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Why?
Why pay homage to a deposed, despicable, thug?
So Inter ultras decided to celebrate the season opener by paying their respect to the defunct Lazio ultras leader.
— Jacopo Piotto (@jacopopiotto) August 26, 2019
The fascist, racist, drug-dealing criminal that used Anne Frank's image as an insult.
I know a lot of Inter fans. None of them would agree with this. https://t.co/eOAHahTCac
Why?
At the start of a season so blessed with optimism and fanaticism. A new, world renowned manager; a proven winner. A new, club record signing. A new, spicy away strip. Everything moving forward, unprofessionalism left in the past.
Why?
When you have sold your total allocation of season tickets, spent £170 million in total transfers, have over 60,000 fans attending the season opener, and have a global fan-base yearning for consistent Champions League football and a title challenge.
Why?
When ownership has lived up to its promises and there’s positive momentum around the club.
Why?
When the team fell to fifth in the league’s sponsorship rankings, and marketability so dictates what a club can and cannot do in the transfer market.
Why?
Why before a season opener against newly promoted Lecce, a game that would inevitably prove comfortable.
Why align the club with Fabrizio Piscitelli?
Piscitelli died at 53 on a park bench. Because that is how gangsters die. They get shot. They get shot by men posing as joggers. They get shot by men posing as joggers in cold blood, in the middle of the day.
Gangsters kill gangsters. It is professional breakage.
Piscitelli was killed by gangsters because he was himself a gangster. And he was the worst kind. Not a robin hood type; he was a monster.
He was a fascist. He was a racist. He was the head of Lazio’s ultras.
“For the good of Lazio,” he once said, “we were looking to injure people on the other side, we wanted to go onto the terraces and kill them.”
This was not a football fan. This was a neo-Nazi using the animalistic instincts of gathered football fans for propaganda and barbarism and profit. He was a coward. He flaunted his connections and power and wealth in the face of his own club and Italian football, despite stadium bans.
Why?
He was a drug dealer. Selling scarfs and pins and other emblem-based shite wasn’t enough anymore. Piscietlli graduated from wannabe to deadbeat. He killed people; their bodies never found.
Idiocy eventually catches up to idiots. Italian law enforcement eventually caught Piscitelli on drug possession charges. The warehouse they busted was filled with axes and truncheons and pistols. It was an armoury, not a drug depot.
Why?
Why would the self-proclaimed International club of Italy side itself with a racist, fascist, Mafia-driven era of the most symbolically racist, fascist, Mafia-driven club in Italy?
This is a man who mocked and disrespected Anne Frank; who banned women from the front rows of games; who was an ardent anti-drug campaigner; who was also a junkie.
Why?
In a season of fresh starts, would Inter’s ultras align themselves with the man who forever tarnished the reputation of one of Italian football’s true institute. A man who was so delusional and dangerous that criminals thought the world would be better without him. The man who was a crook and a loser.
Sadly, after last year’s racist chants aimed at Napoli’s Kalidou Koulibaly and the Daniele Belardinelli choregraph at the end of last season, today was disheartening, but not totally surprising.
Nothing if not consistent, I guess.