Suppose They Played A Game And Nobody Came

Say what you will about American sports fans: They drink and swear and fight and drink some more. They give new meaning to the word "fanatic." They elevate sports beyond everything else in their circumspect lives, at times ignoring friends and family in favor of their chosen "national pastime." When American sports fans rally to appreciate the accomplishments of their favorite teams, cars get turned over, and couches get burned - people get hurt.
Over in Italy, birthplace of "The Sopranos", things are getting more intense. Reacting to the fatal attack on a policeman last week, the Italian Cabinet approved measures Wednesday that could force many of the soccer teams in the nation's top leagues to play in empty stadiums. The decree also also bans clubs from selling blocks of tickets to visiting fans and allows authorities to bar suspected hooligans from entering stadiums, even if they haven't been convicted of crimes. In Europe, we have a firmly established additional category: There are fans, and there are "hooligans" (not to be confused with the "best of" album by the Who with the same name).
Like so many things from the Continent, hooliganism has roots that run back almost two hundred years, but it has only been the last fifty years that a hungry media has elevated this "disorderly behavior" to front page status. And what sort of disorder led to the death of thirty-eight year-old policeman Filippo Raciti last week? Film from cameras mounted around the stadium showed Raciti being hit with a sink that probably had been ripped out of one of the stadium's bathrooms. Raciti continued to work, but about forty-five minutes later he climbed out of his car when someone tossed a firecracker inside, and collapsed to the ground as a small, crude bomb went off next to him, newspapers reported.
Perhaps it's not the spread of democracy that's to blame for all the world's violence after all. Maybe we should look into cancelling the upcoming Iraqi soccer season.