A Season With Verona

"You", apparently, are the sort that ordinarily turns their nose up at football. Or at least gets weary of it when one is constantly, in Britain, reminded of its importance, of its absolute centrality to the culture and of what it is to be male in this country.

Somewhere around 1990, English football became acceptable. It was a combination of things: the phoenix rising from the ashes of Hillsborough. Gazza crying during the World Cup. A new penchant for the glamour of foreign players. But it was the start of the Premier League that fired everything up. Suddenly you had to pay just to watch football on television. Via Sky, football became a luxury item. This led to some of the more odious liberal broadsheets to declare that the sport had become "middle class", vindicated apparently by the success of trashy novels based around male middle class characters who supported some of the more successful London clubs.

Players’ salaries went through the roof, clubs became businesses with stock market ratings, replica shirts became fashion items. Yet throughout all this, it’s not as if those who were not middle class abandoned football. Quite the contrary. Whilst some may have been squeezed out by inflated season ticket prices for the top-flight Premiership clubs such as Manchester United, stadium attendance actually went up for most clubs. And the continuing shameful displays of machismo and misguided flag-waving that seemed to follow the national England team as it left a series of trashed café-bars, desecrated historical centres and bruised riot police across Europe were hardly flaunting the safe, family-orientated middle class values that football was now promoting. The image of the Union Jack-shorted thug with his substantial white belly hanging out, spewing hatred to the locals while simultaneously enjoying the nicer weather and nicer beer did much to damage the reputation of England fans, who were regarded as "hooligans" by just about every other footballing nation. This perhaps had has much to do with the English failure to take their alcohol as much as anything else.

Big money and football were nothing new in other nations either: Italy, for example. In fact, the beginnings of the Murdoch/Manchester United-inspired Premier League could be seen as an Italianisation of English football. For years, the Serie A football players had commanded wages far outweighing anything their British counterparts were getting. Clubs were backed by big businessmen: Turin’s Juventus backed by the city’s huge automotive manufacturer, Fiat; AC Milan by the emerging media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. One thing that didn’t catch on, however, were the replica shirts. With their flair for fashion and style, the Italians would never take to wearing poor quality polyester copies outside the confines of a football stadium.

The ‘Seven Sisters’ of the paradiso that is Serie A, (Juventus, Inter, Lazio, Roma, Milan, Fiorentina, Parma), have no trouble making money, signing the best world-class players, dominating the championship year after year. There is gross inequality between these giants and the lower, more provincial clubs – Lecce, Brescia, Vicenza- who are forever fighting to avoid relegation to Serie B, purgatorio, or even the hellish inferno of Serie C1 and C2. Supporters of these clubs wince when they see attendance shooting up when, say, Juventus come to town. Not because hoards of fans from Turin have come to cheer them on (far from it, they all support FC Torino anyway) but because people from their home town would rather support the glamorous, nationally successful teams rather than their local ones. In other words, they are media-led sheep.

Tim Parks is clearly railed by this. In fact, it is this kind of rancour that spurred him on to support his local team, Hellas Verona, in the first place. Born in Manchester, raised in Blackpool and London, Parks gave up his postgraduate studies in America to settle with his wife in Italy twenty years ago. Translator and university lecturer, he is also the author of ten novels and five works of non-fiction. His later fiction (such as Destiny and Europa) combine the styles of his hero Henry Green with the cosmopolitan European, and specifically Italian, tradition. His non-fiction has ranged from books about his life in Verona and national character (Italian Neighbours and Italian Education) to a collection of extremely literary essays published last year, (Hell and Back). Joseph Brodsky has called him the "best British author working today" and I for one back that up one hundred per cent and believe that Parks is one of literature’s most under-rated talents.

A Season with Verona is partly an excuse. That is, an excuse for Parks to follow Hellas not just at the local stadium, as he has done for over ten years, but also to every single away match for a whole season and get to write about it, despatching occasional columns to The Guardian and La Stampa, and for this book which attempts, through football, to get a grasp of modern Italian national character. As Parks will be the first to admit, the latter is an impossible quest. He himself has successfully given insights to readers of sizable aspects of Italian society both in his fiction and non-fiction works, but in one book nobody would be able to chart fully such a complicated and apparently contradictory nation.

Reading this book, as you follow Hellas Verona’s wins and defeats around the country, you get the impression that Parks found this quest to be much more rigorous than he first thought. This was not simply just another way to spend one’s leisure time. The 2000-2001 season became his life, to the extent that even on his university teaching days he would have the roar of the brigate gialloblu (Yellow-blue brigades), the name given to the boisterous hardcore fans, ringing in his ears. Not satisfied with seeing the match once a week, the mean time is filled with Parks taking in football TV shows, football radio shows, the Gazzetta dello Sport, even football poems: Leopardi’s To a Winner With the Ball. He spends time on the Hellas Verona web discussion boards, and even earns respect from sections of the brigate who inexplicably nickname him the ‘parish priest’.

As in most other areas of Italian life, Italian football is infused with politics. This forms the basis for most of the book: Verona is a city already smeared by the Italian press as bourgeois and racist, though there is no evidence that it is any more racist than any other Italian city – certainly, organisations such as Umberto Bossi’s Northern League have not thus far had a look-in in the Veneto. The 2000-2001 season was marked by incidents concerning Hellas Verona fans reported not just in the Italian press but internationally, whereby the Italian football federation warned Verona fans that if they continued their racist chants and monkey grunts every time a black player touched the ball they would be banned from visiting their own stadium. They were given a reprieve when every time the racist minority sparked up, the rest of the fans, determined not to lose their stadium, drowned them out with whistling. Belatedly, even the New York Times got in on the act, sending a photographer to get pictures of the infamous racist Veronese. He didn’t get any, as the brigate were determined not to have such easy stereotypes portrayed by a newspaper that presumably knows nothing of European football. The fact is that, as Parks point out, the real aggression from the fans is aimed at politicians and journalists and rival football teams, not ethnic minorities.

Of course, the Hellas fans themselves are not averse to the odd bit of stereotyping. Just as the rest of Italy associates Hellas with racism, the brigate gleefully join in chants branding fans from Turin as gobbi (hunchbacks – bent over the Fiat production line), Bologna as rossi (reds – in lieu of Bologna’s communist mayor), and Vicenza as magnatti (cat eaters – don’t ask why). At one point they even provoke Udinese fans with the refrain terremotati, earthquake victims, since Udine and the surrounding region was the unfortunate victim of a major earthquake killing thousands in the mid-seventies. The Udinese fans simply fight back with the chant Serie B, Serie B, Serie B.

All of this is part of the posturing and release that watching football brings. We discover that most of the hardcore fans hold down respectable jobs during the week and are devoted family men. The football stadium for Parks enables people to express emotions and feelings that are repressed out on the streets; the politically correct stance of Serie A newcomers Chievo, also based in Verona, ignores the fact that it is better for a certain minority of fans to release perhaps fundamentalist though often heavily ironic (the affected hatred of southerners, for example, when half their team is made up of southern Italians and so are half their fans) views in the confines of a football match than in ordinary society and politics.

In the end, what makes this nicely thick, detailed book so good is that we get a taste of the rigour and emotional drainage that comes from so much travelling, writing, chanting, and devotion to one thing. The analogy with religion is obvious (the Italian edition is to be titled Questa Pazza Fede). Parks has the ability to portray the excitement, the despair, the humour. The book should appeal both to the casual football fan, with its detailed league tables and match stats, and the more literary-minded reader, with its political intrigue and travelogue.

As Parks says: "In a globalised world where borders and discriminations are no longer possible, where religion and political idealism seem more dangerous than comforting, football…offers a new and fiercely ironic way of forming community and engaging with the sacred…You too can be a part time fundamentalist, a weekend Taliban."

Ian Nicholls