I remember being surprised when I first read that soccer cleats (that’s American for boots) are commonly made from kangaroo leather. I was browsing through a soccer products catalog and came across the description. With a child’s naivete (I was probably 10 or so at the time), I assumed that this “kangaroo leather” couldn’t actually be made from those cute Australian animals. I was wrong, of course. Many high-level cleats today are made from the pelts of those adorable marsupials.

Soon to be seen on David Beckham’s feet

The first recorded pair of football boots came when Henry VIII of England ordered a pair from the Great Wardrobe in 1526. The royal shopping list for footwear states: “45 velvet pairs and 1 leather pair for football.” At that time, boots were made from cowhide.Throughout the early development of soccer, cowhide continued to be used to make cleats. The large bovine population in the UK, where soccer was codified, led to the wide adoption of cowhide to make boots. This material was also well suited to players’ requirements at the time, which were more about self-protection, rather than improving touch on the ball. The Wikipedia article on football boots says that they “were originally heavy boots with protection for the ankle, and these remained the standard style of boot in northern Europe for many years where the boots needed to stand up to the rigours of use on muddy winter pitches.”

An old school football boot, likely made of cowhide

But as soccer spread to areas with different climates, a new type of boots came to be used. “A lighter boot without ankle protection and resembling a studded shoe became popular in southern Europe and South America where pitches were generally harder and less muddy and this eventually became the standard style.”

The Puma Super Atom, the first screw-in boot

In addition to making the switch from hi-tops to low-tops, European and South American practitioners of soccer brought about a style of play that valued touch on the ball. As anyone who has used a pair of boots made from cowhide can attest, the material is relatively stiff. To advance the game, new materials were needed.

One material stood out among the various options. It was kangaroo leather, a material whose properties had been recognized since the 19th century, as former British citizens settled en masse in Oz. That Australia stayed a member of the Commonwealth even after independence in 1901 meant that trading connections with the UK remained strong. Australia has been a relatively small contributor to the world game in terms of players, but in terms of materials, its exportation of kangaroo leather fundamentally changed the production of footwear.

Kangaroo leather caught on because it is light, strong, and soft. According to the website Soccer-Boots.com:

Kangaroo hide is the toughest and most durable available and been used to produce quality sports shoes for rugby, American football, baseball, basketball, tennis and cycling shoes for over a century. It is lightweight yet very strong and many times stronger than the same thickness of cowhide. Comfortable and supple it requires no break-in period and gives the player a tight fit with optimal feel for the ball.

There is a scientific rationale for why kangaroo leather has these properties:

The skin of the Kangaroo does not contain sweat glands or erector pili muscles, which would weaken the skin surface. The yellow elastic fibres (elastin) are evenly distributed throughout the skin thickness which gives the leather greater tenacity.

Soccer-boots.com quotes a study that found “kangaroo leather retains between 30% and 60% of its original tensile strength, as compared to a retention rate of 1% -4% for calf and bovine leathers.”

Lotto Stadios, my favorite kangaroo leather cleats

As kangaroo leather has become more and more common in soccer cleats (see this list for some of the most well known ones), some complaints have been raised. Most vociferous is the group Viva!, (Vegetarians International Voice for Animals) which fills its website with complaints that focus primarily on inhumane treatment of kangaroos and the impact that widespread killing of the indigenous Australian animals has on the ecology.

A Viva! protest

Viva! claims that kangaroo harvesters routinely ignore government guidelines on humane killing of the animals. They say, for example, that a “million “joeys” die – battered to death or left to starve when their mothers are killed.”

The large numbers of adult and baby kangaroos killed (Viva! says that, at a minimum, 100,000 kangaroos were killed to make the 500,000 pairs of Predator Mania boots that Adidas sold in 2002) are also an ecological problem. Viva! claims that the so-called kangaroo harvest undertaken to reduce overpopulation is simply an excuse for companies to kill the animals for profit. The effects of reduced kangaroo populations, which are well adapted to the Australian environment, are not completely understood.

Hilariously, an article in The Independent on Viva!’s efforts finishes with a recipe for sauteed kangaroo. It reminds me of this t-shirt I once saw in the butcher’s department of a grocery store.

Viva!, not surprisingly, promotes the use of synthetic materials to make soccer cleats. Until recently, this would have been unthinkable, but several boots have been produced with man-made materials (see, for example, the Nike Mercurial Vapors)

The Danish company Hummel has gone a bit retro in their use of materials. Rather than using synthetics, they have been promoting a new boot that uses goatskin leather.

Hummel’s 4.2 Concept FGC, made of goatskin

One advantage these shoes have is that ten year olds like me won’t wonder if they are really made of hopping marsupials. There is also the benefit that animal rights organizations are unlikely to raise a stink over the use of goatskins in soccer cleats (the cuteness equation goes: goats < kangaroos). Whether they succeed, however, will ultimately depend on their quality. If goatskin can be used to make boots as high-quality as those available today, they may be become commonplace. If not, expect to see kangaroo leather boots for a long time to come.

Shortly before the game between Lazio and Livorno in April 2005, Ian Hawkey wrote in The Times that “politics will outshout the sport.” While exaggerations about the wider significance of games are rampant in sports journalism, Hawkey’s assertion was completely accurate. Lazio vs. Livorno was not just a Serie A match. It was to be a clash of ideologies between the two clubs, their fans, and their star players, Paolo Di Canio of Lazio and Cristiano Lucarelli of Livorno.

Paolo DI Canio is nothing if not controversial. In 1998, while playing for Sheffield Wednesday, Di Canio achieved infamy by pushing referee Paul Alcock to the ground after being sent him off. (Incredibly, Di Canio also won the 2001 FIFA Fair Play Award for catching a ball he could have easily put in the net because a player was injured at the time.) But Di Canio’s most controversial moment came in 2005, when Di Canio gave a one-armed Roman salute (most famously used by Italian fascists) to fans of his team, Lazio.

Di Canio make his Roman salute, a gesture he would repeat two more times

But Di Canio’s is not the only salute witnessed on an Italian soccer pitch. Livorno’s striker Cristiano Lucarelli often celebrates his goals with clenched-fist salutes made famous by those associated with Communism.

Lucarelli’s clenched-fist salute

The ideologies of Di Canio and Lucarelli are apparent in their salutes. And the players’ choice to use their prominence to espouse political views shows the strength of their beliefs.

Neither player is ashamed of his views. Di Canio describes himself as right-wing and he tried to quell the controversy over his salute by saying, “I’m a fascist, not a racist” (Jewish groups, among others, did not take kindly to this justification). Lucarelli, on the other hand, is an admitted communist, whose ringtone is the communist anthem The Red Flag. The player’s official website prominently displays Lucarelli’s most famous quote: “Some football players pay a billion for a Ferrari or a Yacht, with that money I bought myself Livorno’s shirt. That’s all.”

It’s tempting to write off Di Canio and Lucarelli as ideological extremists who just happen to be extremely talented soccer players. But they both represent ideologies shared by many fans of their teams. Livorno and Lazio are two of the 42 clubs in Italy’s top three divisions that a study claimed had “significant political orientations.”

The connection between Lazio fans and fascism is long-standing. Mussolini was a fan of the biancocelesti who often went to matches. Though Mussolini is long-dead, support for his fascist ideology lives on in some elements of the Lazio support. Ben Fenton wrote in the Telegraph in 2005 that Di Canio described his Roman salute, as “a salute from a ‘camerata‘ to ‘camerati‘, carefully using the Italian words for members of Mussolini’s fascist movement.” Andrea Mussolini, granddaughter of Il Duce, gushed over Di Canio’s gesture, saying, “What a delightful Roman salute! I was deeply moved. I will write him a thank you note.”

Lazio’s hard-core fans, known as irriducibili, are well-known for bigoted views that would make Mussolini proud. It wasn’t that long ago that the Curva Nord, the stand where the ultras congregate for home matches, displayed a banner “Team of Blacks, Crowd of Jews” to taunt their counterparts at Roma. Non-white players have been relatively rare at Lazio, perhaps scared off by the racist graffiti that welcomed Aron Winter, the first black player at the club in the early 1990s. In 2000, the fans showed their support for Serbian war criminal Arkan.

In stark contrast to the right-wing fans of Lazio, Livorno’s supporters are known to be extremely left-leaning. The Italian Communist Party was founded in Livorno in 1921 and this ideology is expressed by fans of the local soccer team. Ian Hawkey writes that, Livorno are known as a communist club, whose fans don’t just take scarves, replica jerseys and loudhailers to matches, but go with Che Guevara in tow. His face, emblazoned on banners and T-shirts, is the chosen signature not just of a club but of a city as strongly associated with the left as any in Italy.

Che’s image is accompanied by Communist flags and songs in the Armando Picchi Stadium.

Livorno’s fans have not avoided controversy either. Writing in the Scotsman, Kasper Steenbach describes an incident in which the “newly formed left-leaning fan club Brigate Autonome Livornesi (BAL) defined its stance at a Livorno home game when members unfurled a banner depicting a local female member of the post-fascist political party, Alleanza Nazionale – with the Italian flag up her backside.”

Just as Di Canio has explicitly connected himself to Lazio’s most extreme fans, Cristiano Lucarelli expresses admiration for BAL. He wears number 99, in homage to the year the fan club was founded and shares their love of Che. Many believe Lucarelli’s international career has been hampered by an incident in which he celebrated a goal by removing his uniform to display a t-shirt with the iconic image of the Argentine revolutionary. The striker is unperturbed, saying, “I am sure that, if I had been a little more careful expressing my political views, if I had shut up more often, then I would have had fewer problems with getting in the national team. But my national team is Livorno.”

Though they would be loathe to admit it, Di Canio and Lucarelli have many things in common. Both are, first and foremost, passionate fans of their clubs. “[Di Canio] travelled [sic] with the fans to away games even when he was already a distinguished member of Lazio’s youth team back then in mid-eighties.” And Lucarelli, while playing for Torino in 2002, went to see his beloved team play a crucial match.

That game changed his life. When Igor Protti scored the winner, it secured Livorno’s promotion to Serie B for the first time in 30 years. Lucarelli, donning scarf and sunglasses, joined fans who rushed on to the pitch at the final whistle.

Lucarelli would join Livorno soon after, taking a pay cut to do so. Di Canio also sacrificed money for love of club, joining a financially troubled Lazio in order to help his team regain past glories.

The love Di Canio and Lucarelli have for their clubs is reciprocated by their fans. Lazio fans offered to pay Di Canio’s 10,000 euro fine after his Roman salute (a gesture which is illegal in Italy). And Kasper Steenbach writes that in Livorno, the “hero is Lucarelli, a man who put the right to laud Che Guevara above his career with the national team.”

As Barney Ronay pointed out recently in the Guardian, players with strong political views are rare today. Yet in Paolo Di Canio and Cristiano Lucarelli, Italy has two of the most outspoken players. Their views may differ, but both Di Canio and Lucarelli have a need to express their politics on the pitch.

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