As the team bus made its way to the church, it passed a family in a horse-drawn cart and peasant women using shovels to dig rows in front-yard plots. When Karpaty arrived at church, the last service hadn’t yet finished.
The team piled out of the bus and bided time on the rocky road in front of the church. As always, Edward and Samson stood together. In their tracksuits and sneakers, they hardly looked prepared for the sacred.
Across the road, the coaches and trainers waited in their own group. The club’s chief assistant coach, a hard-looking man with a martial flattop, entertained them. “Edward is always crossing himself.” He bowed his head and made the Greek Catholic gesture with vaudevillian exaggeration. The management laughed.
“I wish the Ukrainian boys did the same more often.”
He clasped his hands, looked toward the sky, and sarcastically smiled. The management laughed some more. After a few minutes of awkwardly waiting, the club’s executive director signaled that Karpaty should file into the church. The Ukrainians traced crosses on their chests in rapid succession at almost every door jam and juncture; their hands never falling to their sides. In an entryway, they stopped to kiss the feet of a crucifix hung on an almost-hidden sidewall. A thickly bearded priest in billowing white robes chanted the end of the liturgy.
While the Ukrainians enthusiastically moved
toward the priest, Karpaty’s two Muslim players, both from the ex-Yugoslavia, stopped near the back of the church. Although they seemed to concentrate hard on the ritual, they shifted their hands from their pockets to behind their backs and into their pockets again. The Ukrainians—and the Greek Catholic church—had
robustly backed their Slavic Serb brothers in their war against Bosnia’s Muslims. When the priest’s scepter lobbed holy water over Karpaty, the two players took matador steps to the side.
Without a word of explanation, the priest then disappeared behind the altar and resumed chanting. One by one, players moved toward the front of the church and performed the Greek Catholic rituals. Edward tried to imitate the Ukrainians: a cross of the chest; a kneel to the ground, a kiss on an icon of Jesus in his death shroud; a wiping away of lip marks with cloth; the cycle repeated.
Edward rose. Following his teammates, he walked to the gold altar. In front of the icons, he went down to his knees. He crossed himself, folded his hands, closed his eyes, and prayed. p
H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s
t h e N e w O l i g a rc h s
I.
Pierluigi Collina’s fame defies all the laws of sporting celebrity. His haunted-house looks include a Kojak pate, tubercular gauntness, and Beetlejuice eyes springing forth from their sockets. He runs like an ostrich. There is, however, something far stranger about his celebrity: He is not a player but a referee.
To be fair, he isn’t just any bureaucratic enforcer of the rulebook. Collina is roundly considered the premier practitioner of his trade. He has presided—with a combination of exceptional hardheadedness and sensitive diplomacy—over World Cup finals and heated rivalries like the Falkland War rematches between England and Argentina. His renown is now such that he appears in Adidas ads alongside David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane, and other virtuosos. GQ fashion spreads, and countless magazine profiles, capture him in his manicured villa, playing lovingly with his pet dogs.
Not just in America, but in any country, this adoration would seem strange. But Italians have endowed their referees with celebrity. Collina’s colleagues have stood for parliament and retired into comfy careers as television commentators. Referees have achieved this notoriety, because Italian media devotes so much careful attention to every yellow card disbursed and every sweeping tackle ignored. Newspapers use star rating systems to judge their work, as with restaurants or movies. They regularly publish statistical analyses—
down to the second decimal point—that try to uncover the true biases of referees. A highly watched television program called Il Processo, the trial, sits a jury of journalists and retired players that vivisects the minutiae of controversial calls. In refereeing the referees, the jurors rely on an array of technological tools. Super slow motion can show a player onside by sixteen centimeters. Like a Cindy Sherman art film, Il Processo endlessly repeats footage of falling players, so that the jury can precisely determine if he faked his plummet.
To understand the importance of refereeing requires a brief word on the paradox of Italian soccer. As everyone knows, Italian men are the most foppish representatives of their sex on the planet. They smear on substantial quantities of hair care products and expend considerable mental energies color-coordinating socks with belts.
Because of their dandyism, the world has Vespa, Prada, and Renzo Piano. With such theological devotion to aesthetic pleasure, it is truly perplexing that their national style of soccer should be so devoid of this quality. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
Starting in the 1960s, the Italians began practicing a highly defensive strategy called catenaccio, the lock-down. This formation adds an extra layer of defense, a sweeper, bringing up the rear of an already robust back line that marks man-to-man. O¤ense doesn’t usually receive many resources in this arrangement. Goals are scored in bursts of counterattack, with the ball quickly sent up the field in flashes. This way, goals come with great rarity, usually only once or twice a game. With so few opportunities to score, and so little margin of error, players must do whatever they can to gain the upper hand. Thus, the greatest cliché of Italian soccer—the impassioned two-handed mamma mia pleading with the referee.
Even as the old catenaccio style has been heavily modified in recent years to provide more o¤ense, the tropes of the system remain. Complaints and games-manship are still meant to provide the decisive advantage in games. Players flop in hopes of deceiving the referee into awarding a penalty. They argue the justice of every decision, calculating that they can plant enough doubt to earn a make-up call later in the game.
After every goal, defenders hold up their arms in protest, as if this gesture might pry up a linesman’s o¤side flag.
Because of the referee’s centrality to the outcome of games, teams do whatever they can to influence him.
Almost every year, there’s a new debate over the proce-dure for assigning referees. Under the current system, a two-person committee winnows down the pool of referees before their names go into a random draw. One member of the committee is known to be backed by the most powerful clubs, Juventus of Turin and AC Milan.
The other represents the rest of the league. The result is that Juve and Milan often can rig the system to assign themselves the most mediocre, provincially minded referees, who are (subconsciously) more deferential toward their prestige clubs. The famed Collina and similarly scrupulous colleagues are rarely ever sent to preside over Juve matches. Other referees who have issued critical penalties against Juve have found themselves working games in the lowly Serie B.
This is only the overt rigging that we know about.
Clearly, much more goes on behind the scenes. The fact that Milan and Juventus have so much power over the selection process is itself damning evidence of funny business, begging a long series of questions about the transactions between club chairmen in smoky rooms. Everyone testifies to these sub rosa shenanigans but they rarely have concrete evidence to prove it. On only a few occasions have some of the sub-merged sordid details come to surface. In 1999, the daily sports paper Gazzetta dello Sport exposed that the club AS Roma had given each of Italy’s top referees a $13,500 Rolex—an event dubbed “Night of the
Watches.” Not one of the referees, the report revealed, had voluntarily returned the gift.
Undeniably, the benefits of friendly refereeing accrue to Juventus and Milan more than any other clubs in Italy. And in a way, that’s not shocking. Big, historically dominant teams universally seem to get the benefit of the doubt. But Italian manipulation of referees is a far more deliberate a¤air. Juventus and Milan take two very di¤erent paths to winning generous tr
eat- HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
ment, and these two di¤erent modes don’t just reveal contrasting organizations. They reveal critical di¤erences between their owners—the most powerful forces in postwar Italy and representatives of two very di¤erent styles of oligarchy.
Juve is a toy of the Agnelli family, owners of Fiat and of a substantial percentage of the Milan stock exchange. As much as anyone in Europe, the Agnellis represent the preglobalization style of ruling class that dominated much of the Latin world for the twentieth century. Even though the Agnellis are industrialists, at the height of their powers they behaved like the landowning families that ruled Central America. They did little to advertise their influence, preferring to hide behind the curtains, while they quietly controlled the politicians who regulated their business empires. Their shyness contributed to a longstanding problem in Italian politics: Nobody could locate the true centers of power, a condition that exacerbated the longstanding Italian penchant for worrying about conspiracies.
Despite the system’s obtuseness, it has become clear that it worked like this: a coalition of northern industrialists, corrupt Christian Democratic politicians, and the southern Mafia ran the country. Politicians lived o¤
bribes from industrialists, and the industrialists survived on the state contracts they received in return. Only with the “clean hands” anti-corruption investigations of the early nineties, and the indictment of hundreds of politicians, did this system topple.
For most of the postwar era, Juventus has had the same sort of dominance as the Agnellis, broken only for a short spell in the sixties. It became a kind of national squad for Italians, with more followers scattered across the peninsula than any other team. But in the eighties, Juve found its stranglehold seriously challenged by AC Milan. The arrivistes owed their new success almost entirely to their flamboyant owner, Silvio Berlusconi. Within the course of two decades, he built his own massive empire, starting with real estate, extending to television, newspapers, advertising, and insurance. Eight years after buying the club in 1986, he rode its success to the pinnacle of power, the Italian premier-ship, an oªce he now occupies for the second time.
According to Berlusconi’s critics on the left, his tangle of interests represents a danger to democracy, the harbinger of the new dictator: the Citizen Kane media mogul who can manipulate and control public discourse to ensure such profits and power that he will never be e¤ectively challenged. And in the globalized economy, they argue, the media has so much more power. No longer do these moguls really have to compete with state-owned television networks, or fight for market share against state companies, which have been enfeebled by privatization and deregulation. Now that moguls like Silvio Berlusconi can operate on a global stage, they can develop economies of scale that make them even more oligarchic and politically untouchable.
But there are key di¤erences that separate the new oligarchs from their forerunners. Because they trade shares of their companies on stock markets and cut deals with multinational corporations, the current breed of mogul has a harder time obscuring wealth and influence. And even if they could, such humility would HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
play counter to type. Like Berlusconi, they are new money inclined to flaunt their riches. Consequently, everyone knows and understands their conflicts of interest. Of course, this doesn’t excuse the sins of the new moguls—and it certainly doesn’t excuse Berlusconi’s bribes, manipulation of government to promote his own interests, and other alleged criminalities—but it makes them more transparent, and in an odd way a democratic advance over the old regimes.
II.
When Berlusconi bought Milan, it was a team with a glorious past that had stumbled onto hard times. He made it great again, by infusing it with flash, foreign players, and his nose for spectacle. Juventus has an entirely di¤erent style. They have always been great and exuded the understatement of old money. Its owners, the Agnellis, are often referred to as the “unoªcial Italian monarchy.” Where Berlusconi tries to cast a populist persona, the Agnellis prefer a patrician one. The cravat-wearing, late paterfamilias Gianni Agnelli was the dashing European playboy par excellence. He cavorted with Jackie Kennedy and Rita Hayworth. He spent years tuning out Italy’s postwar devastation, lounging on the Riviera.
Because the Agnellis didn’t advertise their wealth and power, it is easy to underestimate them. By one count, in the early nineties, the Agnellis influenced or controlled banking, insurance, chemicals, textiles, armaments, financial services, cement, and publishing businesses with a total market worth of about $60 billion. That’s roughly a third of the entire capitalization of the Milan stock exchange. Fiat controlled a substantial share of the Rizzoli publishing empire and important papers, including the Corriere della Sera, the New York Times of Italy. It would be odd if this much money and influence didn’t buy enormous power. According to an old joke, the role of the Italian prime minister is to polish the Agnellis’ doorknob. They considered it their right to exert influence on policy. “Industrialists are ministerial by definition,” Gianni Agnelli’s grandfather once proclaimed.
Juventus have the nickname Old Lady, an unlikely appellation for a club run by so stylish an owner as Gianni Agnelli. Despite flashy foreign stars and occasional periods of entertaining play, their style has often been an extension of their drab black-and-white uniforms. Their defensiveness and tactical obsessions leave little margin for error and much in the hands of referees. Nevertheless, Juventus sit as the unoªcial monarchy of Italian soccer. Since 1930, when the professional game began, Juventus have won twenty-five championships and finished second fourteen times.
What’s shocking about this record, aside from the sheer dominance it represents, is how often Juventus have won the championship at the end of the season on a piece of dubious refereeing. Footage of these oªciating travesties can be viewed on the Web site www.anti-Juve.com. It is worth seeing with one’s own eyes the phantom penalties that have deprived Juve’s opponents of vital goals. You’ll see clips of the ball crossing Juve’s goal line, yet inexplicably not counted against them. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
A recent example from this history of infamy perfectly illustrates the critics’ case. In 1998, Juve won the so-called “season of poison.” They triumphed because referees denied Juve’s opponents clear goals and failed to properly punish Juve’s sins. Even though Juve committed more fouls than any club in the league, they received the least red cards, a statistical inconsistency that defies logical reckoning. The season came to be summarized by a match against their closest rivals, Inter Milan. After a Juve player blatantly body-checked Inter’s Brazilian striker Ronaldo, the referee declined to award Inter a penalty. A bit later, on the other side of the field, he granted Juve a dubious penalty for a transparent piece of thespianism, where the cause of a player’s flop to the ground could not be explained by any known law of physics. The whole game was so pathetically adjudicated that even an Angelli-owned paper, La Stampa, condemned the handing of the championship trophy to Juventus. “One cannot remain indi¤erent when confronted with certain coincidences that are so singular, and, let’s say ‘nutritious.’. . .”
After that season, Juventus’s strength became, once again, the subject of intense public debate. In a parliamentary session, a postfascist politician called Domenico Gramazio railed against the pro-Juve travesties. “A lot of Italian referees drive Fiats,” he exclaimed loudly in the well of the Italian legislature. His accusations deeply wounded one of his colleagues, a former Juventus player named Massimo Mauro. In response to the attacks on his club’s honor, Mauro began chanting
“Clown, clown.” It took gold-braided ushers to prevent Gramazio from punching Mauro. To prevent further escalation and further humiliation, the deputy prime minister abruptly closed the session.
Gramazio went a step further than the evidence.
Aside from isolated cases in the distant past, there’s no direct evidence linking Juventus to enormous
bribes.
Nevertheless, the Juventus record looks too suspicious to be chalked up to mere serendipity and stray referee error. Besides, we know too much about the style of Agnelli, Fiat, and Italy’s postwar oligarchy. There’s no doubt that Agnelli built Fiat into an industrial giant by dint of superb, charismatic management. And there’s no doubt that his management tactics included bribing politicians. He has admitted as much. In the early nineties, Agnelli confessed that Fiat had paid $35 million worth of bribes over the course of the previous ten years. Although Fiat had more power than most corporations, it was hardly alone in slipping stu¤ed envelopes beneath the table. Under the monopolistic rule of the Christian Democratic Party—an organization that formed the bedrock of every postwar Italian government until the 1990s—bribery was a regular-ized feature of Italian business. Politicians would sign government contracts with the corporations and install high tari¤s to protect them. In return, the corporations helped consolidate the Christian Democrats’ control and slipped the politicians a big tip for their help. Carlo De Benedetti, the magnate who ran the industrial giant Olivetti, described postwar Italy as “closer to the Arab souk than to Brussels.”
But after the “clean hands” investigations of the early nineties, this system broke down. Agnelli’s right-hand man found himself indicted on all sorts of corrup- HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
tion charges. Deprived of political patrons and forced to compete in a liberalized European market, Fiat was pummeled by foreign competitors and began wallow-ing in debt. It began shedding its non-automobile businesses, focusing its energies on salvaging its core from fatal decay.
Here the analogy between politics and sport breaks down. The events of the 1990s had no parallel in soccer. Juventus’s prestige and dominance have hardly su¤ered. But now they have a formidable competitor for dominance in the new oligarch Silvio Berlusconi’s AC Milan.
How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization Page 15
