Appointment at 6:30 pm in Piazza Municipio for Messina fans: after years of banners and chants, the height of the protest reserved for the club’s ownership, enough has been added for the organized groups of white-blue support who want to “give a voice to those who truly love Messina”.
A relationship that never blossomed between president Pietro Sciotto and the fanswith the perennial protest since the first matches in Serie D in 2017, with the banners that have often become routine in recent years. Responses to presidential positions such as the “imposition” of Cozza and Rappoccio in 2018 (“Cozza we don’t want you”) to that of Lo Monaco in 2021 (“This ownership enjoys openly challenging the entire square, the soul and heart of Messina and Messina”). Up to the chants during matches, to which the president has sometimes responded: the famous “I’ll take you to the third category” shouted at the “Rocchi” in Viterbo, on the occasion of the 3-1 defeat with Monterosi. It was February 2022 and a few years earlier it was the turn of his son Paolo, in Latina in the Coppa Italia final lost to Matelica, to respond to the chants of the fans. Now the protest will reach its peak with the afternoon demonstration.
Messina fans will return to the square to show their dissent, as happened in November 2008 against the then president Pietro Franzawith the long procession in Via Garibaldi. Or like in the most famous of protests, when they blocked the ferries at Caronte in 2005 after the exclusion from Serie A.
Fans who, however, also demand a response from politics, silent in these long weeks of football uncertainty with only the positions taken by city councilor Dario Carbone and the latest, “soft” letter that the president of the council Nello Pergolizzi addressed to Sciotto himself. Last year, however, Mayor Basile was somehow a “protagonist”, as a “guarantor” in the negotiations with Fabrizio Mannino. While in 2022 he was often alongside Sciotto, trying to support the club that was trying to find support on the territory.
Today the fans ask “the city institutions, often absent, for maximum vigilance and transparency”.
