The stakes are so high that many ultras have, over the decades, been murdered. Even if other sources have suggested a lower figure of $400,000 a month, it’s still big money, especially since many come from the slums. At Boca Juniors in Argentina the Doce crew allegedly pull in $3m a month. Montague never shies away from the darkest aspects of this subculture. They looked at the pitch, but were drawn to the danger and the noise of the crowds behind the goals. Every ultra, Montague writes, has the same “origins story, the same recollection.

In some ways it’s nothing to do with football but all about danger and adrenaline, about vulnerability and protection, about piggy-backing football to enjoy an emotional rollercoaster. It’s “a sound”, he writes poetically, “that you could lose yourself into”. I was smiling.”īut the first-person is never overdone or naff: there’s enough of it to capture the fix and the fear, but it mainly serves to explain the existential attraction of the ultra life: the absorption of the self into something far greater, into the group, into a tribe or a brotherhood. I turned on the light in the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.

After one scrape – and there are many here – he says: “My heart was beating fast and I felt something approaching elation after my escape. Getting caught was almost as big a rush as getting away.” Researching and writing the book was a way to recapture that teenage buzz. He hints that he was something of a scallywag in his youth: “As a teenager I must have been arrested a dozen times. It’s an immersive account, partly because it is clearly a world Montague enjoys. It’s frequently pretty dangerous: “I had been warned that if we ever got into trouble that I should not, under any circumstances, fall over. He smokes weed with a fascist mobster in Rome. In Indonesia the author is chased by rival ultras armed with machetes. In Albania, a nationalist called Ismail drives with his knees as he loads, cocks and fires a gun. Travelling to 25 countries to compare ultra movements around the world, he takes the reader to warehouses, forests, terraces and underpasses. Montague is a brilliant and daring guide. It is typified by the word dišpet used by its members from Hadjuk Split: “a term of defiance that roughly means to oppose something no matter the consequences … Dišpet means to be anti-everything.” There’s a bloody-minded contrariness to the ultras. It’s that which unites the movement: there is, Montague writes, a “mistrust in any type of authority”. The “1312” of the title refers to the alphabet code for ACAB, an ubiquitous acronym which stands for “all cops are bastards”. James Montague has spent many years with them (his subtitle – “among the ultras” – seems a conscious nod to Bill Buford’s acclaimed if flawed book on British hooligans, Among the Thugs).

James montague 1312