Last Friday, shortly before kick-off in the Serie A match between Catania and Palermo, the Massimino Stadium was a sight to behold. Catania’s sky-blue and grey colours mixed with a multitude of sparklers, flags and banners, including a giant tapestry of St Agatha, the city’s patron saint, which covered half of an end of the ground, as fireworks lit up the sky.

Yet something was not quite right. The stand in which the expected 3,000 visiting Palermo fans were supposed to be seated was virtually empty. Outside, nearly a thousand ticketless Catania fans began to get unruly. Sticks and chains began to appear and the first rocks and broken bottles began to fly through the air.

Less than two hours later, a 38-year-old police officer named Filippo Raciti lay dead in hospital, leaving behind a wife and two children, more than 100 people were injured and Italian football had once again shamed itself.

The Italian FA immediately called an “indefinite” halt to football at all levels of the pyramid. A final decision on the length of the suspension is expected today, but rumours were circulating of a two-week suspension followed by another fortnight of football played behind closed doors. One expects a raft of new measures aimed at curbing fan violence, but a closer look at the nature of the violence on Friday night reveals just how difficult it would have been to prevent the violence.

Some 300 hardcore Catania supporters were banned from the ground for previous disturbances. They were supposed to sign in at their local police station before kick-off, but deserted en masse. The rumour was that they were planning to ambush the convoy of Palermo supporters’ buses, which were making the four-hour drive across Sicily. As a result, the buses’ police escort ordered them to make numerous diversions along the way in an effort to confuse would-be ambushers. This resulted in delaying the motorcade and angering the Palermo fans, who would only reach the ground at the start of the second half.

It also proved pointless. Some 500 ticketless Catania fans — among them most of the banned supporters — showed up outside the stadium shortly after kick-off. When the police tried to make them disperse with the usual baton charge, they were rebuffed and a long stand-off ensued while the match went on. It became obvious that, if the coaches were to be ambushed, it was to happen right here, just outside the ground.

The authorities faced a difficult choice. If they ordered the buses back to Palermo, they would face the wrath of the supporters, many of whom had been driven around Sicily for eight hours. Many were women and children, all had bought their tickets through official channels. But if they allowed them to make it to the ground they would come into contact with the Catania hardcore support waiting in the stadium forecourt, armed and ready.

They chose the latter option, believing that they had enough numbers — 1,100 police in riot gear — to maintain order. It was to prove a fatal mistake. When the Palermo supporters disembarked, the Catania fans attacked the police who were trying to keep them apart.

Meanwhile, several hundred Catania Ultras inside the stadium, alerted to what was happening outside, joined their brethren in the forecourt and took on the police. Others, poised high in the stands, began showering the police with flares and homemade fireworks. One of these made it inside the police van driven by Raciti and went off. The explosion in a confined space, coupled with the teargas released by the police, caused him to have a seizure. An ambulance arrived, not without much difficulty — it, too, was attacked by Catania supporters — and took him to the hospital. He was pronounced dead an hour later. The fighting continued until midnight.

Calling for harsher laws and penalties is correct, but the question remains whether they would have been effective in a case like this. Most of the Catania supporters who started the trouble were already banned. Because they were not inside the ground, harsher controls would have done little to stop them. In fact, this whole affair had nothing to do with football and everything to do with young men wanting to vent their rage on the police. Which is why this is not a football problem, it is a much broader, social issue.

In modern medicine there is often a distinction made between treating the cause of the ailment and treating the symptoms. The symptom here is fighting at football matches. But the ailment is that a significant proportion of twentysomething males simply enjoy getting into fights.

You can cure the symptoms. It has been largely done in England through the Taylor Report and Football Disorder Act. But what to do in a case like this? What pushes these people to fight is not football, it is a whole range of societal causes that the game cannot and should not deal with.

All that said, the Italian FA is right to try to stamp out violence at football grounds by any means necessary. The shock therapy of the suspended Serie A season might yet do the trick. But, even if that succeeds, there should be no illusions. The violence will just move elsewhere. A disease is not being treated here, it is just the symptoms being minimised.