Provincial football. A reality whose value is not merely semantic. A football that once concretely embodied, and perhaps ever less embodies, a kind of oasis where one might recover the freshness of a genuine sporting passion, free from private and at times even corrupting interests, both on the pitch and in the stands. Provincial football, which drew, and in some way still draws, a space bounded by settled and inexhaustible values, such as competitiveness without violence, attachment to the shirt, at times lived almost as a territorial pathos: "we are Umbria", sing the Perugia supporters. A city that makes itself a region, but above all a place of the soul belonging to a territory. A provincial football, then, which, though it stands within the empire of Italian football, has, or would have, an ethics of its own, based on a kind of disinterested competitiveness that acts as a counterweight to the artificial one that money imposes in the professional world of the great and middling clubs.

Parents at odds
A provincial football that keeps a value of its own even in language, if it is true that Juventus, for instance, is praised for knowing how to be soundly provincial when needed, that is, solid, muscular, spare and cohesive in every department. In short, the imagery of the footballing province as a place of a certain purity of play, of conduct, even of style, holds up as a kind of paradigm to set against the contradictory reality of the television-spectacle football of our day. A provincial football, par excellence, of belonging to a territory, a culture, why not, a tribe, as a great anthropologist grappling with the ball once pointed out to us. A place, however, where the inevitably competitive and violent drive that hides behind the gonfalon was, and perhaps still is, tempered by those wholesome values that recognize in the one who is other than oneself a dignity bound to the attachment to one's own roots that he too possesses. We are opponents, we do not love one another, yet we respect one another as befits those who know the toils of life, which, in the provinces, are more evident. Certainly a whole that someone might call reactionary, but which, if well balanced, produces passion and solidarity. Yet if this is the picture, we must inevitably note that it is fading, and that the so-called province comes to resemble the rest of the empire ever more closely in its faults, and even its virtues are turning ambiguous and contradictory. An example might be drawn from certain news items, those that see unsuspected fathers and mothers literally take the field to defend their own son, whom the village youth-team coach fields very little, perhaps preferring to him the son of those "scoundrels" who live in the little house across from theirs. Woe to the coach who dares such a thing: insults fly, and even shoves. Woe, too, to the parents of the opposing side who dare to shout and cheer, ferociously to tell the truth, on our home ground, where our children play. Then it comes decidedly to blows, then the untouchable little darlings are avenged.

"Umbria infelix"
It has happened here too, in Umbria, what seemed a legacy of the amoral familism of the south. It has happened, albeit in an attenuated form, that in the name of the footballer son whole family factions came to blows, and the moderation typical of our people gave way, at least in part. Not to mention the first symptoms of a support that is growing vicious. As shown by the spilling over of the Perugia-Ternana rivalry into something other than a dialectical confrontation founded on banter. And besides, Perugia and Terni are, in footballing terms, land to be conquered by "outsider" chairmen who bring perhaps passion, but certainly personal interests, softening and washing out the very strong identity that the support seeks and wants. Because, in our region, as emerges from the history of the Fere and the Grifo, if the chairman is a fellow citizen or someone who has absorbed your identity, then he knows and understands the limits beyond which one must not go, moral and material, whereas the "boss" who comes from outside tends to justify his own failures by sharpening the quarrel with the outside world, that is, with everything that, so they say, keeps the team from rising. In short, in Umbria too the support begins to radicalize, however mildly. And that spurious bond that forms between the club and the harshest fringes of the support is being sealed, at the expense of those who wish freely to criticize. And so if a chairman, ill-advised, as happened recently, takes it out on the supporters who leave the stadium before the end, weary of the spectacle on offer, it may happen that those same "runaways" become the target, for now only a moral one, of the most rabid fans. These are the unripe fruits of a plant that is putting down roots in the "felix Umbria" too, and which, once ripened, might make a mere memory of the tolerance and the essentially "secular" way our fans take part in the matches of the regional sides, making the beloved province resemble ever more a kind of semantic fetish to be brandished only opportunistically, while football, in our own small homeland too, drifts off toward other shores: televised, contrived and violent.

Claudio Cagnazzo, journalist, contributor to "Il Messaggero" and to the fortnightly "Rocca". He writes on Sport, Custom and Society.