The Art of Tifo

Preface

Some years ago, when our daughter first began playing club soccer, we organized an outing to see an upcoming match featuring the U.S. Women’s National Team, which was coming to our hometown. To get the girls excited about the game we introduced them to the tifo tradition. This entailed buying white bed sheets, stitching them together, and outlining a design. The design featured two banners. The first had the club’s name on top (i.e., Inferno) and a giant red heart in the middle, with flames surrounding the heart. The second simply said, in blue font USWNT. It was intended to signify that these girls and their club loved the USWNT. The weekend before the match we hosted a tifo painting party at a local park and the girls completed the banners coloring them in black, red, orange, yellow and blue. We then took the tifo to the game and displayed it, unfortunately without too much fanfare. Nonetheless the girls learned about tifo as a means of demonstrating commitment and support for your favorite team.

Because the tifo included two pieces, we were able to repurpose the larger banner and use it at championship matches for the team. Supported by a large frame constructed out of plastic piping, a small army of parents would hoist it up on the sidelines just before kickoff to inspire the girls. Thus, it appeared several times in the local Phoenix soccer scene, often catching curious glances from opponents and their fans. Years later, a pregame conversation with an assistant referee revealed that she remembered our club because of the “giant sign” we used ←ix | x→to display. So while the original two-panel tifo failed to garner much attention, the subsequent one (featured in the image below) made an impression.

To those unfamiliar with choreographies conducted at football/soccer matches, the spectacle of tifo is captivating and memorable, their origin curious, and the preparation behind them mysterious. This book aims to expose the tradition to a much larger audience, while recognizing and celebrating those who pour their time, energy, and devotion into producing choreographies and displaying tifos.

Partial View of the AZ Inferno Soccer Club Tifo

Source: Author.

The word tifo means typhus in Italian, a disease characterized by emotional outbursts. In the 1930s, newspapers likened fanatical supporters and their emotional displays to the symptoms of typhus. Over time the term simply came to denote fans and the phrase ‘fare il tifo’ (or ‘doing the typhus’) the active support for their respective clubs (COPA90 Football, 2017). The word subsequently referenced in-stadium displays by ardent supporters. Tifo is often used synonymously with the term choreography, with both connoting organized, pre-planned public spectacles at football matches and soccer games. But tifo also refers to a specific form of stadium display—“handmade, large-scale, and colorful banner displays” (Andon, 2017, p. 165). These are widely “acknowledged throughout the world as helping to create atmosphere and propelling players and teams to perform their best before big matches” (p. 166). And they serve as a means by which supporters can show their unadulterated adoration for their respective clubs “in a grand and material sense” (p. 166). As such, for fans, tifos are a powerful form of visual rhetoric that “use colors, shapes, and images to communicate messages in unique ways” (p. 166). Thus, tifos are an important element of fandom, notably for the performative dimensions of fan culture and the identity claims supporters make (Doidge et al., 2020; Henderson, 2018; Kossakowski, 2017).

Choreography or tifo refer to a class of stadium actions that can include choreos, pyro, flags, small banners, and larger tifo displays or a combination of ←1 | 2→these elements (COPA90 Football, 2017; Doidge et al., 2020). Choreos occur when supporters hold up various colored tiles (i.e., small individual-sized squares or rectangles) to form specific images. This ensues when a predetermined pattern inscribed in the distribution of the tiles becomes evident after they are collectively displayed in unison. These are popular in some of the larger clubs and stadia in Europe (e.g., Barcelona, Inter Milan and Real Madrid). Increasingly, choreos have been produced by clubs rather than by fans. Yet they still require the collaboration of fans and spectators for their execution. Pyro, short for pyrotechnics, refers to the (typically illegal) use of flares and smoke bombs in stadia in many parts of Europe, often in tightly choreographed and organized displays. It is, for example, highly prevalent in Turkish football which has cultivated a reputation for being a tough destination for other European teams in inter-continental competitions (Irak & Polo, 2018). Aware of this tradition, supporters of Russian outfit FC Zenit Saint Petersburg welcomed Turkish club Fenerbahçe with a noteworthy pyro display in February of 2019 for a Europa League fixture (Costa, 2019).¹ Zenit supporters stretched for hundreds of yards along both sides of the snow-encrusted boulevard leading to the Krestovsky Stadium as the visitors’ coach arrived. Flames engulfed the Fenerbahçe team as it gradually made the climb uphill as successive supporters lit flares just before the coach passed. This fiery display was impressive not just for the pyrotechnics involved, but also because it extended well beyond the confines of the stadium. This is somewhat unusual given the unwritten expectations governing what constitutes choreographies.

The operating rules for tifos subscribe that traditionally they must be displayed briefly in stadia before matches (although in some cases they get displayed during games), be designed, created, and funded by supporters, and that they avoid corporate sponsorship or promotion. Moreover, they usually take months or weeks of planning to produce and execute, being crafted anonymously and in intense secrecy, to avoid compromising the element of surprise (Dirty South Soccer, 2018). Additionally, they tend to be reserved for pivotal moments like season opening or closing games, cup matches, or important rivalries. While tifo displays can consume entire stadia, especially when they involve large-scale mosaics, it is more customary for them to emerge from behind the goal in the curva or kop end of stadia where the most fervent supporters typically reside (Kennedy, 2013).