Ultras

Are fans being phased out of modern football, with its eye-watering ticket prices, greedy owners, inconvenient kick-off times and corporatised stadia? Has the prawn sandwich brigade won the war for the soul of the game? Not according to this raucous deep dive into the fan culture of the hardcore ‘ultras’. Outside of England’s sanitised Premier League bubble, at least, there’s plenty of flare-lighting, choreographed-chanting life in it yet.  

Director Ragnhild Ekner, an ultra of Swedish club IFK Götenborg, sets out her treatise on ‘the world’s most popular subculture’ early doors. ‘I see it as an act of resistance,’ she says in voiceover, ‘...an uprising against loneliness’. None of her interviewees are seen on screen because, she notes, it’s the collective, not the individual that matters. 

Opening with Italian disco-meme energy, Ekner traces the phenomenon back to Italy’s calcio in 1970s and ’80s. Travelling the globe to film fans across three continents and get beyond the hooligan stereotypes of football fans – without neglecting the violent, fascistic side of extreme fandom – she explores its various manifestations: as a political movement, a source of collective healing, even a surrogate family. People take their babies onto the terraces, elaborate tifos are unfurled, flares drown the players in red smoke, call-and-response chants thunder the stands. Watching the game feels like a minor piece of this mad tapestry. 

Turning the cameras away from the pitch, Ultras captures football fans from the packed terraces of Argentina to a couple of dozen self-aware Eastbourne Town fans on a dank Sussex terrace. God help any close relatives with no interest in the sport. ‘Even if a family member is dying, we still go to the game,’ notes one fan of Atlético Nueva Chicago, a Buenos Aires club with a ferociously dedicated fanbase.

Finding positive manifestations for mass groups of men in identical clothing is no mean feat

Then there’s the medieval pageantry of the tifos, giant handcrafted banners so elaborate, one even involves a huge scrolling fruit machine. It’s a fun sight watching hard-nut fans lovingly sew and paint them like it’s an episode of Blue Peter. A club’s colours come with a code: lose them to the opposing fans and ignominy awaits. Rivalry spills over into violence. In Egypt, the darkest story awaits: the 2012 Port Said Stadium riot, where the tensions of the Arab Spring spilled over into a massacre that saw 74 fans murdered by rival fans.

Some of the drum-banging extends to the filmmaking, too. There’s lots of Herzogian cut-aways to scenes of nature, drawing a heavy-handed parallel between the order of the natural world and the uniformity of these fan groups. Although, the odd moment of serenity is quite nice amongst all the noise and pageantry.

Finding positive manifestations for mass groups of men marching through cities in identical clothing is no mean feat, but you’ll walk away from Ultras with a new understanding of a misunderstood phenomenon. 

In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Apr 24. Previewing at Hackney Picturehouse with director Ragnhild Ekner on Thu Apr 23.