasingly isolated individuals”.7 Redhead argued in 1997 that
football fandom was on the dawn of “post-fandom”, where team loyalties were to be determined by mediatized and commercial representations and “disappearing into forms of popular culture”.8 These writers often thought nostalgically about a time where local working-classes saw their collective identity represented in the team from their respective town or neighborhood. But while the globalization of football has undoubtedly altered the fan
experience in many ways, one only has to look around football stadiums in Europe to see that collective identities are still regularly celebrated by football fans that feel a deep attachment to their football team. One might argue that because of the globalization of football, football fans responded by putting greater value on the specific local identity of their football teams.
5 Tony Judt. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. (Penguin Press, 2005): 782.
6 Simon Critchley. What We Think About When We Think About Soccer (Penguin Press, 2017): 151.
7 Simon Lee. “The Political Economy of English Football” in Adam Brown (ed) Fanatics: Power, Identity and Fandom in Football (Routledge, 2002): 48.
8 Steve Redhead. Post-fandom and the Millennial Blues: The transformation of soccer culture (Routledge, 1997): 1.
Football as a game has thus seen a rapid globalization which has facilitated cross-border transfers of players and tournaments. In its wake, culturally specific modes of football fandom came in contact with each other and starting appropriating each others styles and manners. In the 1970s and 1980s, the hegemonic subcultural style in European fanatic football fandom was the English casual style, which is today seen as the typical football hooligan style. Hooliganism, or the “competitive violence between socially organized fan groups”, was considered nothing less than a plague in the 1970s and 1980s.9 Especially in the United Kingdom violence in football stadiums was pervasive, with hooliganism even becoming branded as the “English disease”.10 Football hooligans became “the folk devils of our age”, synonyms for moral depravity and social decay.11 Hence, academic discourse on football hooliganism with a strong UK-centric focus set the parameters for research on football fandom for a significant part of the last three decades. This led to a problematically narrow conception of football fandom and the many modes and styles that can be witnessed in global football fandom. This narrow focus on violence is problematic because, as novelist Nick Hornby argues, “at least 95 percent of the millions who watch games every year have never hit anyone in their lives”.12
The ultra subculture in football fandom is such an alternative mode of football fandom that only recently started receiving academic attention, after many fanatic European football fans gradually started to brand themselves as ultras rather than casuals or hooligans. The ultra mode of football fandom originates from Italy, where football fans became inspired by the political protests that were a common sight in 1960s Italy. Borrowing the drums, banners, and pyrotechnics from the political protests, the ultras made the football stadium not only the stage for aesthetic spectacles, but also a new space for expressing political and ideological expressions. According to Spaaij and Vinas, the ultra “unconditionally supports the team in an active, constructive but critical manner” through tifo which are “meticulously
choreographed displays” with “large flags, mosaics, drums, flares, chants, and so forth”.13 In the last two or three decades the ultra style has largely taken over the center stage in football
9 Ibid., 11.
10 Jon Garland, Rowe, Michael. “The English Disease – Cured or in Remission? An Analysis of Police Responses to Football Hooliganism in the 1990s” Crime Prevention and Community Safety 1 no. 4 (1999): 35. 11 Steve Redhead. Post-fandom and the Millennial Blues: The transformation of soccer culture (Routledge, 1997): 1
12 Nick Hornby. Fever Pitch (Penguin Press, 1992): 4.
13 Ramon Spaaij, Carles Vinas. “Passion, politics and violence: A socio-historical analysis of Spanish ultras.” Soccer & Society 6 no. 1 (2005): 80.
fandom. The violence of the English hooligans disappeared for the most part and was replaced by more the more politically conscious and aesthetically spectacular ultras.
The ultras are involved in a performance that works to reinforce and celebrate the identity that is ascribed to the football team. They do so through ritualistically orchestrated
choreographies that are performed in front of the rest of the audience and in recent years increasingly for people that watch at home in front of the TV. The performances reiterate local identities and also “represent and comment upon the values and ideas of the society that stages the performance” by voicing criticism at developments in the domain of football and wider society.14 Although ultras originate in Europe it was mainly non-European ultra groups that first started to receive attention in popular European media outlets. Especially Egyptian ultras made the news after they played a major role in the 2011 protests that eventually led to the downfall of Hosni Mubarak. The ultra subculture or subcultures in Europe have not been involved in political protests to the same extent as Egyptian or South American ultras, but after the events in Egypt attention shifted to European ultras as well. Popular media outlets began to wonder who these fans were and what their spectacular and often politically motivated performances really meant.
How did the spectacular celebrations of the ultras become the dominant subcultural style in European fanatic football fandom? Kennedy argues that “the ultra movement takes its place among radical political cultures that have grown on the continent in reaction to … the
abandonment of social democratic principles in the face of market reformism”.15 On the other hand, writing for the Council of Europe, Pilz and Wölki-Schumacher argue that “[t]here is no one European Ultra scene” but rather there are “groups, movements and scenes that differ both from one country to another and within the curva with regard to structures, rules, main points of emphasis and ideas to what the term ‘Ultra’ means for them”.16 The goal of this thesis is to analyze how on a cross-European scale, ultras construct or reinforce a specific social, cultural, or ethnic identity in their performances. This research will focus on the cultural performances of the ultra groups of four European football teams that all have a fan base that identifies themselves with a specific political ideology, nation, or ethnicity, namely
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 135.
16 Gunter A. Pilz, Wölki-Schumacher, Franscesca. “Overview of the Ultra culture phenomenon in the Council of Europe member states in 2009”. Council of Europe T-RV 03 (2010): 5.
Celtic FC, AS Livorno Calcio, FC St. Pauli, and Athletic Bilbao. By doing an integrative comparative research on ultras operating in different national contexts, this thesis aims to provide empirical research to the discussions about the local and global elements in the ultra subculture. What are the commonalities between the ultra groups and how do different national or local cultural contexts influence the fandom spectacle? Why has the football stadium become a space where socio-political identities are collectively expressed, celebrated and occasionally ridiculed? This thesis aims to provide a comparative framework that helps to better understand this new fandom style that is rapidly gaining grounds in European football stadiums. Doidge argues that ultras are “active agents within their own identity” and
ritualistically perform this identity by relying on “the relevant components in the construction of the spectacle”.17 How are these relevant components appropriated and presented in the performance? Can we speak of a European ultra movement or are there indeed multiple ultra cultures? Ultimately, this leads to insights about fandom as a source of identification in an environment where traditional allegiances and identities are increasingly unstable, challenged, and unfixed. It also aims to provide empirical findings to discussions about how the global and local interact in the expression of collective identities and how they syncretize or clash in the expression of specific local or national socio-political identifications.
This thesis will start with a review of academic literature on football fandom and the ultras. This is done to contextualize the ultra subculture in wider academic discussions about football fandom. In the methodology chapter the methods for analyzing the four ultra groups will be explained next to the historical contexts of the researched football teams. In the analysis this thesis will analyze the cultural performances of the ultra groups by relying on Brake’s writings on subcultural style. The three main elements he recognizes as constructing a specific subcultural style are “image”, “demeanor”, and “argot”.18 Image and argot are the visual and auditory aspects with which a specific subcultural allegiance or identification can be expressed and will therefore prove to be most suitable components to research how specific national or local contexts influence the ultra performance. Blake recognizes
demeanor as the specific uses of the body that signify identification with a specific subcultural style. This thesis finds that demeanor or the use of the body is a common denominator among
17 Mark Doidge. “The Birthplace of Italian Communism: political identity and action among Livorno fans” Soccer & Society 14 no. 2 (2013): 251.
18 Udo Merkel. “Football Identity and Youth in Germany” in Richard Giulianotti & Gary Armstrong (ed) Football Cultures and Identities (Palgrave MacMillan, 1999): 56.
the researched ultra groups. The bodily practices of ultras operating in different national contexts are strikingly similar, while the national or local contexts for a large part inform the image and argot of the ultra groups. The discussion will compare and contrast the findings in the analysis. The conclusions of the research are that the cultural performances of ultras follow similar choreographic tools and themes in all case studies, but ultimately they all express a specific local socio-political identity. Therefore, the performances of the ultras can only be understood when they are placed in their specific historical and local context. All the ultra groups performitavely celebrate distinctly local identities. In doing so they rely on a wide variety of global and local symbols that are included in the spectacle to reinforce their primary identification. The performances of the ultras are thus a bricolage of global and local symbols that together are ritualistically reproduced to reinforce the primary identification of the ultras. The celebration of a local identity by relying on a set of global symbols is therefore a prime example of cultural syncretism in a globalized world or of ‘glocalization’, which shows “the societal co-presence of sameness and difference, and the intensified
interpenetration of the local and the global, the universal and the particular, and homogeneity and heterogeneity”.19
19 Richard Giulianotti, Robertson, Roland. “Recovering the social: globalization, football and transnationalism” Global Networks 7 no. 2 (2007): 169.
1. Ultras: the history, the stadium, the performance
1.1. The origins and rise of ultras in European football fandom
Compared to other forms of fandom, football holds a unique position for football fandom is arguably “a major component of the way the game is played, displayed, and sold
aesthetically”.20 The fans are both spectators and participants in the football spectacle. In some other sports the fan is expected to be as invisible as possible to not influence the course of the game. In football, the opposite is true. The fandom spectacle is often believed to have an influence on the football players, be it positive or negative, and players commonly refer to the football fans as the ‘12th man’, insinuating that a successful fanatic fandom performance equals the advantage of having an extra player on the pitch. For many European men and women fanatic football fandom also provides a powerful source of identity. It is marked by a strong “emotional, financial and physical commitment” and “many of its associated behaviors may be considered extreme, or indicative of high levels of group bonding and loyalty”.21
The aesthetic fandom performances of the football fans that branded themselves ultras that are now commonplace in the European football stadiums are a relatively new phenomenon. Fanatic football fandom manifests itself in various ways and hegemonic styles change and are relative to time and geography. In popular discourse the various subcultures in fanatic football fandom are often conflated and together branded as ‘hooliganism’, which according to Spaaij, has evolved into an umbrella-term to describe all forms of socially deviant behavior during football games.22 This conflation has also for a long time marked academic inquiries into the world of football fandom as “discourses surrounding the topic of ‘hooliganism’ have tended to establish the parameters of debate around and influence thinking about virtually every aspect of football culture”.23
20 Leon Davis. “Football fandom and authenticity: a critical discussion of historical and contemporary perspectives” Soccer & Society 16 no. 2 (2015): 423.
21 Martha Newson. “Football, fan violence, and identity fusion.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 1 no. 14 (2017): 1-2.
22 Ramon Spaaij. Understanding Football Hooliganism: A Comparison of Six Western European Football Clubs (Amsterdam UP, 2006): 11.
23 Les Back, Crabbe, Tim, and Solomos, John. “Racism in football: patterns of continuity and change” in Adam Brown (ed) Fanatics: Power, Identity and Fandom in Football (Routledge, 2002): 72.
The academic fascination with the hooligan sprang from public concerns about crowd
violence during football games in the 1970s and 1980s, which was pervasive in many parts of Europe and in particular the United Kingdom. Hooliganism, or the “competitive violence between socially organized fan groups” was even branded as the ‘English disease’.24 Football hooligans arguably became “the folk devils of our age”, a synonym for moral depravity and social decay.25 This image was compounded by various catastrophes like the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985 when crowd hostilities between Liverpool and Juventus fans caused the death of 39 people. Although the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 was later concluded to be the result of overcrowding due to police failure, the police and influential media outlets at the time blamed hooliganism and excessive drinking for the 96 fatalities during the FA Cup final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.
‘The hooligan’ is for the most part a construct in popular discourse, and only in the last decades have some fanatic football fan groups appropriated the term through what Umberto Eco called “rhetorical code-switching”.26 Most fanatic English football fans that were branded hooligans in the 1970s and 1980s would at the time rather have called themselves casuals instead. The casual subculture began as “a post-mod, post-skinhead subculture in the 1977/78 season, initially in the North of England and later in London” and combined socially
organized violence around football games with a fascination with designer clothing.27 The casuals often wore expensive clothing by brands like Lacoste, Stone Island, Burberry, and Fred Perry which helped to escape the attention of authorities who were primarily concerned with typical working-class fans. According to Williams the clothes “also represented more a defiant masculine celebration of economic depression and unemployment in the face of an overwhelming pressure to consume”.28 Through international football tournaments and the increasing media coverage of football and football-related matters since the 1980s, the casual style spread to other Northern and Western European countries and it became the dominant mode of fanatic football fandom there for the remainder of the 20th century.
24 Sean Ingle. “Football hooliganism, once the English disease, is more like a cold sore now.” The Guardian 4 November 2013, accessed, 10 May 2018.
25 Steve Redhead. Post-fandom and the Millennial Blues: The transformation of soccer culture (Routledge, 1997): 1
26 Umberto Eco. A Theory of Semiotics (Indiana UP, 1976): 286. 27 Ibid., 81.
In Southern Europe in general and Italy in particular a different mode of fanatic football fandom became dominant from the 1960s onwards. The fan groups that emerged in the Italian football stadium at the time called themselves ultras. The term ultra was first used in the French Bourbon Restoration as a synonym for ardent monarchists, and was appropriated by politically extremist protest groups (from both the left and right) that held a strong presence in the turbulent 1960s.29 In this strongly politicized atmosphere fanatic Italian football fans appropriated the ultra label and transposed it to the football stadium. This transposition of the political to the world of sport was not so much a deliberate act than a logical conclusion. In Italy the worlds of football and politics have historically been intertwined in many ways. The football fan groups were basically a continuation of a “tradition of local associations, religious and political, which are deeply rooted in Italian culture”.30 The Italian ultras were inspired by the passion and intensity of the English casuals, but differed significantly from the casuals in both their fandom practices and organization. Podaliri and Balestri argue that the ultras operated with a relative “degree of autonomy” from other fan cultures.31 Ziesche argues that the main difference between the casual hooligans and ultras “lies in their stance towards violence. Hooligan groups ‘actively seek’ violence, whereas ultras groups usually do not refrain from using violence when confronted with violence or see it as a probate means to an end (e.g. avoiding body controls at the stadium entrance)”.32
Whilst the different approach to violence is an important distinguishing factor, the different fandom styles and practices of the ultras and casuals go further than merely their stance towards physical aggression. Whereas the stadium event for the casuals is rather sober apart from the occasional outburst of organized and usually planned violence, ultras provide constant visual and auditory support throughout the whole game. According to Spaaij and Vinas, the ultra “unconditionally supports the team in an active, constructive but critical manner” through tifo which are “meticulously choreographed displays” with “large flags, mosaics, drums, flares, chants, and so forth”.33. An important inspiration of the distinct ultra
29 Mark Doidge. “Italy’s ultras: death threats, local pride and footballing farce” The Conversation 15 November 2013, accessed, 10 May 2018.
30 Rocco de Biasi, Lanfranchini, Pierre. “The Importance of Difference: Football Identities in Italy” in Gary Armstrong, Giulianotti, Richard (ed) Entering the Field: New perspectives on world football (Berg, 1997): 91. 31 Carlo Podaliri, and Carlo Balestri. “Racism and Football Culture in Italy” in Adam Brown (ed) Fanatics: Power, Identity and Fandom in Football (Routledge, 2002): 89.
32 Daniel Ziesche. “The East strikes back. Ultras Dynamo, hyper-stylization, and regimes of truth”. Sport in Society (April 10th, 2017): 889.
33 Ramon Spaaij, Carles Vinas. “Passion, politics and violence: A socio-historical analysis of Spanish ultras.” Soccer & Society 6 no. 1 (2005): 80.
style were the political protests but Guschwan argues that the ultra style of fandom also bears resemblance to the way fans behaved during traditional village horse races that historically were an important part of Italian civic identity.34
The ultras first emerged in the politicized and turbulent climate of 1960s Italy and accordingly the first ultra groups organized themselves around political and ideological loyalties. Whereas English rivalries were usually based on traditional local animosities, Italian ultra groups befriended those with the same political orientation and contested those on other sides of the political spectrum, notwithstanding geographical locations. Podaliri and Balestri state that the “mixture of football support and political forms was absorbed by the ultra groups, and was evident in their behavior patterns and in their organizational structures”.35 The ultras drew their inspiration from the radical political protest groups from both the left and right. Occasionally ultras were associated with these organizations as well. The ultra groups organized themselves around the principles of these protest groups and transposed their methods and style to the Italian football stadium. This clear infusion of traditional football fandom with the radical political elements of the 1960s protests gave the ultras their distinct characteristics which can still be witnessed in the performances of European ultras today.
Not only the methods of fandom showed this unique fusion between political protest and football fandom, also the organizational structure of the first ultra groups was directly
borrowed from the Italian political sphere. Ultras organize on their curve, which is usually the traditionally working-class terrace in the stadium. The goal of the ultra group is to gain hegemonic control over the curve and in order to do so a certain level of organizational structure is necessary.36 Podaliri and Balestri argue that the “Italian supporters felt that the activities borrowed from politics and aimed at socializing and increasing curve participation were a real priority”.37 The first ultra groups had a structured or semi-structured organization with membership cards, a division of tasks, and a behavioral code to which the members were supposed to adhere. This contrasted with the more loose organizational structure of the
English casuals. Being an ultra meant an investment that went beyond the match day. Preparing the banners and the pyrotechnic shows and organizing the transport to football
34 Matthew Guschwan. “Stadium as public sphere.” Sport in Society 17 no. 7 (2014): 897.
35 Carlo Podaliri, and Carlo Balestri. “Racism and Football Culture in Italy” in Adam Brown (ed) Fanatics: Power, Identity and Fandom in Football (Routledge, 2002): 89.
36 Ibid., 92. 37 Ibid., 91.
games in other stadiums required a certain level of structure and organization which mirrored the organization of the political protest groups that swarmed the streets of Italy in the 1960s and early 1970s.
Podaliri and Balestri argue that this explicitly political form of football fandom constituted the first era in Italian ultra fandom. During the 1980s the Italian ultra subculture saw some
pervasive changes. This coincided with the spread of the ultra mode of fandom to other countries. The Italian ultras in the 1980s were “less ideologically political” and whereas in the first phase leftist ideologies dominated the terraces, from the 1980s onwards right-wing parties found their way into the ultra subculture which “facilitated racist and xenophobic behavioural patterns inside the stadia”.38 Violence also became more prominent. Local pride in many cases substituted political ideologies, which Podaliri and Balestri ascribe to the “ebbing of political movements”, the wider socio-political context of Italian regionalism and the “increase of intolerance in Italian society towards new immigrants coming from poorer countries”.39
During the 1980s, when the Italian ultra scene saw a significant shift to localism and neo-fascism, the ultra model of fandom first spread to other countries. Spaaij and Vinas note how the 1982 World Cup served as a catalyst for Spanish football fans. Enthused by the Italian ultras, young Spanish football fans started to form ultra groups around their football teams.40 Also in France and Portugal ultra groups started to emerge. Through international
tournaments and mediatized football events, football fans across the whole of Europe were introduced to the Italian mode of football fandom. During the 1990s, ultra groups started to emerge in Greece, Turkey and former Yugoslavia as well. Doidge and Leiser note that this still had to do mostly with geographical proximity and the popularity of Italian football in these regions.41
38 Mark Doidge, and Martin Lieser. “The importance of research on the ultras: introduction”. Sport in Society (April 20, 2017): 834.
39 Carlo Podaliri, and Carlo Balestri. “Racism and Football Culture in Italy” in Adam Brown (ed) Fanatics: Power, Identity and Fandom in Football (Routledge, 2002): 94.
40 Ramon Spaaij, and Carles Viñas. “Political ideology and activism in football fan culture in Spain: a view from the far left”. Soccer & Society 14, nr. 2 (2013): 186.
41 Mark Doidge, and Martin Lieser. “The importance of research on the ultras: introduction”. Sport in Society (April 20, 2017): 2.
The late 20th and early 21st century saw the spread of the ultra subculture to Northern and Eastern Europe. Doidge and Lieser note that especially in Germany, Poland, Austria and the Czech Republic the curves in the football stadiums were rapidly dominated by newly
established ultra groups.42 In countries like England, Scotland, The Netherlands and Denmark the casual mode of fandom was relatively strongly ingrained in their respective football fandom cultures, but recent years also saw the emergence of several ultra groups in these countries.43 Doidge states that “[t]elevision and social media” were the main catalysts for the spread of ultras in other parts of Europe in the 21st century.44 According to Kossakowski the increasing popularity of the ultra movement in Europe is inextricably linked to the
simultaneous decline of the English mode of fandom, the hooliganism of the so-called casuals. Modernization of football stadiums and stronger police presence has generally pushed the football hooligans out of the stadium which created more space for the visual and auditory ultra mode of fandom.45 This is just one reason why the ultras became a dominant presence in European football stadiums. It was undoubtedly strongly influenced by the crackdown on the casual’s violence, but both the autonomous and spectacular performances and the politicized aspects of the ultra mode of fandom resonated strongly with fanatic European football fans that see the ultra mode of fandom as a retort to the perceived rapid commercialization of professional football.46
1.2.Football fandom in its social and political context
Bromberger argues that in modern societies football is “a primordial space for making collective identities known through confrontation, and that its success in fact proceeds from its capacity to generate group adhesions and make them known”.47 The athletic event of the football game is in itself a confrontation between two teams, but the importance of this athletic event is amplified by the football fans who infuse this event with symbolic social and
42 Ibid.
43 David Kennedy. “A contextual analysis of Europe’s ultra football supporters movement” Soccer & Society 14 no. 2 (2013): 132.
44 Mark Doidge, and Martin Lieser. “The importance of research on the ultras: introduction”. Sport in Society (April 20, 2017): 2.
45 Radosław Kossakowski. “Where Are the Hooligans? Dimensions of Football Fandom in Poland”. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 52, nr. 6 (2017): 696.
46 Mark Doidge. “Italy’s ultras: death threats, local pride and footballing farce” The Conversation 15 November 2013, accessed, 10 May 2018.
47 Ekain Rojo-Labaien. “Football and the representation of Basque identity in the contemporary age” Soccer & Society 18 no. 1 (2017): 66.
political meanings. Fanatic football fans often regard the football team as a representation of a collective identity or a “specific mode of collective existence”.48 The football stadium is one of the rare spaces in modern life where “collective emotions are unleashed” and where “socially taboo values are allowed to be expressed”.49 Football thus constitutes something resembling deep play for the fanatic football fans, where the meaning of the confrontation in the athletic event is compounded and amplified by symbols and meanings that go beyond the athletic event in itself. As Eric Hobsbawm argued, “for the majority of humanity today, it is eleven young men on a football pitch who embody ‘the nation’, the state, ‘our people’”, and this counts not only for the nation but for any other social identifier, be it local, regional or religious.50 Football fandom’s quality to assign meaning to football teams that go beyond the athletic event is reflected in many famous football rivalries. For instance, German teams FC St. Pauli and Hamburger SV are known to be archrivals, but they only played together in the same league for 7 years since World War II. Although they rarely play against each other, the two teams have come to reflect different and opposing modes of collective existence for its fans.
Especially in recent years, after most fanatic football fans started to adhere to the ultra subculture, the football fan experience has developed into more of a spectacle. Bromberger argues that the “behavior of the crowd is certainly a noisy affirmation of a specific identity, but it is also a condition of taking part in the excitement”.51 Football fandom is thus “a powerful catalyst for social identities” as well as what Bakhtin branded a carnivalesque festivity. The chaos and immensity of the fandom spectacle represents “the performance of an otherwise mute and largely unconscious popular resistance to the restrictions and limitations of the parent culture”.52 Through hedonistic and eccentric performances on the stands, the dominant conventional norms and values are temporarily inverted in the football stadium and sometimes ridiculed. It is this carnivalesque element of football fandom and its flirtation with rebellion and transgression that has led to the popular stigmatization of fanatic football fans as violent and irrational.
48
Christian Bromberger. “Football as world-view and as ritual” French Cultural Studies 6 (1995): 303. 49 Ibid., 302.
50 Eric Hobsbawm. Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century. (Little Brown and Company, 2013): 59.
51 Christian Bromberger. “Football as world-view and as ritual” French Cultural Studies 6 (1995): 303. 52 Mikita Hoy. “Joyful Mayhem: Bakhtin, football songs, and the carnivalesque” Text and Performance Quarterly 14 no. 4 (1994): 302.
Football as a carnivalesque domain where socio-political identities are performed by the fans in the stands often clashes with football as a global commercial domain and the
commercialization of football since the 1980s has led to increasing tensions between the two domains. It can be argued that the rise and spread of the aesthetic and performative ultra subculture in football fandom is a response to the increased efforts of authorities and club boards to limit and contain the carnivalesque elements of fanatic football fandom. This is exemplified by the often awkward relationships between ultras and the board of their football team where the ultras generally consider themselves to be the only loyal element of a football team that is usually under the control of a board that does not understand the social and political meanings the ultras assign to their football team. This tension between the carnivalesque fandom performances of the ultras and the commodification of professional football led to a persistent sense of marginalization within the ultra subculture and today in most European ultra groups “resistance ideologies” can be identified.53 These ideologies of resistance against the system are “generated by those actors who are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination, thus building trenches of resistance and survival on the basis of principles different from, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of society”.54 These resistance ideologies consist of an “undisputable libertarian element” which is closely linked to the anti-structure of the carnivalesque.55 Testa and Armstrong argue that ultras organize themselves around the principle that they are
“undergoing a never ending shared ordeal” where their way of life is constantly under threat from the club, other supporter groups, the media, and a plethora of other forces.56 Ideologies of marginalization and resistance are a common binding element in the European ultra subculture.
Ultras thus reinforce the collective socio-political identities through ritualistic performances in the football stadium. These performances are framed as celebrations of this identity and as an act of resistance against forces that aim to disconnect the historical context from the football team. Historically, football has been a “ready and flexible vehicle through which
53 Ramon Spaaij, and Carles Viñas. “Political ideology and activism in football fan culture in Spain: a view from the far left”. Soccer & Society 14, nr. 2 (2013): 183.
54 Manuel Castells. The power of identity (Wiley, 1997): 8.
55 Gabriel Kuhn. Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics (PM Press, 2011): 162. 56 Alberto Testa, Armstrong, Gary. Football, Fascism, and Fandom (A&C, 2010): 85.
ideological associations can be reinforced”.57 The social, political, ethnic, or religious identity that is reinforced and celebrated is drawn from the historical context in which the football team was initially founded. Sometimes this historical identity is reflected in the name of the football team. Arsenal FC was founded by blue-collar factory workers that were employed in the gun factories of North London and Celtic FC was founded by Irish immigrants that moved to the docks of Western Glasgow at the end of the 19th century. Ultras legitimize their self-conception as the authentic element of the football team by drawing upon this shared history and their performances reinforce these specific historical identities. Ultras thus constitute an imagined community that legitimizes its existence with a certain interpretation of a shared history and they perceive themselves as the only group that represents this historical community in contemporary football.
Such an imagined community based on a shared history inherently demarcates insiders and outsiders. Often the ultras’ own identity is principally defined through antagonisms with others. It is therefore that Critchley argues that football “can license the most egregious forms of tribalism at the level of club and the ugliest nationalism at the level of country”.58 Problems with racism, nationalism, and parochialism in football fandom are well-documented and stem largely from the ‘us versus them’ identification processes that can be perceived in football fandom. In ultras’ fandom performances they rely on a strategy that Thompson called “the expurgation of the other”, which involves “the construction of an enemy which is portrayed as evil, harmful or threatening and which individuals are called upon collectively to resist or expurgate”.59 In the world of modern football these are fans of the historically rival football teams, but also the political and football authorities are felt to threaten the cohesion of the imagined historical community and identity of the football fans.
In a response to the globalization and commodification of football, the ultras identify as a resistance actor. This also explains the politicization of the ultras which contrasts with other football fandom cultures that have been dominant in the past. Ultras use the football stadium as a space for protest against anyone who is said to threaten the collective identity of the football fans and against those who aim to anaesthetize the passion involved in the
57 John Hoberman. Sport and political ideology (Heinemann, 1984): 10.
58 Simon Critchley. What We Think About When We Think About Soccer (Penguin Press, 2017): 151.
59 Ramon Spaaij, and Carles Viñas. “Political ideology and activism in football fan culture in Spain: a view from the far left”. Soccer & Society 14, nr. 2 (2013): 186.
celebrations of these collective identities. The political engagement and the protests that the ultras often stage in the football stadium have become popular subjects among scholars researching football fandom. Kennedy argues that in respect to the politicization of ultras in Europe, “the ultra movement takes its place among radical political cultures that have grown on the continent in reaction to … the abandonment of social democratic principles in the face of market reformism”.60 Authors like Spaaij and Vinas argue that such a classification would be exaggerated. Instead, they argue that the use of symbols take precedent over a thick and coherent ideological agenda in most ultra groups.61 This thesis aims to address this difficulty in understanding the actions and performances of ultras and their engagement with broader political and social issues by researching and contextualizing the messages the ultras express in their performance.
1.3.Theorizing the football stadium
To understand why ultras use football games as a site for expressions and celebrations of socio-political identities, it is essential to contextualize the space in which they operate. The football stadium is the designated space wherein the fandom performances of the ultras take place on a cyclical and regular basis. The stadium is the theatre for the ultra performance and the space where their ideological associations are expressed freely. For the ultras the stadium is a genius locus, a distinct and sanctuary place. It is also a “symbolic territory that is separate from their everyday lives” and they often develop a deep “emotional attachment to ‘their’ stadium”.62 The unique and ambiguous features of the stadium in the modern sporting ritual for a large part inform the practices in the ultra subculture. The modern European football stadium is “a residual bastion of blue-collar masculinity and its associated cultural baggage” that remains “a place of ritual, with its clients often succeeding, through various forms of resistance, in preventing its conversion into a sanitized space”.63 Bale argues that the stadium at once symbolizes “human confinement and freedom, the closed and the open”.64 It is an ambiguous site of resistance and protest and one of the most guarded and secured spaces in
60 David Kennedy. “A contextual analysis of Europe’s ultra football supporters movement” Soccer & Society 14 no. 2 (2013): 135.
61 Ramon Spaaij, and Carles Viñas. “Political ideology and activism in football fan culture in Spain: a view from the far left”. Soccer & Society 14, nr. 2 (2013): 185.
62
Mark Doidge. “Il Calcio as a Source of Local and Social Identity in Italy.” in Udo Merkel (ed) Identity Discourses and Communities in International Events, Festivals and Spectacles. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015): 44. 63 John Bale. “Introduction” in John Bale, Moen, Olaf (ed.) The Stadium and The City (Keele UP, 1995): 13. 64 Ibid., 12.
modern life. This thesis will follow Bale and Guschwan among others by seeing the football stadium as a liminal space wherein football supporters communicate and reinforce primary identifications through performative and ritualistic choreographies. Because of these rather unique qualities, Hobsbawm argued that the football stadium would be the most suitable symbol of the public sphere in the 21st century.65 With its theatrical and discursive features, the football stadium serves as the liminal space in which the ultras appropriate and express identities in their fandom performances.
The reason why football is a “ready and flexible vehicle through which ideological
associations can be reinforced” can for a large part be explained by the liminal qualities of the football stadium.66 Football is one of the few sports where an unambiguous separation
between players and audience has not yet been attained, notwithstanding efforts from many politicians and authorities. In football “there are strong aural and visual links between spectators and players”, exceeding the critical distance between athlete and spectator that in other sports is carefully observed.67 In football, as stated earlier, the audience is arguably both a participant and spectator. Since the 1990s however, most modern European football
stadiums are designed to enlarge the distance between spectator and football player through “rigidly-defined metrical and ordered cells” where every attendant has their own allocated space to watch the game.68 These widespread stadium modernizations were a response to the violence and social deviant behavior that was persistent during the 1980s.69 Modernization of football stadiums usually involved the installing of camera security, gates, and large nets that aim to prevent the throwing of objects on the field. For ultras this increased policing of their performance has in turn served as “a new social context through which these fans redefine their social identity”.70 The constant surveillance and criminalization of behavior that ultras regard as ‘authentic’ fandom emphasizes the idea that the ultra subculture is under constant threat from outside forces. Consequently, “[t]his process leads to the unification of fans,
65
Eric Hobsbawm. Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century. (Little Brown and Company, 2013): 34.
66John Hoberman. Sport and political ideology (Heinemann, 1984): 10.
67 John Bale. “The Stadium as Theatre: A Metaphor for our Times” in John Bale, Moen, Olaf (ed.) The Stadium and The City (Keele UP, 1995): 315.
69 Ibid., 317.
70 Alain Brechbühl, Schumacher Dimech, Annemarie & Seiler, Roland. “Policing Football Fans in Switzerland: A Case Study Involving Fans, Stadium Security Employees, and Police Officers.” A Journal of Policy and Practice no. 1 (2017): 2.
creating perceptions of empowerment giving legitimacy to collective resistance of the police’s actions”.71 The modernization of football stadiums has thus encouraged the “resistance
ideology” with libertarian underpinnings that comes to define most ultra groups.72
The ultra performances can be said to be an act of resistance to this separation by making themselves visible within the stadium, and through their banners, songs, and other actions bridge the distance between the sporting event and the fandom performance. The violations of boundaries that can be witnessed in the fandom performance make the stadium a liminal space or a space where “sport overflows the normal boundaries of the game”.73 For the ultras the stadium constitutes a limen for it is a “symbolic territory that is separate from their everyday lives” and therefore during the sporting spectacle there is a temporary inversion or transcendence of regular social conventions and during the game the ultras assume “a centrality” that is arguably “denied them in other areas of life”.74 The football stadium is a space where the social hierarchies of everyday life are transcended or disappear and where the boundaries of the sport spectacle are transgressed by the aesthetic performances of the ultras. John Bale compares the football stadium to the traditional organic theatre where “[t]he spectator and the performer share the same space and sometimes exchange spaces”.75 This exchanging of the front stage happens in football when ultras through their practices become the center of the sporting event. This sometimes happens when, for instance, the ultras set off pyrotechnics that make the field invisible. In the football stadium the boundaries are
transgressed and transcended during the sporting event.
The concept of liminality is closely related to theories of ritual. Sporting events like football games can arguably be considered a modern-day ritual that shares similarities with events like church masses and village carnivals that used to play a big part in social life. Sport and ritual have always been closely related. In ancient Greece, games like the Olympic Games were traditionally full of ritualistic performances, as the Olympic flame still reminds us of.76
71 Ibid.
72 Ramon Spaaij, and Carles Viñas. “Political ideology and activism in football fan culture in Spain: a view from the far left”. Soccer & Society 14, nr. 2 (2013): 183.
73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 317. 75 Ibid., 318.
76 John J. MacAloon. “Introduction: the Olympic Flame Relay. Local knowledges of a global ritual form.” Sport in Society 15 no. 5 (2012): 575.
Today sport “continues to be a ritualistic experience” that “occurs within a ritualized space”.77 Bromberger was one of the first authors to expand on the idea of football fandom as a ritual. He attributes rituals the following properties: “a break with everyday routine”, “a specific spatio-temporal framework”, “a carefully programmed schedule of ceremonies … with a view to achieving some transcendent ends”, “a symbolic configuration”, “the establishment … of an ‘anti-structure’, freed from ordinary hierarchies regulating social life” and finally “the moral obligation to participate”.78 Bromberger bases his definition of ritual on V.W.Turner’s The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. This famous study on rituals in African tribes stressed the function of liminality in rituals and the consequent phase of anti-structure that served to generate a sense of communitas, a truly organic bond between the participants of the ritual that underlines the group’s collective existence.
Rituals are traditionally considered to consist of three distinct phases. The first phase signifies “the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure”. The second phase is the liminal phase, the phase that has “few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state”. The third and last phase is the phase of “reaggregation or reincorporation” where the “passage is consummated”.79 This second liminal phase gets most of Turner’s attention. The liminal phase is an in-between phase. People are not bounded by the structures of ordinary life before and have not yet fully incorporated the meaning of the ritual. It is in this phase, void of structure and crossing or transcending certain social
boundaries, that the organic bond of the communitas is attained. Bromberger, Giulanotti and Merkel among others argue that this liminality phase is what takes place in the stadium during the football game which is facilitated by the liminal properties that the football stadium offers. The ultras “symbolically detach themselves from the mundane in order to engage in the performance of the ritual”, and these rituals create what Turner called an “anti-structure”, a space where the social hierarchies of everyday life are transcended or disappear.80 The football stadium serves as the physical space for the ultras where “they reproduce the
ritualistic actions that generate the collective effervescence of the crowd”.81 The rules on the
77 Mark Doidge. “Il Calcio as a Source of Local and Social Identity in Italy.” in Udo Merkel (ed) Identity Discourses and Communities in International Events, Festivals and Spectacles. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015): 42. 78 Christian Bromberger. “Football as world-view and as ritual” French Cultural Studies 6 (1995): 305-306. 79 Victor W. Turner. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Cornell, 1991): 94,95.
80 Ibid., vii.
81 Mark Doidge. “Il Calcio as a Source of Local and Social Identity in Italy.” in Udo Merkel (ed) Identity Discourses and Communities in International Events, Festivals and Spectacles. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015): 44.
curve during football games are detached from the hierarchies of ordinary life. Behavior that is considered extreme, irrational, and some acts that do not fit in general gender stereotypes (hugging, kissing) are all temporarily normalized on the curve.82
The ritualistic dimension of the football game within the liminal and ambiguous space of the stadium, where structures and boundaries of social conventions and the athletic event are constantly blurred, changing, and transcended, creates a space where the ultras can perform and reinforce socio-political identifications with a freedom that is relatively rare in
contemporary European societies where there is increasingly less space for the expression of collective identities. As Bromberger argues, a “carnivalesque atmosphere” is created where social and political critiques are expressed “through exaggerated clothing, speech and symbols”.83 Testa and Armstrong argue that the football stadium can be compared to the classical Greek agora, a marketplace of ideas and political expression, “one of the few surviving places in which a group may jointly express sentiments of rebellion and collective identity”.84 Efforts by the authorities to sanitize the stadium from its rebellious dimension are met with heavy resistance by many ultra groups that feel deeply affiliated with the stadium that for them is one of the few spaces in modern life that represents “a liberation from the regimes of normative practices and performance codes”.85
Drawing on Testa and Armstrong’s conception of the football stadium as a modern-day agora, Matthew Guschwan argues that the liminal space of the stadium provides a “flawed site for political discourse” but nonetheless “one of the few opportunities for public co-presence or aggregation and it is an essential topic of our corporate media-inflected public discourse”.86 The stadium is one of the few spaces remaining in modern societies where citizens meet on a cyclical basis, and its liminal qualities provide a space where political and cultural commentaries can be espoused in relative freedom. The highly aesthetic and
spectacular performances of the ultras that reinforce primary identifications are very suitable for reproduction in the media and consequently enter the “virtual public sphere” which in
82 Andy Harvey, Piotrowska, Agnieszka. “Intolerance and joy, violence and love among male football fans: towards a psychosocial explanation of ‘excessive’ behaviors” Sport in Society 16 no. 10 (2013): 1403. 83 Christian Bromberger. La Partitia di Calcio:Etnologia di una passion (Riuniti, 1996): 224.
84 Alberto Testa, Armstrong, Gary. Football, Fascism, and Fandom (A&C, 2010): 85.
85 John Bale. “The Stadium as Theatre: A Metaphor for our Times” in John Bale, Moen, Olaf (ed.) The Stadium and The City (Keele UP, 1995): 317.
many ways is the closest modern societies come to Habermas’ conception of the public sphere, albeit ostensibly very flawed and fragmented.87
The ritualistic dimensions of the football fandom spectacle take place in the liminal and ambigious space of the stadium. The stadium thus constitutes a vital element of the ultra performance, and conceptualizing it as a liminal space where the structures and boundaries of outside society are blurred together with the boundaries between athletes and players, serves as an explanation for why the ultras reinforce their socio-political identities so fanatically during the athletic event of the football match. The resistance ideology of ultras and the construction of narratives where ultras are under threat by outside forces can only be manifested in the anti-structure of the modern football stadium where ultras are temporarily not bounded by the structures of everyday life and where they see themselves as participants in a ritual that constitutes the fans as part of a larger socio-political communal identity.
1.4.The ultra spectacle as a cultural performance
The football stadium is often compared to the organic ‘environmental’ theatre where “the audience is transformed from a collection of separate individuals into a group or congregation of individuals” through a set of ritualistic actions that complicate the boundaries between spectators and participants.88 In the play Stadium by Mohamed El Khatib this comparison is drawn further when he let ultras of French football team RC Lens perform their
choreographies within the actual theatre. The play shows how the stadium and the organic theatre are in some respects interchangeable spaces. For the ultras, the stadium is the stage of the spectacle, but how should we interpret the fandom performance of the ultras? Ultras are actively engaged in the dramaturgy of the football spectacle within the liminal, marginal space of the football stadium. The ultras can be said to be involved in performances that are aimed to generate and express a community, or a communitas in Turner’s terminology. In the football stadium this communitas’ existence is expressed in front of an audience. In fanatic football fandom, the football club is part of the fan’s individual and collective identity, because these football teams historically “represent religious, class and other divides”.89 This expression of societal, religious, or economic fault lines gives the football game “social
87 Ibid., 887.
88 Richard Schechner. Performance Theory (Routledge, 1988): 143.
meaning” that goes beyond the actual football game and gives the game more significance.90 The socio-political identities are emphasized in the carnivalesque fandom performances of the ultras, in contrast to ‘Others’ who always represent the binary opposite of what the particular ultra group is set to embody. This intersection of the social and political outside the football stadium with the “artful, reflexive, and performative” fandom spectacle in the liminality of the football stadium makes the ultras such a fascinating subculture in football fandom.91 This thesis follows authors like Guschwan who argue that the fandom performance of the ultras should be considered cultural performances that “represent and comment upon the values and ideas of the society that stages the performance”.92
The concept of cultural performativity draws heavily on work from anthropologists and performance studies scholars and is particularly inspired by the work of Victor W. Turner and Emile Durkheim on rituals. Cultural performances, in the words of Alexander, are “the social process by which actors, individually or in concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation”.93 MacAloon sees cultural performances as “occasions in which as a culture or society we reflect upon and define ourselves, dramatize our collective myths and history, present ourselves with alternatives, and eventually change in some ways while remaining the same in others”.94 The cultural performance shares a lot of the same constitutive elements of the ritual as defined by Bromberger. Singer argues that the cultural performance “has a definitely limited time span, a beginning and end, an organized program of activity, a set of performers, an audience, and a place and occasion of performance”.95 By relying on
dramaturgical methods and practices, the actors in a cultural performance reflect and
articulate their interpretation of their own or others’ social situation and “provide a structured outlet for people to channel their creative energies and to confirm and contest the values of their societies”.96 These performances are thus grounded in a cultural context, where the performances are understood by the audience immediately. In the performance the actors are united as a common force in an otherwise often fragmented or individualized society. Like in
90 Ibid., 315. 91 Ibid., 292. 92 Ibid.
93 Jeffrey Alexander. “Cultural pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy.” in Jeffrey
Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Jason L. Mast (ed.) Social Performance: Symbolic action, cultural pragmatics, and ritual. (Cambridge UP, 2006): 32.
94 John J. MacAloon. “Introduction: Cultural Performances, Culture Theory” in John J. MacAloon (ed) Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals towards a Theory of Cultural Performance (Philadelphia, 1984): 4. 95 Milton Singer. Traditional India: structure and change (Texas UP, 1959): xiii.
a traditional nomadic ritual, “identity or solidarity” is “generated from the collective emotion generated in the ritual”, clearly dividing the participants with those who are not partaking.97 The performances also introduce, or make visible, the social situation of the participants to the outsiders witnessing the performance.
Ultras are football fans that, as we have seen, are involved in such performances. They consider themselves members and heirs of a particular historical social identity that is often marginalized in wider society. In the liminal and ambigious space of the football stadium, the ultras express these identities through performative acts in front of an audience. The ultras use symbols, banners, drums, and pyrotechnics in a complex ritualistic choreography that aims to reify their primary identification and to make their social situation known to the audience and opponent. Although it has been done very limitedly so far in football fandom studies, seeing the ultra mode of fandom as a cultural performance can provide valuable insights into how the ultras represent a certain socio-political identity through the fandom performance and what these appropriations are meant to convey to both the ultras themselves and the audience. Kossakowski et al. argue that “in nearly every country fans make use of performance as a tool of manifesting their identity or their concern with social problems which affect them”.98 The ultra performance involves “the presence of an audience”, is “delimited”, and “never the same”.99 The performances not only represent the individual’s experience, but “a recognized and culturally coded pattern of behavior”.100 The performances are thus grounded in a particular cultural context in which these performances are meaningful.
1.5.The ultras as a European phenomenon
The cultural performances of the ultras are rooted in and commenting on a particular cultural context, but does this mean that there is not one ultra subculture in European fanatic football fandom but that we should rather speak of several culturally specific ultra cultures? To what extent do local traditions and customs influence interpretations of what constitutes an ultra group? Recent literature on the ultra subculture is occupied with this question about the
97 Mark Doidge. “Il Calcio as a Source of Local and Social Identity in Italy.” in Udo Merkel (ed) Identity Discourses and Communities in International Events, Festivals and Spectacles. (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015): 44. 98 Radoslaw Kossakowski, Szlendak, Tomas, and Antonowicz, Dominik. “Polish ultras in the post-socialist transformation.” Soccer & Society (April 10th, 2017): 857.
99 Ibid., 4. 100 Ibid.
