Hooligans Disrupt Italian Soccer Matches as Country Awaits the 1990 World Cup

On a recent Sunday, 2,000 Rome police officers were dispatched to Olympic Stadium. Their assignment: Body-search every person entering the 66,500-capacity arena for the Italian League match between defending champion Juventus and Roma.

Even with such extraordinary security measures, one fan snuck into the stadium with an ax, which was thrown against a net used to protect players entering the field.

Officials still judged the November day a success, since no one was injured or arrested at the game, an increasingly rare occurrence in Italian soccer.

Despite innovative security measures and greater numbers of police at stadiums, authorities still are looking for the answer to violence among the huge crowds who attend the matches in Italy, which is set to host the World Cup in just over three years.

Since the season began, one youth has been killed, two badly stabbed and more than 100 people arrested in match-related violence.

In clashes with troublemakers, who throw stones and sharpened coins and carry knifes and clubs, police have used tear gas on almost every Sunday this season.

Crowd violence also has spilled out of the stadiums. Youths often attack tour buses containing rival supporters, wait at junctions to stone private cars carrying visiting fans or fight pitched battles at railroad stations.

In early December in Ascoli, a youth was stabbed to death outside a discotheque in a brawl between rival fans of second-division clubs Ascoli and Sambenedettese.

“All you need is a bus with 50 crazy kids and you have chaos. These delinquents--I don’t call them supporters--are looking for an outlet and when they don’t find it elsewhere they look for it at soccer matches,” says Umberto Esposito, a Roma official.

Roma has taken several new measures to try and halt troublemakers. Representatives of the team’s numerous fan clubs hold meetings with officials before all home games to try to pinpoint possible trouble.

Alcohol long has been banned at Rome’s Olympic stadium and the prohibition has now been extended to soft drink cans and plastic bottles. Police presence has been increased, with the force deployed for the Juventus game the largest ever.

For away games, Roma insists that fans produce an identity card in order to buy tickets to prevent hooligans, who call themselves “ultras,” from sparking trouble on the road.

That policy, however, failed to work in Roma’s Nov. 23 league match with Fiorentina in Florence.

At that game, a 19-year-old Roma supporter was stabbed in the back by fans of his own club. Later, police fired teargas at thugs who wrecked buses and destroyed cafes outside Florence’s stadium.

“Sometimes restricting tickets makes little difference because these delinquents climb over the stadium walls. They don’t even pay for the train to the game, never mind the tickets,” Esposito said.

Florence’s stadium is one of 12 which will be used for the 1990 World Cup. Heralded as an architectural triumph when it was opened in 1931, the stadium has become a security risk.

Only 8,000 out of a capacity crowd of 65,000 have seats and the terraces are two long strips of crumbling concrete and rusty metal barriers, which make crowd control almost impossible.

Other stadiums are in worse condition.

The total cost of rebuilding or redesigning the 12 stadiums is estimated at around $265 million.

Initial construction plans include dividing up terraces into sections that can be sealed off in the event of crowd trouble, using television cameras to spot troublemakers and providing more seats--crowd violence nearly always takes place in the standing areas.

The lessons of the disaster in Brussel’s Heysel Stadium in May 1985, when 39 soccer fans, mainly Italian, were killed when a crowd rioted at the final of the European Champions’ Cup between Liverpool and Juventus of Turin, have not been lost.

English and Italian fans were allowed to buy tickets on the same terrace for that game and were separated only by a flimsy wire fence.

Belgian justice officials have said they were able to identify many thugs from television footage of the disaster, allowing a prosecutor this month in Rome to indict 26 British fans for manslaughter in that riot.

“Our hooligans are not as bad as the British,” Esposito said. “But still the level of violence is often intense in Italy. Soccer is like a fuse, sometimes things explode.”