No matter how strange the Premiership or La Liga or the Bundesliga, or even MLS seems, just remember that it can always get stranger, and it will always get worse in Serie A. They don’t have referee quality issues, they have match fixing scandals. They don’t have hooliganism issues, they have ultras and police officers killing each other and full-scale riots. And, as you’ll find out, the fans aren’t just whiny and demanding like Madridistas or the Kop, they’re positively litigious.

It’s rough to be a Napoli fan. Your city sits underneath an active volcano. Your city is south of Rome, which means that the economy is in the toilet and that there’s a huge Mafia problem, sort of like 1920’s Chicago without Kevin Costner and Sean Connery to keep order. Only two months ago, there were 50,000 metric tons of uncollected garbage on the streets because of a dispute with the mafia-controlled garbage collection companies. To put that in perspective, you could make a pile of every piece of paper written about Brett Favre this summer and it wouldn’t weigh that much (although, it’d be close). To make matters worse, ultras from Northern clubs (i.e. the successful clubs) reserve a special hatred for you. Over the years, fans of northern teams have displayed banners at Napoli away matches with slogans like “Napoli, you’re all half-African” (hmmmm, sounds like there’s a job for those ultras with John McCain), “Sewer of Italy” and of course, the always-classy “Vesuvius, please do your duty.”

But fear not, Naples is fighting back. Not on the field, of course. Napoli kinda sucks these days and there’s not really enough money in Southern Italy to bankroll huge transfers.  Not that any player would want to go to a city that hasn’t, you know, mastered garbage collection. One intrepid Napoli supporter, however, has fought back in the only way he can: through the courts.

Yes, a Napoli fan sued Inter for “existential damage” stemming for abusive banners, and even Jean-Paul Sarte thinks that’s a load of crap. Surprisingly enough a judge actually bought his argument and issued a bold statement against Italian regional discrimination by awarding the plaintiff the sum of…wait for it…1,500 Euros. Woooooooooooo! Fight the Power!… From Naples, because that won’t even bankroll another trip up to the San Siro for more abuse.

-Ryan