I am currently working on a piece for a special issue of Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal which comes out next year. It is a special issue of the journal on ‘Deviant Leisure’, a concept which is the brainchild of Oliver Smith and his criminology colleagues at Plymouth University in the UK. My deviant leisure essay features research on the global phenomenon of football fan ‘ultras’, which is an extension of the football hooligan memoir project which I directed over many years. Ultra is not the same as ‘hooligan’ in sporting criminology discourse. Ultra is a term related to hardcore football fandom in parts of the world, especially Europe and South America. In some cases, as for example at Roma and Lazio in Italy, it has been connected to the rise of the right and neo-fascism but there are instances of connections to the left and progressive politics, too. Egypt ultras were a widespread part of a complex social formation within the Arab Spring and a huge social movement in themselves. With the advent of social media and globalised TV rights to sports media the ultra phenomenon has diversified and become part of the ‘bricolage’ (taking something out of one context and putting it in another to create new meaning) of global football culture with millions of followers and devotees. It has also involved football protest movements and strengthened fan groups in their quest for social justice and legal rights. Western Sydney Wanderers in Sydney, NSW, Australia, a club only a few years old, has gained notoriety through its Red and Black Bloc, or RBB, supporters, a fan group manifestly transposing Italian ultra style to Australasia. Dinamo Bucharest Ultras in Romania are an example of ultras in Eastern Europe who adopt much of the ever changing British football casual culture from the late 1970s onwards as their definition of ‘style’. My research work has been used in the study of this phenomenon. In Britain, ultrafication is everywhere. The Holmesdale Fanatics of Crystal Palace in South London (named after the Holmesdale Road end of Selhurst Park stadium, part of which is given over to the fan bloc) are another recent example of an unfashionable club becoming part of a global fandom trend. So, too, are recently formed Wolves Ultras and also Jorvik Reds, fans of York City, for a decade a non-league club until 2012, who have been in existence for many years. Clapton Ultras, a moniker created with a certain amount of irony, are part of a more widespread anti-racist, anti-homophobic culture at the small non-league London club. Confusion around the term ultras has resulted in a conflation of terms such as football hooligans, fans, casuals and firms. ‘Ultrafication’, so prevalent in Italy for decades, has become a fashionable term for commentary on football fandom fashion; as Callum West noted, British football in particular, over the past couple of years, has been subject to an ‘ultrafication’ and Italian terms like ‘tifo’ (fan) and ‘supertifo’ have pervaded the language as pyrotechnics have appeared at wet and windy British stadia. Dagenham and Redbridge played non-league Whitehawk recently in the English FA Cup 2nd round – TV coverage showed a banner in the away end proclaiming support for ‘Whitehawk Ultras’. The essay I am writing now sets these images in context and theorises the new ultras as part of changes in practices of global deviant leisure and commodification of sport culture, drawing on theoretical work of Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, as well as my contemporary research into global football fandom culture and sporting criminology.
