Nazi Salute Highlights Lazio’s Problem

If there’s one club in Italy with a bigger problem with racist fans than Juventus, it is probably, no undoubtedly, Lazio. Vile chants and even more offensive banners are part and parcel of the Irriducibili Lazio standing on the Olympic Stadium’s Curva Nord.

Fascist salutes are normal and the club has an otherwise inexplicable intense rivalry with Livorno, who play far away but have that rarity, an avowedly left-leaning supporters’ image. Former West Ham and Celtic player, Paolo Di Canio was a Lazio fan since birth and for some reason decided that the fascist salute was a great way of showing his empathy with the Lazio fans. In the course of the 2005 season alone, he did it three times.

To be fair, Di Canio has never disguised his far right wing sympathies, but the photograph of the salute cause shock waves when it started to spread virally around the internet. It shouldn’t have caused a surprise. Di Canio has the word “Dux”, the Latin equivalent of “Duce”, tattooed on his arm, and has often publicly defended Benito Mussolini, whose grandaughter Alessandra was on hand to witness his first rendition of the salute in a Rome derby. The fascist salute, sometimes sanitised by rebranding it the “Roman Salute”, is identical in every way to the Nazi salute, save for an arguable and semantic slight difference in the angle of the outstretched hand.

I’m a fascist, not a racist, says Paolo di Canio (Daily Telegraph)

Lazio are under the microscope again today after Argentinian forward Mauro Zárate was photographed giving the Nazi salute. He caused outrage in Italy last week after he was pictured with a group of Lazio fans giving the Nazi salute as he watched the Rome club’s 2-0 defeat to Bari last Sunday, a game for which he was suspended.

His agent Jose Alberto Coppola has leapt to his defence, in a way, by insisting the 23-year-old did not realise the significance of his gesture. “Mauro does not even know who Hitler and Mussolini are,” his spokesman told German agency SID.

While claiming his client is an idiot may not be the smartest defence, he may have a point that the problem is Lazio or even himself, not his player. The young and naive 23-year-old was surrounded by fans making the unpleasant gesture at a club where any contact with hardcore fans is likely to lead to uncomfortable situations. Even if Zarate knows nothing about Lazio (or the holocaust), his agent definitely has a 100% knowledge of the club, its fans and the inherent dangers. Yet he was happy to send a youngster into that den without warning him.

It is not the first time a player has been embroiled in such a scandal. The maelstrom of Glasgow has thrown up several cases. Paul Gascoigne attracted approbation after mimicking playing a flute, the instrument of choice of the avowedly sectarian Orange Order. This gesture was of course greeted with delight by the avowedly sectarian Rangers support, but Gascoigne an Englishman, probably had no idea what he was getting himself into. After all, to an outsider it seems unthinkable that clubs would have fan bases with such publicly uttered repulsive view points.

Even worse was to befall Andy Goram, once a quietly spoken Englishman who played the gentlemanly sport of cricket, and qualified for Scotland through a grandparent. After signing for Rangers, he eventually found himself in contact with known Northern Irish terrorists and was invited to appear at their fundraisers. After his disgusted wife divorced him over the company he was now keeping, photographs of Goram with known members of Ulster terrorist groups with their banners in the back appeared in the papers.

It ended badly for Goram who was forced to withdraw from the 1998 Scotland World Cup squad after a Loyalist terror leader vowed to murder him because he had allegedly slept with his wife while he was serving a jail sentence. The advent of cell phones and you tube has also brought footage of Celtic players singing along with IRA ditties at Supporters’ club events on a semi regular basis. On the bright side, none has yet been caught making the charming gesture of an IRA sniper frequently pointed at away fans at Celtic’s ground.

Gascoigne was fined £20,000 and Di Canio 10,000 Euros for their gestures and Zárate is unlikely to escape as everyone scrambles to pin the blame on the player, rather than investigate why Lazio continue to profit from turning a blind eye to bigotry. Or indeed ask why an agent is prepared to send a young man into an environment replete with political bear traps without educating him. The young Argentinian was the subject of press rumours linking him with Arsenal in January, a move that will probably now never happen. Zárate will be tagged for life with this incident yet his agent will be free to profit all over again from some unsuspecting youth as long as there are clubs prepared to tolerate bigotry among fans merely because their continued custom is good for business.

Related Reading:

Euro Round up: Chelsea the Big Losers But Roma Now Hovering in Serie A

Juve Player Slams Own Racist Fans

Sounder at Heart: Sounders FC Should Turn Their Backs on Bigotry

Tags: Italy

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