This right on top of an even worse situation in Rome the previous night when fans of the host club Roma clashed with the visiting Manchester United supporters and opposing fans bayed and snarled at each other in their hundreds, through a thin dividing barrier. The Italian police launched into the crowd of Manchester United fans swinging batons with gusto and, it has to be said, excess but that does not excuse the nonesense that preceded their action. Eleven United supporters were taken to hospital one with a rumoured skull fracture.
What used to be called the British disease is now the European one and Rome in particular is a venue for travelling British fans to avoid. In past seasons fans from Middlesbrough and Liverpool have been stabbed during matches at AC Roma and the club has a bad reputation for crowd violence. Italy in general seems to have become a focal point for this kind of problem, the whole of the Italian League being suspended earlier in the season when a policeman was killed during a Sicilian local 'derby' between Catania and Palermo.
South America is possibly even worse with major soccer riots having occurred for many years in just about all the Republics.
But why is it? And why doesn't spectator violence seem to be a major factor in the United States. America is, in some ways, a more violent society than Europe yet the country seems to be mercifully free of the sports crowd rioting so familiar in Europe. Is it because rivalry between football and baseball teams, while keen, is not an all consuming passion as soccer support seems to be for so many in Europe? I'd welcome any American comments on this.
Sociologists and psychologists have tried to find reasons but I'm not convinced that anyone has really put their finger on it. The British have a drink culture and consequently an alcohol problem but I don't believe alcohol is even the prime cause of this. So much of it is mob rule and premeditated. Certainly the current crop of violence, particularly in Britain, is a pale shadow of the horrors of the 1980s which culminated in the terrible events at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, Belgium during the European Cup Final between Juventus of Italy and Liverpool of England when, following crowd violence 39 people died and 400 were injured when a large wall collapsed on people fleeing the violence. However the signs of the disease creeping back to former levels needs to be carefully watched.
After Heysel, the Conservative Government in Britain made sweeping changes to the structure of football grounds, insisting on all-seater stadia and, at first, perimeter fencing around the pitches. This latter was soon abandoned when it was pointed out that if violence did break out people would have no escape from it. The consequence of this change was, almost overnight, to change the nature not only of the stadia but the paying customer too, for the cost of attending a game rose astronomically pricing out many of the former 'working class' tribal patrons and encouraging a new richer 'elite'. Certainly much of the yob violence dropped completely but so did the atmosphere and colour with which local support used to be associated.
Now the violence is back and again the psychologists are asking themselves if they treated the symptom and not the disease when they gave their original remedy to government back in the 80s. It seems to be a complex mish mash of warped nationalism, tribal hunger and some strange way of 'being somebody'.
Whatever the cause of this sudden upsurge which seems to be spreading through Europe like a rash, it is taking away the focus from where it ought to be and that's on the game of Association Football, the greatest game on earth.
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