Wednesday evening Atalanta-Lazio will be played. One of those matches that matters, that you wait for, that you live with your heart in your mouth from the first to the last minute. One of those nights when you should be there, singing, pushing, making the difference.
But no.
Once again we’ll be far from our Lazio. Truly far, in front of a screen. Not through a light-hearted choice, not through lack of love. But because of the restrictions imposed, which have indiscriminately hit an entire people, limiting the freedom to be there, to follow one’s team, to experience support the way we always have.
Because without a voice, without chants, without that collective heartbeat that has always made us unique, it’s like not being there. It’s like watching something that no longer belongs to you completely.
This is the price to pay. And we will pay it out of love for Lazio and the Laziali.
And in this context, the Lazio supporters’ strike grows and strengthens.
There is a silence that deafens more than any whistle, any roar, any noise. A void that echoes inside the stadium, among the terraces of the Nord, in the chants that don’t start, in the flags that stay folded and put away at home… And those who don’t live it from the inside cannot understand it fully.
For us Lazio is identity, belonging, sacrifice.
For us Lazio has never been just ninety minutes. It’s cold, rain, endless away trips, it’s broken voices and frozen hands. It’s living an entire week waiting for that moment. And now we’ve put all that aside. Not out of indifference, not out of tiredness. But out of necessity.
Because at a certain point you have to make a choice: carry on supporting in silence while everything around is emptied of meaning, or stop and say enough.
Those who lived through certain years experience this rift with greater passion: the Laziali who come from another era, from another Lazio, from another way of being a club. The eras of presidents like Lenzini or Cragnotti weren’t just victories, trophies and champions. They were above all periods of connection between the people and the club, feeling part of something great, yes, but also something close. There was a direct line between the team, the club and the Lazio people. The players knew who was in front of them. The club knew who it represented.
We were not customers. We were Family.
For the Laziali – and for supporters in general – Sundays are not just matches: they are collective events, moments of shared pride. You enter the stadium with the feeling that anything is possible. And above all you perceive respect for history, for the Curva and for those who have always been there.
Today that bond is broken.
The Lazio supporters’ strike is born from this as well. From the inevitable comparison between what we were and what we have become. It’s not sterile nostalgia, it’s awareness. It’s having seen that another way is possible. That a club can dialogue, can include, can and must build together with its own fans.
A president is not just a manager. He’s not just balance sheets, numbers and distant statements. A president is the primary guardian of a club’s identity. He must protect that invisible bond that holds team and people together. He must nourish it, not suffocate it.
When this doesn’t happen, detachment becomes inevitable.
Claudio Lotito, over time, has embodied an opposing vision. A management that has progressively turned the supporter into a spectator, and the spectator into a customer. But we don’t buy a product. We live a belonging. And when this belonging is ignored, downsized, treated as a nuisance or a detail, then something breaks.
And when it breaks, it makes noise. Even silence.
The Lazio supporters’ strike is an open wound. Every match without singing is a personal defeat. You watch the pitch on a screen and feel a spectator of something that belonged to you. You see the team and you’d want to push, drag, be the twelfth man. But you stay there, still, far away, because you know that silence is the only weapon you have left.
It’s not against Lazio. It never will be. On the contrary, it is precisely for Lazio!
It hurts, yes. It hurts terribly. Because Curva Nord without a voice is something unnatural. It’s like removing the heart from a body and expecting it to keep beating. Yet it is precisely this pain that makes the strike so powerful. Because it shows how much we are willing to sacrifice in order to defend what we love.
They accuse us of abandoning. But nothing could be more false. Those who abandon stop feeling. We, on the other hand, feel everything. Perhaps even too much. And it is precisely this that has led us to this “extreme act of love”!
Because we have memory. And those who have memory do not accept just any present.
One day we will sing again. We will fill the air with our voice again, colour the stadium, live every match like a battle. But that day will have to make sense. It cannot be like before, as if nothing had happened.
Because support is not a background noise. It’s soul. And the soul of a Laziale cannot be bought, nor sold off cheaply.
Until then, this silence will remain. Deafening. Painful. Necessary…
