Puncicate Should Be Rome's Shame But Attack On Brighton Fans Shows The Eternal City Is Proud Of Stabbings
Knifing opposing supporters has been elevated to the status of cultural symbol by Roma and Lazio ultras
Rome, the Eternal City. The eternal problem for football.
The latest fans to be on the receiving end of Roman hospitality are the supporters of Brighton & Hove Albion. Two were taken to hospital after being introduced to puncicate, a local custom, near the Colosseum.
Brighton have a pretty inoffensive fanbase. They have a rivalry with Crystal Palace but it’s hardly daggers at dawn. The worst they normally suffer is abuse based around their home-town's reputation as the gay capital of the south coast. Well, in Rome, ‘arse stabbers’ is not a homophobic insult. It’s a reality.
Puncicate is the act of plunging a knife into an opposition fan’s buttocks. The term, used by Roma ultras – and Lazio’s, too – is an attempt to elevate this disgusting act of violence into a cultural symbol. Apologists claim it goes back to medieval duels, when the first person to draw blood was the winner. The backside was considered a favourable target because a stab wound in that area was unlikely to be fatal.
The practice has been going on for decades before and after football matches without the civil or footballing authorities seeming to care. In 1984, Liverpool supporters were brutalised on a mass scale after beating Roma in the European Cup final in the Stadio Olimpico. In the intervening years, fans of Manchester United, Middlesbrough, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Celtic have been on the end of Roman blades.
It’s not just British teams, either. Supporters of Sevilla, Galatasaray and Borussia Monchengladbach, among others, have been attacked in the city in recent years. Rome is the only place in football where visiting fans are routinely targeted and stabbed.
Uefa see it as a policing problem. The local authorities are, at best, ambivalent to puncicate. When Achille Serra, the Italian politician, was head of police in Rome, he shrugged off puncicate as “drawing first blood.” Serra is a Roma fan.
Policing is more rigorous now than in Serra’s era of the mid-2000s but visiting supporters remain at risk. As those poor Brighton fans found out.
Uefa wash their hands of the problem because the stabbings occur outside the stadium. That is cowardly. The frequency with which away fans are knifed and slashed when their teams play Roma or Lazio should be setting off alarm bells in Nyon.
Puncicate needs to be erased from football’s vocabulary. If that means banning Roma and Lazio from European competitions for prolonged periods, so be it.
The stabbing of Brighton fans should be a tipping point. The threat this group of English supporters provide is infinitesimal. This was not the first blow in a battle. It was local ultras hunting down easy victims to knife. Nothing more.
Rome should be ashamed. Instead, it’s proud of puncicate. Shame on the city, shame on Uefa.