Quarant’anni fa Desmond Morris celebre etologo e zoologo conosciuto per La scimmia nuda fece uscire il saggio La tribù del calcio (The Soccer Tribe) in cui metteva a confronto i comportamenti, i riti, le mitologie del football con quelle tribali trovandovi numerose analogie nelle manifestazioni: canti di guerra, coreografie colorate, superstizioni primitive, strane consuetudini, territorio da difendere e nei ruoli: anziani, stregoni, eroi, lavoranti e membri di ogni altro genere.

Martha Newson, antropologa cognitiva su Aeon/PSYCHE paragona invece i gruppi organizzati degli ultrà ai cervi in calore, in quanto gran parte delle loro ostilità sono rituali: si ritrovano in strade e pub dove sanno di essere benvenuti, le urla e il lancio degli oggetti spesso avvengono quando due gruppi si allontanano l’uno dall’altro; e i membri del gruppo quasi sempre si fanno avanti per tirarsi indietro l’un l’altro. L’idea è che i tifosi capiscano le regole abbastanza da sfogarsi in sicurezza, anche se, a volte, questi confini rituali, in tutta la loro sottigliezza, possono crollare.

Ma alla fine la forza della tribù è che permette un senso di unità e di appartenenza senza che questo annulli la propria identità

Identity fusion is the ‘oneness’ we feel with the people that help make you ‘you’ – your family, for instance. This intense form of bonding leads to extraordinary pro-group behaviours; we see it in people so fused to their nation that they promptly give blood following a terrorist attack, or among military insurgents so closely bonded to their comrades that they’ll risk it all on the frontline.

Pro-group commitment is rife in fan culture. Fans travel huge distances for away games, invest time and money participating in their teams’ events, and often display visual symbols of allegiance to their team, including lifelong and painful tattoos…. Football matches can generate a sense of belonging so deep that an individual’s bond to their club and fellow fans is permanent. Unlike typical crowd identities, where one’s sense of self dissolves and is anonymised, fused people still recognise individual uniqueness. This is partly what makes it so powerful.

Ma questi sentimenti di unione diventano un problema quando

… fused fans, for whom the group’s best interests come first, turn their prosocial behaviours to less desirable outcomes: the football fights, the mass brawls, the ugly brutality that’s hung over the game for decades. For fused fans, football violence is not necessarily ‘mindless’, as polite society tends to think. Conflict between fused fans is usually targeted specifically toward threatening rivals, this violence was almost exclusively targeted at rivals. Markers of social adjustment or class were irrelevant: in all other domains, these hardcore fans lived very conventional, well-adjusted lives.

Infine una critica al celebrato modello inglese

 In the UK, scenes of naked violence – the physical clashes and their bloody results, once dubbed ‘the English disease’ – have largely moved underground … the Metropolitan Police in London alone spends more than £4 million a year on policing Premier League football games, very little of which is recovered from London’s wealthy clubs.

Immagine Hinchada El Nacional da Commons Wikimedia.