If I lived in Greece, I might be into football. The following is a description of the anarchist fans of AEK Athens from an excellent article on the anarchist uprisings in Greece, “Ed Vulliamy and Helena Smith join frontline activists in Athens” (The Guardian).
””“Another cloud of thick smoke clears, this time caused by the fans’ flares and smoke bombs at the Olympic football stadium as AEK Athens take to the field. You can see the flag behind the goal - that of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia. Unlikely in a British ground, it has been hoisted there by one of a group of AEK fans called Original 21, after the gate number of their section at the team’s old stadium, who are overtly and militantly political.
Around Alexis Grigoropoulos’s “shrine” in Exarchia, the letters AEK are painted everywhere, with a circle round the A. Yards from the site of the shooting is the Original 21 fan clubhouse - the slogan “Fuck Modern Football” and a skull wearing AEK colours painted on the hoardings. Utterly strange to the world of English football, these AEK fans are part of an international alliance with “twin” crews supporting Livorno in Italy, Marseille in France and St Pauli Hamburg in Germany, with whom they rally to help fight fans of teams with a fascist identity and for anti-globalisation demonstrations in loose co-ordination with the Black Block. Around the Grigoropoulos shrine are also slogans painted by the Livorno Autonomous Brigades who, with the Original 21crew, were to the fore in December’s uprising and street fighting with the police, at which they are markedly adept.”“”
