The Dark Heart of Italy

by Tobias Jones

  Juventus are duly gifted a penalty (the Parma defender is sent off). Ciccio wants no talk of a stitch-up. Alessandro Del Piero steps up and slots home the penalty. ‘You see, Zio Tobia, you seem like a sore and stupid loser when you talk like that!’ He’s laughing, jumping up and down celebrating the goal as he slaps me on the back.

  ‘Better a sore loser than a crooked winner.’

  ‘You really are so naïve. You’re simply up against a better team.’

  ‘Right, starting with Agnelli,’ says an old Parmigiano in front of us, turning round to scrutinise the southerner. He’s banging his blue and yellow cushion on his knees in despair.

  The strange thing, and it might just be an impression, is that the longer the game goes on, the more desperate the referee appears to seal the result. Having already awarded a penalty, the referee then sent off another Parma player, reducing the yellow-blues to nine men. The second player to be sent off, Dino Baggio, makes his feelings perfectly clear as a red card is raised above his head: he rubs his fingers and thumbs together, an obvious enough sign that he thinks the referee had been bought (a gesture for which he would subsequently serve a lengthy suspension). The accumulation of injustices (not just sendings-off but bizarre offsides, non-existent corners) is so relentless that it’s hard not to detect a conspiracy, especially where Juventus is concerned. On this occasion, though, Parma somehow pull a result out of the bag. The last minute of the game: a through ball to Hernan Crespo, who feints and then fires with his famous left foot. The stadium goes berserk, the Parma coach, in his cashmere overcoat, rushes onto the pitch and throws himself on top of the now prostrate Crespo. Delirium: nine men against eleven, and Parma manage to pull off a draw. ‘Bet that wasn’t in the script,’ I whisper to Ciccio, who by now is on the verge of tears.

  It is, as I say, only a suspicion, but there’s something about Italian football which is not – as they say – entirely ‘limpid’. Part of the paranoia comes from the fact that the referee is a much more important figure in Italy than in Britain because players, as well as displaying an imperious grace on the ball, are also full of guile. By a rough, personal estimate, there are about three times the number of penalty appeals in Italy. Not because the Italian game has more fouls (it actually has a lot fewer) but because players know instinctively when and how to fall over: ‘Pippo’ Inzaghi (formerly of Juventus and now at Milan) has made a career out of being both a brilliant goal-hanger and a credible tuffatore, a diver. The result, of course, is that refereeing becomes acutely sensitive, and suspicions about the referees’ interpretations, and about the motivations for those interpretations, become evermore exaggerated.

  Presidents of the football teams almost behave as if they wanted to increase those suspicions. In 1999, the President of Roma sent Italy’s most important referees pristine Rolexes for Christmas, an unfortunate scandal which became known as the ‘Night of the Rolexes’. Other investigations have revealed that referees have enjoyed holidays paid for, very indirectly, by Juventus; referees have also enjoyed the company of what’s called in Italian a sexy-hostess courtesy of various clubs. And quite apart from the dubious gifts they receive, the psychological pressure exerted on referees is greater in Italy than anywhere else. During the week between the Sunday matches, television programmes spend hours on the crucial refereeing decisions: vital incidents are shown again and again in snail-pace slow-motion, played forwards and then backwards, as the entire studio debates whether a shirt has been tugged, or a supporting leg clipped inside the area. The importance of having a referee ‘on your side’ is shown by the fact that the leading clubs vehemently oppose what’s called the sorteggio integrale, the practise of pulling the names of match referees randomly from a hat. That, of course, would be too random. Instead, only ‘reliable’ refs are allowed to be responsible for the big games of the big clubs.

  There’s so much smoke that it’s hard to know if there really is any fire, whether there’s any truth to the rumours about Italian football being played on an unlevel playing field. Then, during the fateful 2000–2001 season, the sordid workings of Italian football finally did come out into the open. On the pitch it was going rather badly: no Italian team managed to reach the quarter finals of the Champions’ League or the Uefa Cup. There was much hand-wringing as fans and commentators realised that the traditionally shrewd Italian game had been surpassed by quick, cavalier sides from Spain, England and Turkey – teams in which many of the superstars were home-grown rather than imported from Rio. Nervous presidents began sacking their managers: eight of Serie A’s eighteen teams changed manager, one team (Parma) had three different ones during the season.

  Off the pitch, things were even worse. It was revealed that a match between Atalanta and Pistoiese had been subject to strange betting patterns: large amounts, placed by relatives of the respective players, had been bet on an Atalanta advantage at half-time, but an eventual draw at full-time (which was, of course, exactly what happened). Six players were suspended: not for having bet themselves, but for having failed to denounce exactly what was going on. That was just the tip of the iceberg: the Perugia coach, Serse Cosmi, was then caught on camera describing what had happened in Serie C (the third division). The year before, he said, Juve Stabia was happily mid-table: it had failed to make the playoffs and yet was mathematically safe from relegation. So ‘it began gifting games’. One striker from another team, Cosmi continued, was expected to win the league’s top scorer award: his previous seasonal highest tally was eight goals, but that year he scored 28. ‘They came to an agreement,’ said Cosmi, ‘they lost 4-3, it was enough that he scored three goals. Things from another world. Penalties were showered around, games finished 5-4. The south is like that, if they want someone to win the top-scorer award …’ Cosmi had been caught by surprise, thinking that the cameras weren’t rolling, but he had only revealed what everyone had long suspected.

  More serious revelations were to come. Juan Sebastian Veron was probably the best player in Serie A. He had won the Uefa and Italian cups with Parma, and the Scudetto with Lazio. A shaven-headed Argentinian with a goatee, he plays in the hole between midfield and strikers, and often scores from very long range. If defenders then close him down, he invariably, casually, slips the ball to an attacker. Then it was suggested that Veron had been playing under a false passport (which was true, though Veron was entirely absolved of any involvement). As the season went on, more and more names came out, mostly South Americans, accused of the same thing: of having found fictitious Italian grandparents to adopt them and ease their passage into Serie A. There is a ceiling to the number of ‘extra-community’ players a team is allowed to field, so once a player is Italianised they’re automatically more attractive and their market value rises by some 30%. The crime itself wasn’t particularly serious, but in footballing terms the scandal was seismic. Not for the first time, it appeared that Italian football was slightly crooked. Whilst some teams had been adhering to the rules, others had been wilfully importing and fielding players who had no right to play. Clubs, it emerged, had either forged passports, or not even bothered to look at them. Accusations and libel writs flew in all directions. Fabio Capello, coach of Roma and therefore sworn rival of the other Roman team, Lazio, suggested that Lazio’s historic Scudetto of 1999–2000 was therefore a con. More subtly, the fact that some thirty players were caught up in the scandal added to the already fragile sense of the superiority of football all’italiana: Serie A, it was obvious, was reliant not on native play-makers but on imported stars.

  Since so many teams had fielded illegitimate players, applying the law and its sporting penalties (deducting points from offending teams, banning players or imposing hefty fines) would have meant invalidating many results from Serie A. The problem was so widespread that no one quite knew what to do: whether to go to the civil, rather than sporting, magistrates; whether to penalise teams or rather blame and ban the players themselves. Veron himself, at the centre of the row, began to get increasingly petulant,
and the engine of the Lazio team suddenly found himself unable to get out of second gear on the pitch. The irritating law, it was obvious, was making life difficult for everyone, so a solution was found. It was a solution I was to see used frequently in Italy. The reasoning goes something like this: ‘If so many people are guilty, let’s change the law and play people “onside”. To prosecute the ocean of offenders would lead to utter collapse, because there are simply so many of them. So let’s not prosecute.’ The solution, as always, was to fudge right and wrong, to change the rules suddenly to suit the rulers. Thus, mid-season, the law limiting the number of foreign players allowed to play was wiped out, allowing teams to field whoever they wanted. Those who had been honest were penalised for not having been more furbi; anyone who had played by the book, buying Italian players and checking foreigners’ passports, was suddenly at a disadvantage. It would have been fairer literally to have moved the goalposts.

  Of course, days after the ruling was changed, a foreigner scored a vital goal. Roma were visiting Juventus and being thoroughly outplayed by the Old Lady. Capello, knowing about the rule-change about extra-community players, sent on Hidetoshi Nakata, his Japanese star, who promptly scored one goal and set up another. Roma had clawed its way back into the game, and scraped a 2-2 draw.

  Then another type of dependency emerged. Italian football, it became clear, was being fuelled by banned substances. During the 2000–2001 season, players began testing non-negativo, then confirmed as positivo, for the anabolic steroid Nandrolone. They weren’t simply the journeymen players, but the stars: Fernando Couto at Lazio, Edgar Davids, the Juventus midfielder. A few years previously, the chain-smoking Czech coach, Zdenek Zeman, had alleged that many of the Juventus players had quickly become suspiciously muscular. He was ridiculed, then threatened and sued, and his career in Italy was effectively at an end. As the new crisis deepened, journalists queued up to talk to the unemployed coach (still living in Rome), who confidently repeated his accusations: ‘At the time they made me seem like a madman, but they knew very well that what I was saying wasn’t madness. The fact is they didn’t listen to me or anyone else. I’m very sad, because it’s a very sad time for football …’

  On the day the non-negativity of Edgar Davids was leaked (fifty days after the actual test), I was back on the terraces watching Parma–Juventus with Ciccio. When the name of Davids was read out over the PA, the stadium erupted into a chorus of drogato, ‘drugged’. Even the most partisan Parma supporter, though, would admit that Davids was the best on the pitch, increasingly powerful as the game went on: strong and subtle, able to boss the midfield with sudden changes of direction and speed. The game finished nil-nil. That evening, and for the weeks which followed, there were endless debates about Italy’s crisis of frode sportiva, ‘sporting fraud’. There were partial confessions, veiled accusations. It never quite came out explicitly, but there was a very clear tension emerging between players and their respective clubs. Players claimed to be totally innocent (‘My body is the house of my soul’ said Davids), and hinted that they had been slipped substances unawares. The club doctors were mentioned as possible sources of the contamination. One medical expert claimed that since Nandrolone and other integrators are available commercially from England and America, it might be difficult always to understand what was contained in the imported substances. (Nandrolone, though, in Italian is spelt nandrolone). Moggi, the Juventus troubleshooter, distanced himself from the affair, underlining that Davids had been playing with the Dutch national team on the week of the positive test (as had Frank De Boer and Japp Stam, both of whom were later to test positive for Nandrolone). As ever, the accused cast themselves as victims, citing the usual, extraordinary slowness of the justice system: one player had waited 88 days between his test and the ‘non-negative’ result. Another player, a midfielder from Milan, almost admitted that everyone was taking performance enhancing drugs, and publicly pleaded that players be given more guidelines not about which substances were legal, but about what were the accepted levels of illegal drugs. (The clubs duly attempted to increase the legal level of Nandrolone permitted, though the action was overturned by the Italian FA.)

  But the best response to the crisis was, of course, not moral but aesthetic. Italian football, more than any other, prides itself on its beauty. To put that in jeopardy is infinitely more serious than allegations of match-fixing or drug-use. The real complaint, then, against the steroid use was not that it was wrong, it was that it promoted ugly football. One newscaster (a Juventus supporter) said in a debate that the game had become too ‘physical, antagonistic’, rather too much like the English version. Tackles flew in, players were too aggressive, there was no longer any room on the pitch for the golden boys of Italian football, the fantasisti. Strength and speed, the argument went, had become more important than silky skills. Steroids were wrong not per se, but because they threatened the bellezza of Italian football, and made it more like its vulgar, Anglo-Saxon incarnation.

  In Italy, political power has always been intimately linked to football, and there’s nothing new about one determining the other. If you’re an important politician, chances are that you also own a football team; if you’re a football president, you’re probably also in parliament, or else very close to it. The conflation of football and politics is the reason that Italians, as is well known, ‘lose wars as if they were games of football, and lose games of football as if they were wars’.

  Mussolini was probably the first politician who fully understood the political implications of the sport. Physical perfection and sporting finesse became metaphors for the virility of Fascism, as athletic organisations drilled millions of Italians in gymnasia. Local governments were forced to build ‘lictorian’ (Fascist) sports grounds; by 1930 there were over 3,000 across the country. Bologna’s was inaugurated in 1926, followed by the Berta stadium in Florence, the Mussolini stadium in Turin and the Vittoria stadium in Bari. Footballing triumphs came to be exploited as examples of the strength or superiority of Fascism (Italy won the World Cup twice during the 1930s).

  The suspicion about Italian footballing stitch-ups dates from that period: Bologna, il Duce’s home team and almost home town, won a succession of championships towards the end of the regime (1936, 1937, 1939 and 1941). Given Mussolini’s connections to Bologna, and given the fact that both the football and gymnastics federations were under the leadership of the Bolognese Fascist Leandro Arpinati, those victories are still seen by conspiracy theorists as examples of the dubious continuum between football and politics: when it’s politically convenient, teams can be helped to win titles. Indeed, when during the war it was necessary to reinvent Rome as the all-important imperial capital, the city duly won its own Scudetto in 1942. Football had become, say the suspicious, the most watchable, political propaganda.

  The result is that, when teams now win titles, it’s almost obligatory for the losers to claim that the powers that be had penalised them. Massimo D’Alema, when he was the country’s Prime Minister in the late 1990s, bemoaned the prejudice against his team AC Roma, blaming the cartel of northern powers for the fact that, throughout the 1990s, only Juventus and AC Milan (belonging to Gianni Agnelli and Silvio Berlusconi respectively) won the Scudetto. A Scudetto for Rome, he said, would be worth three championships, such was the prejudice against any team from the capital. He openly referred to what, for any romanista, is the open wound of 1981: it was another crucial match for the championship, three days before its conclusion. As usual it involved Juventus, this time against Roma. Once again, it was being played in Turin, and the visitors had a legitimate goal by Ramon Turone disallowed for a phantom offside. Had they won that match, Roma would have almost certainly won the championship. But the goal was disallowed, and Juventus took the title. Another example, for many, of the Old Lady’s uncanny ability to benefit from glaring refereeing errors.

  Much of the suspicion surrounding football comes from the fact that the owners of Italy’s football teams are the country
’s most powerful men, rather like medieval barons who countenance no dissent. Silvio Berlusconi at Milan, Gianni Agnelli at Juventus, Cecchi Gori at Fiorentina: all three are or have been parliamentarians with extensive media control (Cecchi Gori was until recently the owner of Tele Monte Carlo, the third pole of Italian television after RAI and Berlusconi’s Mediaset). A football president probably doubles as a newspaper owner, owner of a television channel, head of his own financial empire and patriarch of a famous family. Matches probably aren’t fixed, but (it’s hard to explain this to someone outside Italy) the psychological pressure on a referee not to give a penalty against the Prime Minister’s team is surely felt. Thus, the little teams with lesser presidents – Lecce, Reggina, Perugia, Verona – frequently and rightly complain that they’ve been penalised because they’re not important, or else because their presidents aren’t part of a political entourage. (The big clubs are called the Seven Sisters, of which Parma is the obvious Cinderella. But even in the Duchy of Parma, the football team is owned and sponsored, filmed and broadcast, by different organs of the Parmalat empire, which is owned by the Tanzi family.)