A death shakes Italian soccer

Tears slid down the cheeks of Sicilian policemen Monday. A procession through Catania trailed an officer’s coffin and featured his 9-year-old son carrying his late father’s beret into the cathedral. Onlookers clapped solemnly per tradition. Italy’s main public TV channel trained on the funeral for two live hours. Pope Benedict XVI sent a telegram of condolence.

Could this moment spur reform for a nation’s soccer violence plague?

The death of 38-year-old officer Filippo Raciti last Friday night in a riot in Catania on Sicily’s east coast marked Italy’s 13th soccer-related death since 1962. It came 12 years after an AC Milan fan stabbed to death a Genoa fan just outside the stadium, three years after Italy’s former interior minister outlined safety provisions seldom followed, and six days after a club official in a lower league died trying to help quell a postgame fight among players.

Raciti died of injuries from a blunt object and officials suspended the weekend’s slate of matches in the country’s top league, Serie A, as a soccer-crazy country is still dealing with a 2006 match-fixing scandal, yet still glowing from last year’s World Cup title.

As Italian officials hurriedly met, some suggested consulting England, which has suppressed its hooliganism problem with an efficacy widely admired. Many began debating playing matches in empty Italian stadiums.

The latest Italian soccer riot happened after years of ample hints of violence -- in the form of brawling, racist chants and banners in certain fan segments, even a major 2005 European Champions League match played behind locked gates in Milan after fans deluged players with bottles and flares.

“We should put aside our Latin pride and call the English to teach us how they managed to solve their problem, which had become enormously serious,” film director Franco Zeffirelli told the Ansa news agency.

In an online survey by the newspaper La Repubblica, 59% of respondents called for the cancellation of the remainder of the soccer season, and 35% voted for a lengthy pause.

Sustaining the pause would have considerable emotional and financial ramifications for a soccer league many consider the best in the world.

“We are pained, but the show must go on,” Italian football league president Antonio Matarrese said Monday. “Soccer must never shut down.”

As the Italian cabinet aimed to meet on the issue Wednesday, interior minister Giuliano Amato said, “Matches will be played in empty stadiums until security standards are met.”

Security measures already suggested in 2003 mirror some of the English solutions. They include banning indiscriminate ticket sales to visiting-team fans, increasing video surveillance, issuing numbered tickets bearing the buyer’s name, mandating the presence of turnstiles and increasing jail sentences and stadium bans.

England implemented all that and more across the last two decades to quash a notorious hooligan problem and effectively drive it away from stadiums. Standing-only terraces that incubated brawls vanished as stadiums became seating only. Closed-circuit TV cameras became part of stadium furniture. With lines of police protection, visiting fans sit segregated from hometown fans. Beer stays confined to concession areas. Clubs monitor matches that have a hostile legacy and refrain from selling tickets to those without a demonstrable ticket-buying history. Racist chants result in banishment.

Few Italian stadiums could or did comply with such provisions, and all continued playing matches with dispensations from local authorities, as attention swayed to match-fixing and its resulting penalties, including the spectacular demotion of the monster-club Juventus to Serie B, the second-tier league.

Some stadiums reportedly offer little resistance to any fan wishing to bring in flares or even weapons. TV footage of a match in Palermo last September shows fans punching each other over a partition, with some carrying iron bars.

Groups of such fans, known as “ultras,” have come to control slivers of stadiums, some with neo-Nazi banners and overt racism, precisely the ingredients hooliganism experts say portend tragedy. Often clubs have given them tickets to placate them, and clubs and police have practiced leniency out of fear of escalated violence.

Officials certainly knew the dangers as Palermo and Catania prepared to play an intra-Sicily match last Friday night in Catania. Both clubs -- especially Palermo -- have played well enough to flirt with qualification for the European Champions League, an honor going to the top four finishers. Palermo, from Sicily’s north coast and largest city (675,000), sits third in Italy’s top league, while Catania, from the east coast and second-largest city (306,000), sits fifth.

Police allocated 1,500 officers for the event.

The Palermo club won the match, 2-1, over the Catania club, but not without a half-hour, midgame delay because some fans outside the stadium had directed tear gas into the stadium. News footage showed players bent over, coughing amid smoke.

Afterward, the rioting outside the stadium reportedly persisted for hours as youths in ski masks apparently waited to fight each other but did not wait to take on the police. At first, authorities thought Raciti died when a homemade bomb exploded in his face, but an autopsy revealed he died from the force of a blunt object to his liver.

As one journalist, Paolo Liguouri, wrote of the vast majority of Italian soccer fans, “We are hostages.” Catanians packed the streets Monday to honor Raciti.

Raciti’s son Alessio marched in a police uniform. Raciti’s wife, Marisa, told the packed cathedral she hoped her husband could be “an educator in death.”

maria.decristofaro@latimes.com

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Times staff writer De Cristofaro reported from Rome, freelance writer Culpepper from London.