Libya Requires Italian Stage

African nation's football matches held abroad as rivalries mirror fractured politics

- Tariq Panja

MILAN - On a quiet Sunday afternoon in Sesto San Giovanni, a commune on the northern outskirts of Milan, nearly a dozen police vans arrived to provide security at an ageing stadium, which, like the town itself, had seen better days.

Milan is home to one of football's fiercest global rivalries, between AC Milan and Inter. But the police were not there for that. Instead, they had turned out in force in case of trouble between fans of two teams whose home base was more than 1,000km away, in Libya.

The game was part of a curious collaboration between Italian and Libyan authorities that, for a second year running, results in Libya's football champions being crowned in Italy, at the completion of a six-team mini-championship on Aug 11.

The transplanted tournament is a striking example of the security and political crisis that continues to plague Libya more than a decade after the bloody overthrow of its long-time dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. It is also a measure of Libyans' passion for the sport and of the explosive enmity between Tripoli's two most successful teams, a rivalry that played out on Aug 3 at the Ernesto Breda Stadium outside Milan.

The last time the two teams—Al Ittihad and Al Ahli Tripoli—had met was in June in Libya. Even though that game was played without fans, it ended up making global headlines about an abandoned match, an injured referee, unruly supporters storming the stadium, and a team bus reduced to charred ruins.

So Italian authorities were taking no chances, even though for this match, too, no supporters were allowed inside the stadium.

Libya's football league mirrors its politics. One competition is played in the east, a region overseen by a military strongman, and another is played in the west, where a transitional government struggles for legitimacy. The top three teams from each side have travelled to Italy with the hope of returning home to a heroes' reception.