FCZ President Ancillo Canepa makes it too easy for himself

Grasshoppers fans can no longer feel safe in Zurich. Clear words from the FCZ president are more necessary than ever. Instead, Canepa enjoys playing the victim.

Above is the president, below is the south curve. Ancillo Canepa and the hard core of FCZ fans are an unlikely pair.

Simon Tanner / NZZ

“I feel humiliated.” – “I don’t know what’s going on in these people’s heads.”

Ancillo Canepa is shocked. The president of FC Zurich has clear words for the misdeeds of his club’s violent supporters: “Whenever something happens, the bad fans somehow get away with it. We always talk about 95 percent of fans who don’t want violence. But when something happens, these 95 percent protect the perpetrators.” And he knows what his job is. Canepa says: “I am the president of FC Zurich. And the fans are part of the club. So I am also responsible if something happens. At least from a moral point of view.”

The problem: These presidential words were spoken years ago. They come from an interview in 2011, shortly after a derby between Zurich’s Grasshoppers and FCZ had to be abandoned due to massive riots. Today, an appeal from the president would be more necessary than ever.

Ultras against ultras, firecrackers thrown in the stadium, skirmishes in the streets, attacks on the police: none of this is enough for the radical part of FCZ supporters. These thugs want to destroy the Grasshoppers. And ordinary GC fans are feeling the effects of this too. Anyone wearing a GC jersey in Zurich must expect to be spat on, threatened, sprayed with pepper spray, beaten up and robbed by masked FCZ ultras. The attack on a GC supporter at the Bäckeranlage at the end of May is just one of many cases in recent years.

It’s always the others’ fault

The aim of this perfidious strategy: to intimidate the record champions’ supporters to such an extent that one day they will no longer go to the stadium, thereby putting their already struggling club in dire straits. The Grasshoppers, like every club in Swiss professional football, are dependent on spectator revenue. Merchandising is also important. But why should you buy a GC jersey if you can’t put it on without being afraid?

GC supporters in Zurich live dangerously. Boys and girls know this, and even in gym class they don’t wear the colors of their favorite club. And Ancillo Canepa knows this too.

But what does the FCZ president do?

He no longer wants to know anything about the responsibility he imposed on himself years ago, at least not publicly. He would rather make perpetrators into victims and vice versa.

When a stand belonging to the Grasshoppers’ multi-sport club on Utoquai was attacked and demolished by FCZ ultras at the 2023 Zurich Festival, Canepa described the GC stand as a “provocation”. When the south curve in Letzigrund was closed in January following riots by FCZ fans, the president appealed against this: they wanted to make a fundamental decision, and collective punishments lacked a legal basis. And when the local council discussed the strange situation in March that no trams had been running at Letzigrund after football matches for years for safety reasons, it was clear to Canepa how the problem could be solved: the VBZ drivers should wear FCZ jerseys.

Sometimes it is the parents who are to blame for their children, who are no longer very young, not being able to control themselves. Sometimes it is the state that punishes FC Zurich for something that the club is not responsible for. Sometimes the FCZ president calls his club’s thugs and torch throwers “idiots”, “morons” or “psychopaths”.

There is only one thing they are no longer for Canepa: FCZ supporters who attack police officers, tram drivers and GC supporters, and in the case of the latter, they hardly make a distinction whether they are also part of the hard core of violent ultras or simply want to support their football club. They mask themselves, deliberately attack their victims and then disappear again before the police can intervene: be it at the Bäckeranlage, at the Wiedikon, Altstetten or Oerlikon train stations, on the Hardbrücke or at some bus station in a residential area of ​​the city, far away from the Letzigrund.

Most of these violent criminals remain unmolested – partly because their victims are often reluctant to report them. We should not do them this favor.

“We don’t want that!”

The situation is no better in the stadium. There, the thugs and firecracker throwers, whom Canepa calls “idiots,” keep disappearing into the anonymous mass of the south curve. For example, in an attack in October 2021, when several FCZ hooligans ran across the tartan track, threw burning torches into the GC sector and ran back again, while being cheered on by parts of the south curve. After that, exactly what Canepa had rightly criticized ten years earlier happened: When something happens, the vast majority of fans protect the few perpetrators.

Today, however, the FCZ president no longer wants to denounce this situation. On the contrary: Since October, the club has had a security chief, the Green councillor Luca Maggi, who himself comes from the south curve. This reinforces the impression that Canepa no longer wants to bother the powerful core of FCZ supporters and paying season ticket holders with uncomfortable questions about the problematic role of the south curve in the issue of fan violence. The FCZ president hides behind the same old statement that he has always clearly distanced himself from violence and that there is nothing more to say on the subject.

He’s making it too easy for himself. Canepa could take a leaf out of Bernhard Heusler’s book, the former president of FC Basel. When FCB ultras attacked opposing fans after an away game, Heusler stood up at the next match, grabbed the microphone in the stadium and said to his own fans: “We don’t want that!”

Bernhard Heusler, the then president of FC Basel, said to his own fans in 2014: “We don’t want that!” Previously, FCB thugs had attacked fans of FC Aarau.

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