AHC/WI: Italian-Americans import 'ultras' football culture into the US

Morty Vicar

Banned
I've never understood how football is such a big deal in Italy, and there are strong links between Italian Americans and their families in Italy, and yet they never really brought football culture to America with them. So the challenge here is make Italian Americans bring 'calcio' to the US, or at least those cities with a sizeable Italian-American population. Perhaps baseball is as hostile to Italian Americans as it is to African Americans, so Joe Di Maggio and others take up football, form their own teams, and bring glory to the USA in the World Cup.

Bonus points:
Football hooliganism :D
Mob ties to football
South Americans, Germans and Irish form their own teams
 

CultBoy

At a guess American Football gets banned during its early lots of serious injuries and deaths period. Football among recent European immigrants becomes one of the sports that tries to fill the void, in my TL it was rugby union, after a few decades a National League emerges that grows to a good enough size to support a strong national teams by the seventies/eighties.

Sorry don't know enough about football in the US to go into more detail.
 

Enigmajones

PRFU said:
I've never understood how football is such a big deal in Italy, and there are strong links between Italian Americans and their families in Italy, and yet they never really brought football culture to America with them. So the challenge here is make Italian Americans bring 'calcio' to the US, or at least those cities with a sizeable Italian-American population. Perhaps baseball is as hostile to Italian Americans as it is to African Americans, so Joe Di Maggio and others take up football, form their own teams, and bring glory to the USA in the World Cup.

Bonus points:
Football hooliganism :D
Mob ties to football
South Americans, Germans and Irish form their own teams
Click to expand...

You know very little about soccer in America if you think that Dimaggio would have played Soccer instead of baseball.
 

Morty Vicar

Banned
Enigmajones said:
You know very little about soccer in America if you think that Dimaggio would have played Soccer instead of baseball.
Click to expand...

That's why I'm asking you guys! :p That was just a random suggestion off the top of my head, I doubt Joe Di Maggio would be a good soccer player, or Pele would be a good baseball player, or Michael Jordan would be a good baseball player.. :p 'twas merely a suggestion to get the ideas rolling. Speaking of, do you have any ideas for the challenge?
 

Falecius

Sports culture in the US is, to my profane Italian perspective, markedly different from the (continental) European one, and specifically from the Italian one. Italian "football" culture is a very complex phenomenon, whose closest parallels, to my limited knowledge, are to be found in Atlantic South America (where Italian demographic presence is, by the way, much more significant than in the US; in the US the Italian component is a relatively large minority; in Uruguay it may be plurality or a very large minority depending on the timeframe, and this is true for some areas of Argentina and Southern Brazil too).
There is a lot of factors at play, but I would mention that social class and municipal rivalries operate a lot.
 

Morty Vicar

Banned
Falecius said:
Sports culture in the US is, to my profane Italian perspective, markedly different from the (continental) European one, and specifically from the Italian one. Italian "football" culture is a very complex phenomenon, whose closest parallels, to my limited knowledge, are to be found in Atlantic South America (where Italian demographic presence is, by the way, much more significant than in the US; in the US the Italian component is a relatively large minority; in Uruguay it may be plurality or a very large minority depending on the timeframe, and this is true for some areas of Argentina and Southern Brazil too).
There is a lot of factors at play, but I would mention that social class and municipal rivalries operate a lot.
Click to expand...

That last part is where it might get particularly interesting imo, with the bigger Italian American neighbourhoods perhaps developing rivalries, so there would probably at least be some rivarly between New York and New Jersey, if not seperate neighbourhoods like Brooklyn and the Bronx themselves. Other major areas would be Chicago and Boston. At a later stage immigrant hispanic communities, mainly Mexicans, could bring their own soccer culture, perhaps there might be teams with Hispanic Spanish-speaking origin and those with Italian origin. Maybe even a rivalry between Italian and Sicilian teams. At some point if it's regarded as an immigrant sport, and especially if it's associated with violence, it's maybe going to suffer from some backlash, maybe some conservatives will call it 'unamerican'. Maybe it even becomes associated with counterculture, although that's perhaps a stretch. But it has the potential to be an interesting TL in my opinion, in particular the 'Ultras' aspect.
 

Morty Vicar

Banned
CultBoy said:
At a guess American Football gets banned during its early lots of serious injuries and deaths period. Football among recent European immigrants becomes one of the sports that tries to fill the void, in my TL it was rugby union, after a few decades a National League emerges that grows to a good enough size to support a strong national teams by the seventies/eighties.

Sorry don't know enough about football in the US to go into more detail.
Click to expand...

I love the idea, but I was hoping for a less mainstream football culture. Basically the idea was for it to be limited to Italian Americans, and perhaps later Hispanic and African American communities.
 

Falecius

PRFU said:
I love the idea, but I was hoping for a less mainstream football culture. Basically the idea was for it to be limited to Italian Americans, and perhaps later Hispanic and African American communities.
Click to expand...

It's going to be difficult, since in a US American context, it would do nothing but further marginalize the involved communites.
 

wfm

PRFU said:
I've never understood how football is such a big deal in Italy, and there are strong links between Italian Americans and their families in Italy, and yet they never really brought football culture to America with them. So the challenge here is make Italian Americans bring 'calcio' to the US, or at least those cities with a sizeable Italian-American population. Perhaps baseball is as hostile to Italian Americans as it is to African Americans, so Joe Di Maggio and others take up football, form their own teams, and bring glory to the USA in the World Cup.

Bonus points:
Football hooliganism :D
Mob ties to football
South Americans, Germans and Irish form their own teams
Click to expand...

When do you see this happening? Baseball was already established as early as the US civil war, soldiers on both sides played the game. American football was incredibly popular in the college cities in the later 1800's. If you launch soccer with an Italian springboard you simply don't have enough players or fans to go anywhere with it. Kind of like where it is today, lots of talk every four years but no real progress.
 
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