MOST OF US DO NOT CHOOSE OUR footballing faith. It chooses us. Which makes it rather different from our political allegiance, which is a choice we make freely. Perhaps it is precisely because footballing allegiance is not something we can choose that, often, it outweighs political faith. At least that was the impression gleaned after reactions to Paolo Di Canio’s salute at the Rome derby this month.

The Lazio striker’s gesture — stiff right arm, flat palm — originates in Ancient Rome, but these days it is seen as an unequivocally Fascist, if not Nazi, salute. And since Fascism and Fascist symbols are illegal in Italy, Di Canio was not just making a controversial gesture, he was breaking the law and — worse in some people’s eyes — he was mixing sport and politics.

Condemnation followed. Curiously, where applicable, footballing allegiance seeped through and, among the outcry, were some unexpected opinions. Several members of the conservative National Alliance, a party born from the ashes of the banned Fascist Party, were quite scathing in their condemnation, which would have been ironic if they were not avowed fans of AS Roma, Lazio’s bitter rivals. Equally, Sandro Curzi, a Communist politician and thinker, argued that the gesture was being “taken out of context” and “politicised”. That he’s a Lazio fan is, surely, purely coincidental.

Amid the outrage, Di Canio received support from left-wing anti-globalisation intellectuals who, while deploring his politics, found it refreshing that in this “sanitised, homogenised, commercialised” game, a footballer took an interest in something other than “money, cars and sex”.

As for Di Canio himself, he simply insisted that the gesture was “not a political statement”, adding that his critics “try hard to make me appear something which I’m not”.

Full disclosure. I know Di Canio better than most. I first met him some seven years ago and spent hours and hours with him working on his autobiography. And I have good reason to dislike Italian Fascists. My great-grandfather, who lived to be 98, was beaten and imprisoned by Fascists in the 1930s. He lost an eye as a result of the wounds he suffered. Thus it is with very mixed emotions that I tried to make sense of what happened in Rome ten days ago.

The first thing that sprang to mind is that Di Cano’s gesture was totally unplanned and yet, somehow, predictable. He is an intensely emotional person and was reliving a childhood dream. As a 12-year-old he followed his beloved Lazio home and a way. At 20, he not only got to wear the Lazio shirt, he scored the winning goal in a Rome derby. Now, 16 years later, he returned to the Rome derby and again scored the crucial goal in a Lazio win. An outpouring of emotion was bound to follow.

This is a man who took an 80 per cent pay cut to leave Charlton Athletic and return home. This is also a man who stayed up the night before the game watching Braveheart. Under his Lazio jersey he wore a T-shirt that read: “The true samurai must return from battle either with his enemy’s head under his arm or without a head of his own.”

This was fairytale stuff; redemption. So why taint it with a gesture that was bound to draw controversy and overshadow his performance? Because at that moment, he wasn’t thinking. At that moment, he was striding towards 40,000 of his own fans, most of whom, for better or worse, were saluting him that way. Not because they are Fascists or because they were making a political statement, but because they are Lazio and that salute is as much a part of Lazio as it is a part of Fascism. And he responded in kind. Not because he is a Fascist, but because he, too, is Lazio.

Many have used his autobiography to depict him as some kind of right-wing extremist for having a “fascination” with Benito Mussolini yet in the same book, a few lines later, on page 311, he describes Mussolini as “vile” and “deceptive”, a man who “compromised his sense of right and wrong”.

This distinction would probably cause him to lose support among those Lazio fans who are avowedly Fascist. Yet he probably would not care. The reason he resonates so profoundly among supporters of all clubs is that, ultimately, he is one of them: a fan playing professional football.

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