At Roma's home ground, the Stadio Olimpico, the Curva Sud (South Curve) is the home of the more extreme Roma fans sometimes called the Ultras. I question whether some of them can be called "fans", but that's a different conversation.

When the tickets went on sale they did something similar with the seating arrangements here, dedicating one end of the ground to the A.S. Roma supporters, and one to the AC Milan supporters. Several sections of the stadium which radiated out from this core one were also dedicated to supporters of a specific team. The sections that were side on to the pitch were available for general sales.

What we are seeing here is theoretically the section for dedicated Roma fans. So why wasn't I down there? Because it was right behind one of the goals. There is no way on earth I would be able to get decent photography, or get a good overall tactical view of the game if I was sitting down in that section. Instead, therefore, I chose one of the sections that were still within the Roma "block", but gave me an end to end view of the pitch.

However there was a problem. AC Milan has far more supporters than we do. While it's perilous to rely on Instagram numbers for... pretty much anything, really, the fact that they have 16.2 million followers while we have 7.3 million followers seems proportionate.

So what I imagine happened is that the ticketing agency simply reallocated some of the seating in our blocks to AC Milan supporters which explains why I was surrounded by them. In fact, you can even see a few AC Milan jerseys in this supposedly ultra Roma section.

This actually worked out okay because unlike Serie A matches in Italy, nobody took this one too seriously and the absence of some of the best players on each side meant that extreme supporters were never going to bother flying half a planet to watch this match.

When I arrived at my hotel, another guest 2 doors down from me was there with his son, wearing his AC Milan attire while I was wearing my A.S. Roma kit. We stared at each other for a brief moment, then I finally said:
"Buongiorno Diavolo!" (Milan supporters are known as, amongst other things, "the Devils" (i diavoli in Italian) because of the colours of the team kit.)
"Buongiorno Romanista!", he replied, to which he added in English "I'd say 'Good luck', but I wouldn't mean it."
"Buona fortuna... ma non troppo, eh?", I responded. (Roughly "Good luck, but not too much".)
He laughed and replied "Sì, non troppo! See you, mate!"

And that was pretty much the vibe in the stadium as well.

There are clearly a lot of empty seats here but as noted in the image title we are still 26 minutes from go time, and there were a lot of food and beverage stands open on the concourse. A lot of people had yet to take their seats, and others were still trying to negotiate their way in by train after technical failures on half of the lines leading to the stadium.

It wasn't a total sellout, but out of a nominal sporting crowd capacity of 60,000 seats, 56,522 seats were filled.