More than a Football Match: Mapping Ultras’ Banner in Italian Serie A.

Abstract Italian ultras have long been studied as a distinctive form of organized football support, yet their communicative practices, particularly stadium banners, remain underexplored through systematic large-scale analysis. This article examines the discursive and socio-political content of ultras banners in Italy’s top football league, conceptualizing them as a key component of ultras’ repertoire of action and a medium for publicly performing collective identities and oppositional claims. Drawing on scholarship on hooliganism and social movement theory, the study investigates dominant banner themes and assesses whether Italian ultras discourse extends beyond football-related issues. Methodologically, it combines a theoretically grounded frame scheme with a large-N corpus of approximately 8,000 banner images, from which text was extracted using OCR for quantitative text analysis. The findings show that while football-related content remains predominant, a significant share of banners conveys community and critique frames, including commemoration, solidarity and anti-system protest. Opposition to “modern football” emerges as the most recurrent critical theme. Overall, the findings indicate that ultras banners function as condensed socio-political texts through which collective belonging and grievances are articulated in a highly visible public arena, thereby providing support for interpreting ultras as social movement actors engaged in socio-political conflict beyond institutional channels.