by Dr. Cassius Renfro-Beale, Special to IRREVERENT
Your magazine asked me to explain stadium culture to American readers getting their first home World Cup. Fair enough. I’ll do my best. I’m just still trying to find the right tone for people whose main stadium reference point is a guy in a foam cheese hat eating a brat the size of a trombone.
First, a quick geography lesson.
Where the Loudest People Stand
Americans always ask “why aren’t the diehards sitting at midfield, where the view is better?” Because they’re not there for the view. They’re there to make noise, create pressure, and turn the whole end of the stadium into a living wall. Behind the goal is the point.
I spent six years with the Curva Nord of a club I’m not naming here, thanks to a handshake agreement made after a small misunderstanding involving a banner and a prosecutor’s office. During that time, I watched, took notes, and, for full-disclosure, joined in. The University of Trieste labelled this “excessive participant observation.” I called it immersive research. We remain professionally unconvinced by each other.
The Tifo: Arts and Crafts, but With Higher Stakes
The word tifo comes from tifoso, meaning passionate fan, which comes from the word for typhus, because this level of devotion is like a fever. If that sounds like a lot, I should tell you the people involved do not think it’s a lot. They think it’s exactly right.
A tifo is a giant coordinated display before kickoff: cards, banners, fabric, paint, smoke, and hundreds of fans all doing one very specific thing at the same time. From a distance, it turns into a huge image or slogan stretching across the whole curva. Planning starts weeks in advance. Committees form. Supplies get hunted down. Design arguments break out with the emotional force of a family lawsuit. This is not a casual craft project. This is a sacred production with budget problems.
The closest American equivalent is a foam finger, which I mention here with incredible restraint.
The Capo: The Only Person at the Game Not Watching the Game
In the middle of the curva, standing on a barrier, platform, or in one memorable stadium, a milk crate, is the capo. That means “leader,” and, since this is targeted for an American audience, is not from mob movies or shows. The capo leads chants, keeps time, signals changes, and basically conducts the section like an orchestra that has replaced violins with shouting.
And here’s the part that breaks American brains: the capo faces the crowd, not the field. Back to the match. Megaphone up. Arm waving. For 90 minutes, the capo is mostly not watching the game at all.
People always ask why anyone would go to a soccer game and then refuse to look at the soccer. But that misses the job. The capo isn’t there to watch the match. The capo is there to make sure the match has a soundtrack. The crowd is the instrument. The capo is the conductor. Also, occasionally, the metronome.
For comparison, the American stadium experience includes a jumbotron that shows replays, ads, extramarital affairs, and sometimes an animated race between colored dots. Fans are then invited to emotionally invest in a blue circle beating a red one. I offer this without comment.
Why the Flares Never Go Away
Flares and smoke bombs are banned in basically every major soccer stadium on earth. They are also present in basically every major soccer stadium on earth. The curva often ends up wrapped in colored smoke from devices that are clearly illegal according to stadium rules, league rules, and, in some cases, national fire codes.
Why does this keep happening? Because the people doing it believe the ban is wrong. Not merely annoying or inconvenient. Wrong. To them, the smoke and fire are part of the ritual. A match without them feels incomplete, like a dress rehearsal where somebody forgot half the orchestra.
Ultras groups have been fined, punished, and forced to watch their clubs play in empty stadiums because of pyrotechnics. They have mostly continued anyway. The ritual does not depend on permission. From an anthropological point of view, it is one of the more consistent belief systems you will ever see.
The Curva vs. the Luxury Suite
Modern stadiums also have corporate boxes and luxury suites at midfield. These are climate-controlled spaces with soft seats, catering, great views, and often a TV showing the same game you are already attending, just in case you’d like your live event to feel more like being at a Chicago airport lounge.
To be fair, this is one perfectly coherent answer to the question: what is a soccer match for? The luxury suite says the match is for comfort, networking, and spectating in peace. The curva has a very different answer. It says the match is for effort, noise, sacrifice, and joining something bigger than yourself, even if that bigger thing is also setting off a flare two rows down.
These two visions do not really go together and clubs know that. They also sell tickets to both and happily cash both checks, which is a piece of moral flexibility familiar to American sports fans.
Ninety Minutes of Singing
In the curva, the singing starts before kickoff and keeps going until the final whistle. Not just after a goal. Not just during exciting moments. All the time. The songs are not reactions to the game so much as the constant background hum underneath it. The capo rotates the chants. Everyone knows them. Some have been around for decades. You could walk into San Siro in 2026 and hear something that first got belted out in 1963. Nobody thinks this is repetitive. They think it’s tradition doing its job.
Meanwhile, I’ve sat in American stadiums during this World Cup and seen what happens when play slows down. The giant screen issues a command: “MAKE SOME NOISE.” The crowd obeys for a few seconds, like a class responding to a substitute teacher, and then returns to nothing.
I submit this as research.
The Third-Division Chant That Ruined My Professional Detachment
In my fifth year, a third-division club in the Veneto invited me, through an intermediary whose name I wisely left out of my notes, to sit in on the writing of a new chant. By the third meeting, I had contributed two lines. By the fourth, I had written the bridge. The chant debuted at the next home match. The supporters sang it. The players heard it coming out of the tunnel.
I am a Visiting Fellow in Applied Folklore at the University of Trieste. I have published seventeen peer-reviewed articles. I was denied tenure. I have also been banned from three stadiums.
I have also written a chant that 1,100 people sang together on a freezing Saturday in November, in a stadium that held 1,200, for a club that finished seventh and still got relegated.
I’m still not entirely sure what I feel about that. I’ve been trying to work it out for more than a year, which is probably why I keep bringing it up.
So if this World Cup sends you to a match—and it should—do me one favor: ignore the giant screen. Look at the end stands instead. Find the person facing the wrong direction with a megaphone. Watch what they’re doing. Try to understand why they chose not to look at the thing they came to see, so everyone around them could feel it more deeply.
Figure that out and maybe you're starting to get it.
-C.R.B.
Dr. Cassius Renfro-Beale is a Visiting Fellow in Applied Folklore at the University of Trieste. His tenure case was closed in 2021. He is banned from three stadiums in two countries, the names of which he has withheld. He wrote this piece from a press credential he obtained under circumstances he describes as "procedurally ambiguous." He has no regrets about the chant.