The incredible story of the people of Lazio: victorious, but outside the stadium

The torments of the Lazio fan – meaning a supporter of the team of the same name, not a resident of Latina – have many nuances. A colourful catalogue of melancholy and embarrassment: relegations, match-fixing, racist chants, hideous banners, Roman salutes, financial collapses, the falconer of the Olimpico’s eagle sacked for posting a photo on Instagram of his penis enlargement following day-surgery (I’m not joking). Yet a situation like the one this season is unprecedented, as far as I can recall. I do not believe there are any precedents even abroad. I realised this when a friend who lives in New York, passing through Rome, asked me: “What on earth is going on at Lazio?”. I tried to explain it to him like this. Take a team that’s been under fire for years: the fans want to oust the chairman and have stopped going to the stadium. Add a squad just good enough to avoid relegation and a manager who’s had a rough time with the national team, written off before he’d even started. After nine matchdays, that team is top of the table. They’re playing brilliant football. They’re scoring a barrage of goals. They resemble Real Madrid, and as things stand, they could beat anyone – even Real Madrid. So far, this is the sort of surprise that football still throws up every now and then. But the best bit comes now, I told my friend: the more Lazio win, the more Lazio fans are deserting the Olimpico and writing “Lotito, get out” under the club’s triumphant posts, as if the team were plummeting into Serie B.

For months now, one of my Instagram fixs has been Giuseppe, a thirteen-year-old boy from Rome who says “Lotito, free Lazio” every day in a different language – in Swahili, Finnish, Basque – “Lotito, ikomboe Lazio!”, “Lotito, vapauta Lazio!”, “Lotito, askatu Lazio!” whilst I eagerly await the Latin version in a video featuring Lotito. Now that Lazio are winning, he’s beaming. But the series continues exactly the same, day after day, like a mantra. In Tokyo, a gentleman named Hidenori Masui posts a photo every morning wearing a white-and-sky-blue jersey, the city’s weather forecast and the same “Lotito, go away”. This reveals a sort of Lazio-style nirvana that ultimately characterizes this type of support: the Roma fan celebrates a meaningless victory as if it were a Champions League win, while the Lazio fan cannot even bring himself to enjoy top spot. Being a Lazio fan as a form of asceticism. I, too, now await Lazio’s matches as a spiritual exercise: celebrating without celebrating, winning in contemplation, hiding at the top of the table. I even have the banner ready for the derby: “It’s not Lazio, it’s AI”. Playing in this ‘Lazio-champagne’ side is also Romano Floriani Mussolini, aged twenty-three, son of Alessandra, grandson of Romano – the jazz pianist – and great-grandson of that bloke. His shirt simply reads ‘Romano’; the commentators say ‘Floriani’, but when he celebrates on Instagram, the comments under the post are full of ‘grandad’s handsome grandson!’. Everyone took notice of him last Sunday. In the 6–2 win at Reggio Emilia (6–2!), Mussolini scored against Turati – not the socialist, but the Sassuolo goalkeeper. It was 27 October, the first day of the March on Rome. A classic Lazio torment: a flesh-and-blood Mussolini on the wing, wearing the biancoceleste shirt, with the eagle as his mascot. I once had a ready-made argument: “Look, even Sandro Curzi, such a communist, was a great Lazio fan!” But nowadays, nobody remembers Curzi anymore.

The current Lazio season could easily sustain an entire series, given the Noslin subplot: at twenty-seven years old, he was cast aside by Ajax; five years ago he was delivering sandwiches on a moped, today he is scoring impossible goals in Serie A, a symbol of this ‘champagne’ Lazio side.

At this point, one has to ask the question – and many have already done so: what if Lazio play so well precisely because, at home, they play amidst an unreal silence? No pressure, no smoke flares, no Roman salutes. A mental void—the ideal condition for any sporting endeavour, the very thing that mental coaches promise for a fee. A new dimension to football. An experimental, conceptual form of football, shrouded in silence, like a certain kind of off-the-beaten-track theatre: Grotowski stripping everything away, Pina Bausch making the empty chairs dance in Café Müller (I must have a word with Gattuso about this). After all, Alessandro Piperno, a die-hard Lazio fan, had written in the Corriere—following yet another disgrace in the stands (boos on Holocaust Remembrance Day)—that he would never set foot in the stadium again. He’d seen it coming.