Every major Italian club has a curva — a curved end of the stadium, usually behind the goal, where the most dedicated and most organised supporters gather. The choreography these groups produce before kick-off, the coordinated flag displays and smoke and chanting that can make an ordinary Serie A fixture look like a theatrical production, is genuinely unmatched almost anywhere else in football. It’s also, for Italian football’s authorities, a source of recurring, unresolved anxiety.
Ultras culture in Italy developed its own internal structures decades ago: leadership hierarchies within supporter groups, negotiated relationships with club ownership over ticket allocations and matchday revenue, and in some well-documented cases, links to organised crime that Italian prosecutors have spent years investigating. The 2023 Inter Milan and AC Milan ultras investigation, which led to arrests and exposed alleged extortion rackets built around ticket touting, wasn’t an isolated scandal. It was the most visible recent example of a relationship between clubs and their most passionate supporters that has never been fully untangled.
What makes the situation genuinely difficult, rather than simply a law-and-order problem, is that these same groups are often the reason Italian stadium atmospheres have retained an intensity that a lot of modern, sanitised, all-seater stadiums elsewhere in Europe have lost. Clubs have historically tolerated behaviour from ultras leadership that would be unthinkable from an ordinary season-ticket holder, partly out of genuine respect for what these groups contribute to matchday, and partly out of simple fear of what happens if that relationship turns hostile.
The darker side of ultras culture, including racist chanting that has repeatedly drawn condemnation from European football’s governing bodies, has damaged Italian football’s international reputation in ways the authorities have struggled to meaningfully address. Stadium bans, partial closures, and fines have been issued for years without the underlying problem disappearing, which suggests the issue runs deeper than individual bad actors and closer to a culture that some factions within certain curve have resisted reforming.
Clubs have tried, with mixed success, to build a different kind of fan culture around their ultras rather than simply opposing it — working with supporter groups on safety, dialogue, and representation rather than treating every organised chant as a threat. Where that’s worked, it’s produced some of the most striking matchday atmospheres in world football. Where it hasn’t, it’s produced exactly the scandals that keep ending up in Italian newspapers and occasionally in criminal courts.
Italian football’s relationship with its ultras isn’t going to resolve into something simple any time soon, because the thing that makes the problem hard to fix is the same thing that makes Italian stadiums some of the most atmospheric in the sport. You don’t get one without at least some risk of the other.