* An example of a soccer fan club turning to militant nationalist politics when the rubber hit the road is early 1990s Yugoslavia.
Down in Serbia, a certain unsavory, underworld, and semi-criminal character who called himself Arkan was by that time long active in Serbian football hooliganism (a phenomenon which transcended the Iron Curtain). As things fell apart for Yugoslavia, Arkan transformed the football fan club he led into a kind of pro-Serb nationalist militia. His political militia soon took the name “Arkan’s Tigers” and gained fame in battle. It was active through the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Arkan became a Serbian nationalist hero. Serbia was in a time of crisis and needed heroes; football gave it one.
In principle, the same could happen in any European country today, given the right circumstances.
* In the former Yugoslavia, soccer games were one of few occasions where nationalism was expressed openly. It is no surprise that many soccer fan clubs later evolved into paramilitary militias.
* An American, Dr. Mark Dyal, has published on “radical right wing” political tendencies among Ultras in Rome, Italy.
“Hostility, Rivalry, and Romanità: An Ethnographic Study of AS Roma’s Ultras”
The 15-month ethnographic study of the fan organizations, or “Ultras,” associated with the Italian professional soccer team A.S. Roma assesses the role that a critical understanding of modernity plays in their self-conception. Using participant observation, interviews, and questionnaires I found that the deep philosophical commitments of the Ultras, drawn from Roman political, social, and cultural history, motivate a radical and aggressive engagement with political liberalism as well as an attack on the cosmopolitanism they believe accompanies the transformation of soccer into global big business. The oppositional aesthetic of the clusters of fan groups produces some instances of exemplary violence against the state and occasionally against foreign nationals resident in Rome, but perhaps more typically provides a profound political understanding of how, by their lights, modernity betrays the local values they believe should be the basis of an authentic Roman culture and life.
