Verona, Praszelik in 88 jersey: for the ultras reference to Nazism and “heil Hitler”

Football and politics should never be mixed. Unfortunately it happens instead. Even unintentionally. This is the case of what happened in Verona, where the photo on the Hellas website of the latest signing, the 21-year-old Polish midfielder Mateusz Praszelik, unleashed the far-right fans of the Bentegodi south curve. Only because Praszelik chose the number 88 shirt, a number that identifies Hitler for the neo-Nazis. The letter H is in fact the octave of the alphabet, the double H would stand for Heil Hitler.

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So here is that the social networks of these characters were filled with compliments for the Pole. They range from “Honor” to “One of ours” by the exponents of a group that several times in the past has been noted for episodes with a racial background: swastikas, Roman greetings, chants against the Jews. In their minds, the juxtaposition between ’88 and Nazism was therefore immediate. But the choice of the 21-year-old taken from Legia Warsaw has nothing to do with neo-Nazi follies. The player would have chosen 88 because in Poland he was playing with the 8 which in Verona is on Lazovic’s shoulders. Inter shirt, and Pasalic to Atalanta. The best known precedent is that of Gigi Buffon, who in 2000-2001 at Parma also chose 88 at Parma, being accused of ultra-right sympathies and criticized by the Jewish community.