Making a Brotherhood: Young Ultras Beyond the Match

In Italian, the term ‘ultras’ is used to identify fans—usually, but not exclusively, football fans—who go to great lengths to support their teams, following them constantly throughout the season, showing their support through spectacular performances during matches, and sometimes engaging in fights with other teams’ supporters. In Italy, the ultras phenomenon emerged during the 1970s when young people created the first groups all over the country. Initially, young people began to attend matches sitting in the popular stadium section behind the goal (in Italian: curva) as clubs started to offer these seats at a discounted ticket price. This spatial concentration led to the emergence of a specific style and code of conduct, according to which the ultras phenomenon can be defined as a proper subculture (Marchi 2015; Doidge, Kossakowski, and Mintert 2020). Largely—when not exclusively—composed of young men, ultras communities have been defined from their very beginning as youth subcultures (Dal Lago and Lanfranchi, 1997; Dal Lago and De Biasi 1994) and unbreakable ‘male preserves’ (Elias and Dunning 1986). Although recognised, ultras’ youthful and masculine nature has, however, been largely treated as a taken-for-granted characteristic. Research has paid great attention to ultras’ rituals and violent behaviours during the matches, but surprisingly few attempts have been made to explain how ultras groups and ultras’ collective behaviours emerge from the ‘everydayness’ of being young and/or of being male. Overlooking the ‘insurmountable nature of the everyday substrate’ (Maffesoli 1996: 13), many existing studies have portrayed young ultras as ‘creatures who— like zombies—come back to life only on Sundays’ and analysed the ultras phenomenon only by looking at the extraordinary moments of the match. Such a perspective fails to consider the ‘the ‘informal underground centrality’ (Maffesoli 1996: 4) on which these youth collectivities are built and which assures their existence and permanence beyond the match. Drawing on qualitative research conducted through ethnography and biographical interviews with the young male members of an Italian ultras group, the present study asks what kind of collectivity young ultras forge when they are together and how this collectivity emerges beyond the match. Analysing a series of ‘rituals of interaction’ (Collins 2004) which are embedded in the young male ultras’ everyday lives, the study shows how the acute sense of togetherness constituting ultras collectivity develops through the ‘trivial vectors’ (Maffesoli 1996: 24) of everyday sociality.