Three fans of the soccer club San Lorenzo de Almagro slipped past security guards after a closed-door practice last month and berated players on the field for their recent losses.*A reference to Yellow Submarine, if you're old enough to remember.
Jonathan Bottinelli, a star defender, told the men to leave. One of them lunged at Bottinelli and punched him in the face. Another hit him from behind. A few teammates rushed in to stop the fight, Bottinelli and other players said, but the beating continued, leaving Bottinelli, a club fan since childhood, with doubts about ever again pulling on the red-and-blue San Lorenzo jersey.
More than a decade after England finally tamed the roving bands of hooligans that long ravaged soccer stadiums in Britain, fan-related violence continues to stain the sport in Argentina. The unrest in part reflects an increasingly violent Argentine society, where street crime has been on the rise. But much of the violence can be traced to hostilities between rival factions of barra bravas, the Argentine version of hooligan fan groups that use fists, firearms, and knives, and operate like mini-mafias. They engage in legal and illegal businesses, including selling drugs, often with the cover and complicity of the police, politicians, and club officials, according to prosecutors and others who have studied them.
Barra bravas are blamed for many of the 257 soccer-related deaths in Argentina since 1924, almost half of which have occurred in the past twenty years, according to Let’s Save Football, a nongovernmental organization in Buenos Aires that is working to eradicate violence in the sport. “We don’t feel safe inside of our stadiums in Argentina,” said Monica Nizzardo, president of Let’s Save Football. “That is why families have stopped going.”
The head of the barra brava for San Lorenzo, Cristian Evangelista, led the attack on Bottinelli, players testified in court, though they refused to name the other barras involved. Club officials did not respond to requests for comment. After the episode, the Argentine government canceled San Lorenzo’s next match while officials investigated.
Soccer violence became so rampant in the past decade that officials barred visiting fans from attending all but first-division matches for four years. The prohibition was lifted in August. Visiting fans are not always the problem. After the storied club River Plate lost a match in June, relegating the team to the second division for the first time in its history, its fans pulled apart their own stadium, throwing bleachers and metal poles onto the field as the police fired tear gas into the stands. Fans fought with one another and attacked reporters and the police, who used rubber bullets and water cannons to try to quell the chaos. An estimated seventy people were injured, including 35 police officers, and about a hundred people were detained.
The tension was palpable at a second-division match in September between River Plate and Quilmes. Some six hundred police officers set up roadblocks around the stadium to separate Quilmes and visiting River fans. After the match, Quilmes fans had to wait a half-hour for River fans to exit before being allowed to leave the stadium.
Asserting control over unruly fans is more complicated than in England, said experts who have studied soccer violence. In England, many hooligans were working-class men looking for a weekend fight. In Argentina, the barra bravas have ties to politicians, the police, and club management, and some of their leaders have gained the admiration of young fans. Politicians tap them as a “shock force” to muscle unions backing rival politicians. Prosecutors have accused barras of killing union workers.
“On Sundays, they go to the stadium and wave the flag of the club to support the team,” said Gustavo Gerlero, a public prosecutor. “During the week they are giving support to politicians and union leaders as laborers and bodyguards by the very people that theoretically should be stopping them.”
The Argentine Football Association, the sport’s national governing body, said it was concerned about the barra bravas’ role in the violence. Nizzardo and others have criticized the powerful president of the association, Julio Grondona, for not showing the will to break the barras. Grondona, 80, has led the association since 1979, when Argentina was in the midst of a bloody dictatorship. He is also a senior vice president of FIFA, soccer’s world governing body.
Grondona, who officials said has been ill lately, declined to be interviewed. In an interview last year that appeared in an Argentine book, Football and Violence, he said his association wanted to eradicate the barra bravas to “ensure normality in the stadiums”. And he said the clubs needed to institute “biometric” control of fans entering the stadium to “deepen the right of admission”.
A barra brava typically has a few hundred members. They chant songs and wave flags and organize the huge banners supporting their club. Away from the field they earn money from scalping tickets, parking cars, selling illicit drugs and, some prosecutors have said, taking a cut of the sale of players.
Gerlero suggested that a deadly attack in 2007 on a high-ranking barra brava member, Gonzalo Acro, was sparked by a dispute over a cut of the sale of striker Gonzalo Higuaín by River Plate to Real Madrid for 13 million euros (about seventeen million dollars). In September a court in Buenos Aires sentenced Alan and William Schlenker, leaders of one of the River Plate barras, and three associates to life in prison for shooting Acro three times after he left his health club. Grondona, in the interview last year, called the notion that the barra bravas were working with the clubs in the selling of players “absurd”.
The barra bravas of the top clubs, like Boca Juniors La 12, earn more than 300,000 pesos a month (about $70,000), with a group’s leader earning $15,000 or more per month, said Gustavo Grabia, a journalist and author of a best-selling book about the Boca barra brava.
Rafael Di Zeo exemplifies the cult-figure status of some barra bravas leaders and the changing fan culture here. The former leader of the Boca La 12 barra brava, Di Zeo was released from prison in May of 2010 after serving more than three years for aggravated assault for his role in a 1999 fight against fans of the Chacarita Juniors that resulted in fourteen injuries. He signs autographs at matches for young fans and has appeared on magazine covers.
Until the 1990s, fans idolized the top players at their clubs. But with the growing lure of bigger contracts abroad, many Argentine stars leave to play in Europe. “There isn’t time for kids to identify with a player as the idol of their club,” Grabia said. “So they identify with the barras instead.”
On 30 October, Di Zeo made his long-awaited return. He stood at the opposite end of the field from Mauro Martín, his successor, and both men rallied fans to shout louder for the players. Di Zeo and some two thousand of his followers hurled insults at a large group of Martín’s followers, chanting about fighting.
“Oh lele, oh lala, we are going to kill all the traitors,” Di Zeo and his supporters chanted. Across the field, Martín was captured on camera making a cut-off-your-head gesture.
After the match Di Zeo told reporters that he sat on the visitor’s side to avert problems. Carla Cavaliere, a judge in Buenos Aires, did not agree. On 4 November she barred both Di Zeo and Martín from going within five hundred meters of any stadium where a game was taking place or about to take place until at least the end of this season, a move apparently intended to avert a violent clash for control.
Di Zeo has said that the violence is eternal in Argentine soccer. “Do you think that with me in prison the violence is going to end?” he told Grabia before entering prison in 2007, as recounted in his book. “Do you believe that if you put us all together in a plaza and kill us the violence is going to end? No, it isn’t going to end ever. Do you know why? Because this is a school. It is heritage, heritage, heritage.”
That sort of violent posturing has driven many families away from the stadiums. Andrés Nieto, a supporter of San Lorenzo, said he stopped attending matches three years ago, and lately has had to resist pressure from his eight-year-old son, who wants badly to go. “Every day it is harder to go to the stadiums with your kids to see the games,” said Nieto, 41, a graphic designer. “It seems like the quality of soccer is getting worse every day. The young players, most of them, are looking to play in whatever other country because they can earn more and it’s less violent.” Nieto said the threats and assaults on players had become all too common.
After being beaten up at the hands of the barras, Bottinelli went to the coast to recover. He has decided to stay with San Lorenzo for now. “I am a little nervous, a little tense about what we had to go through,” Bottinelli told Fox Sports after the beating. “Now it’s over. What are you going to do? We have to live with this in soccer.”
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