On a quiet Sunday afternoon in Sesto San Giovanni, a commune on the northern outskirts of Milan, nearly a dozen police vans arrived to provide security at an ageing stadium, which like the town itself had seen better days.
Milan is home to one of soccer’s fiercest global rivalries, between AC and Inter. But the police were not there for that. Instead, they had turned out in force in case of trouble between fans of two teams whose home base was more than 1,000 miles away, in Libya.
The game was part of a curious collaboration between Italian and Libyan authorities that for a second year running will see Libya’s soccer champion crowned on Sunday in Italy, at the completion of a six-team mini-championship.
The transplanted tournament is a striking example of the security and political crisis that continues to plague Libya more than a decade after the bloody overthrow of its long-time dictator, Muammar Gadafy.
RM Block
It is also a measure of Libyans’ passion for the sport and of the explosive enmity between Tripoli’s two most successful teams, a rivalry that played out last Sunday at the Ernesto Breda Stadium outside Milan.
The last time the two teams – Al Ittihad and Al Ahly Tripoli – had met was in June in Libya. Even though that game was played without fans, it ended up making global headlines about an abandoned match, an injured referee, unruly supporters storming the stadium and a team bus reduced to charred ruins.
So Italian authorities were taking no chances, even though for this match, too, no supporters were allowed inside the stadium.
Libya’s soccer league mirrors its politics. One competition is played in the east, a region overseen by a military strongman, and another is played in the west, where a transitional government struggles for legitimacy. The top three teams from each league have travelled to Italy with the hope of returning home to a heroes’ reception.
“Primarily, they would be worried about the security of it, and it’s not like they would accept to play it on one side or the other,” Tim Eaton of research group Chatham House, said as to why the tournament was moved so far from the competitors’ home turf. “Who is the neutral arbiter in the Libyan context?”
Holding the tournament in Libya would not be safe for teams or fans.
In May, the western half of the Libyan championship was paused as fierce fighting broke out in Tripoli after forces loyal to the transitional government killed one of the city’s top militia leaders, Abdul Ghani Al-Kikli. The militiaman, known as Ghaniwa, was also the honorary president of the Al Ahli team. Libya’s current prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, is a former president of the Al Ittihad team.
“We’ve seen quite a lot of key elites and security figures having a close connection to football clubs,” Eaton said.
While Italy has taken up the role of neutral arbiter, even it cannot escape the political divides that roil Libya’s league.
At last season’s Libyan competition in Italy, the winning team’s president, a son of Khalifa Hifter, the dictator who rules eastern Libya, was prevented from entering a field in Rome for the awards ceremony because Italy – like the rest of the European Union – recognises only Libya’s transitional government.
The younger Hifter told his team to leave the arena, and an impromptu celebration was held instead in a parking lot outside.
This year, passions are running as high as ever, even though games have been played so far from home and each team is allowed to bring only 20 invited guests to its games.
A first-round match between two teams that share a common name, Al Ahly, but are from opposite sides of Libya ended abruptly with one team walking off the field and refusing to return after complaining about a referee call. But that was nothing compared with what took place a week later in Sesto, where the need for a sizeable police operation, which included units of armed military police, quickly became apparent.
Even though they were not permitted inside the stadium to watch the game, fans of both teams travelled from other parts of Italy, Germany, Belgium and as far as Libya itself to Milan for the occasion, which was deemed so high-risk that not even invited guests were permitted to attend.
Dressed in Al Ahli’s green and white jersey, Mohammed al Hamdi, 41, arrived on the morning of the game after taking two flights. Though he had little hope of getting inside the stadium, he said he just wanted to be close to the occasion.
“I’m here to support my team,” said al Hamdi, a father of four.
As the number of police officers outside the stadium swelled, so did the crowd of ticketless fans. At first, supporters of both teams mingled, sharing their frustrations about not being allowed inside. Then, as the 6.30pm kick-off time neared, the tensions rose and clashes started, with some fans beating rivals with sticks and belts. The security forces leaped into action, at one point donning helmets and shields to chase after a pocket of Ittihad fans.
Inside the stadium, the police were also required, though not for misbehaving supporters.
At half-time, Ibrahim Dbeibeh, a 20-something son of the prime minister, swept into the grounds to offer support to his team, which seemed to have the opposite effect as it went down 4-1 after an embarrassing own goal from midfielder Mohamed Zrida that sailed over the goalkeeper from about 40 yards out. The midfielder slumped to the ground in disbelief.
Moments later, the game descended into a melee that took almost 30 minutes to bring under control, with rival players and staff members kicking and punching one another, forcing the police to move in.
Ahmed Sawan, an Arabic-speaking security guard, warned a goalkeeper who had been at the centre of the violence that he risked arrest if he did not leave the field, and officers took out a pair of handcuffs. Two 10-year-old ball boys from the local club Pro Sesto ran to seek sanctuary in the stadium’s cafe.
The match eventually restarted after a warning from Valentina Battistini, the Lombardy region’s top soccer official. One more outburst and it would all be over, she warned, as the prime minister’s son and the Libyan counsel general’s son looked on, grim-faced. The game ended with the police in riot gear standing guard in front of the winning team’s bench until its opponents had cleared the field.
As the victors celebrated raucously in front of the empty stands, Sandro Stagni, 67, who had worked at the stadium for four decades, struggled to comprehend what he had just witnessed.
“I have never seen anything like this before,” Stagni said with a shake of his head. “I know it’s a derby, but that was over the top.”
At the gates, about 100 fans, held back by police officers in riot gear, cheered their team on to the bus. At the front of the group was Al Hamdi, wearing a huge grin and showing no signs of fatigue from his two-flight journey. He had watched the game on his phone outside the stadium.
“I’m very happy,” he said, raising four fingers of his left hand and one on his right to revel in the score. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
