The Dark Heart of Italy

by Tobias Jones

  The most obvious conclusion from watching Italian football is that the country is based upon a few, very powerful, oligarchies. It’s not dissimilar to the Renaissance, with a dozen important families who have carved up the spoils of the country. Because it is, invariably, a family thing. The same surnames recur again and again, regardless of whether you’re talking about politics, television or football, regardless of whether you’re reading a contemporary newspaper or one from the 1960s. The sons and brothers (occasionally a sister or a mother) become part of the footballing entourage, which is often an apprenticeship before they enter parliament or start editing the family’s newspaper. Many of the sons of famous club bosses are agents, which means that they take a percentage on every deal done by their fathers. There’s no notion of a conflict of interests, due to the desperation, the absolute determination, for ‘strapotere’, all-encompassing power.

  To understand Italian football, and therefore its politics and media, it’s useless to use British terms of reference. In Italy the equivalent of British monopolist, or American anti-trust, laws don’t exist. There’s no notion that there are areas of objectivity that must be observed, be it in refereeing or in news reporting. There’s no central state that acts as a check on the various Citizen Kane characters. The most obvious example of that ‘strapotere’ outside football is media ownership. In Italy there’s no fourth estate: newspapers, with a few exceptions, are divided amongst the oligarchies. It’s called ‘lottizzazione’, ‘sharing the spoils’. Besides owning Juventus, the Agnelli group owns one quarter of all Italian national or provincial newspapers (and, more importantly, controls 13% of all advertising revenue in the country). Berlusconi, besides AC Milan, owns the Mondadori publishing house and therefore the copyright on a quarter of all Italian books. Il Giornale, a national newspaper, is his (or, technically, his brother’s, which keeps it at least in the family), as are three out of the seven national television channels. He, too, has the financial lever of Publitalia, an advertising company without whose revenue many programmes and publications would abruptly collapse (Berlusconi controls roughly 60% of all television advertising sales).

  Almost all the media is, and always has been, ‘schierato’, which is to say ‘marshalled’ or ‘lined up’. In the old days the three state channels, RAI 1, 2 and 3, were divided up between, respectively, the Christian Democrats, the Socialists and the Communists (even now, on RAI 3, the daughter of Enrico Berlinguer – one of the historic leaders of the post-war Communist party – reads the news; her uncle just failed in his bid to become leader of the Democrats of the Left). The RAI channels are the only national, televisual opposition to Berlusconi’s three Mediaset channels. That is why it’s often impossible, watching the news or reading newspapers, to have the least clue about what’s been going on: each channel or publication, intimately linked to political power, has its own, very obvious angle. The same people who are making the news are also paying people to report it and broadcast it. It’s called ‘appartenenza’, the ‘belonging’ to a particular political formation. To form anything resembling an objective idea of events, you would have permanently to zap between channels, and buy at least a dozen newspapers.

  Many on the left are fairly hysterical about such oligarchies, and about the concentration of so many things in the hands of so few. It certainly makes journalism either craven or, if you’re daring, dangerous. When one American journalist, writing a biography of Gianni Agnelli, decided to try and penetrate that power system with an objective, financial analysis his house was broken into, and the American embassy warned him to leave the country before finishing his book. Italian oligarchies, he not surprisingly concluded, are ‘antipathetic to democratic pluralism’.1

  Berlusconi, of course, is the oligarch par excellence. He became owner of AC Milan in 1986, saving the club from the threat of bankruptcy. In the official hagiography of Il Cavaliere, it was the fulfilment of a childhood dream: ‘The San Siro [Milan and Inter’s shared stadium] is my dearest memory, hand in hand with my father …’ Even that official version describes the baby Silvio learning to bend the rules: at the turnstiles ‘I made myself tiny to be able to let the two of us use just the one ticket …’ During the first year of his ownership, two of his television channels, Canale 5 and Italia 1, ran long montages of Milan glory, with a persuasive voice-over: ‘Make yourself a present of a new Sunday with the azure sky, the green of the lawn, and the red and black of the new Milan …’ A record number of fans, almost 60,000, quickly snapped up season tickets.

  The achievements of Berlusconi’s Milan are amazing. In fifteen years under his leadership, Milan have won a total of eighteen trophies: Scudetti, European cups, Supercups, Intercontinental cups. He brought together three of the greatest Dutch stars – Marco Van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard – and blended them with stylish Italian defenders like Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini. Arrigo Sacchi, a little-known coach who was then manager of Parma, was picked as the new coach of Milan. Sacchi introduced what was then a revolutionary new style of ‘total football’ in which players paid little attention to traditional positions in an all-out siege on the opponents’ goal. Gone were the days in which Italian teams played ‘catenaccio’, ‘lock-out’, defensive football. (Before then, the mantra of Italian football had come from Annibale Frossi, who claimed that the perfect game of football was the artistic and philosophical equivalent of a blank canvas: a no-score draw.) Later, Fabio Capello became coach, and the Liberian George Weah inherited the mantle of prolific goal-scorer.

  As ever, though, the success story is mixed with scandal and Milan’s trophy cupboard contains skeletons as well as trophies. The club, indeed, is the reason for one of Berlusconi’s many legal prosecutions. In the summer of 1992, Milan paid Torino the then extraordinary sum of 18.5 billion lire for a young footballer called Gianluigi Lentini. It was later claimed in legal proceedings that the Lentini transfer had been the subject of shady financial deals. The President of Torino football club (who doubled, of course, as a member of parliament) alleged that six and a half billion lire of the transfer fee was paid ‘sottobanco’ – without receipts or contract – to a Swiss bank account, an obvious way to avoid taxes; it was claimed the actual player, Lentini, had his proposed salary slashed from four billion lire a year to little more than a billion and a half (with the obvious suspicion, according to the Torino President, that he was ‘topped up’ in cash from Berlusconi’s slush funds in Switzerland); most damning of all, it was claimed that when the Milan directors had paid a seven billion deposit on the player, they didn’t ask for the usual ‘receipt’ of payment, but instead wanted shares in Torino. It was that, more than the financial scams, which incensed neutral observers, because it meant that Milan had played much of the end of 1992 season owning controlling shares in another club. All the allegations were denied by Berlusconi. The magistrates who investigated financial irregularities in the early 1990s were called ‘Clean Hands’; the Lentini scandal duly became known as ‘Clean’ or ‘Dirty Feet’. Berlusconi’s response to the scandal was to become, during the next ten years, a familiar refrain. He was, he said, the victim: ‘I have the sensation of living in a police state … I feel the object of a witch-hunt.’

  When Berlusconi burst into politics in the aftermath of Clean Hands, voters thus had his record at Milan at the front of their minds. There were, as usual, two sides to the coin: the epic success of Berlusconi’s football presidency, countered by the strange financial deals that he was accused of conducting in the dark. Berlusconi gambled that because so many people would be dazzled by the success, few would worry about the scandal and thus, not for the first time in Italian history, he openly aspired to conflate politics and football: his political party was baptised Forza Italia –a chant from the terraces, as in ‘Go Italy!’ His parliamentarians were originally referred to as his ‘azzurri’, the generic term for players in the Italian national side. When he announced the formation of his new political party, and his own candidature for the
post of Prime Minister, Berlusconi even spoke of the move in overtly footballing tones: ‘descending onto the pitch’. Forza Italia’s regional offices were often little more than the former fan-clubs of the Milan football team which were dotted up and down the peninsula. Berlusconi, it was clear, intended to run the country as he ran his club (which could – depending on whether good football is more important than correct accounting – cut both ways).

  The intimate link between football and politics is, with Berlusconi, ubiquitous. When, in May 1994, his first government faced a crucial no-confidence vote in parliament, his team AC Milan were simultaneously competing for the Champions’ Cup with Barcelona in Athens. That evening, once Berlusconi’s team were 2-0 up (they would eventually win 4-0), parliament voted in his favour. Some people have followed the analogy between football and politics even further. Romano Prodi (Berlusconi’s rival in the 1996 elections and who won the contest) presented himself as a keen cyclist, an image which, politically, recalled the old days of proportional representation: a mass of competitors, the result announced after months of competition and difficult calculation. Berlusconi’s footballing mentality meant that he was ideal for the new, first-past-the-post system that was to revolutionise Italian politics. Italian politics was suddenly more like football: a show-down between two sides; abuse could be hurled at the opposing fans and their players, be they sporting or political.

  Spring 2001. The crisis of Italian football was coming to a head. It centred, appropriately enough, on the reigning Italian champions, Lazio. Someone had allegedly forged a passport on behalf of Juan Sebastian Veron. Their coach, Sven-Goran Eriksson had been wooed away by the English FA. Their Portuguese defender had tested non-negative. Worse, though, for the image of Lazio and Serie A, was the racism and violence, reflections of a more general, sociological malaise.

  It started when Arsenal visited Lazio in the Champions’ League. As the Lazio fans, traditionally from the far-right, barracked Arsenal’s Patrick Viera with choruses of ‘boo-boo’, the Lazio defender Sinisa Mihajlovic repeatedly called him ‘nigger’. At the following match the Serb was forced to apologise and denounce his own racism over the stadium’s PA system. And yet the racist fans clearly enjoyed the collusion of the club and the Carabinieri lined up outside the stadia. Anyone who has ever been to a football stadium in Italy will know that it’s impossible to get into the place with a cigarette lighter, with coins and sometimes even keys. They will almost certainly be confiscated when you’re dusted down by the hoards of Carabinieri on the gates. And yet, despite such stringent checks, the following banners (both about fifty metres long) had both recently appeared in Lazio’s stadium: ‘Jews: Auschwitz is your town, the ovens your houses’ or, a tribute to Mihajlovic and his fellow Serbs, ‘Honour to the Arkan Tiger’. In another instance of incompetent policing, a motorbike was ridden up the spiral walk-way which takes fans to the upper tiers of the San Siro and thrown onto the opposing fans on the tier below. Quite how a motorbike was able to get there, when no one’s ever managed to take even a hip-flask into a stadium, baffled the embarrassed commentators.

  Watching football matches became like watching newsreels of matches in Britain from the 1970s: fans goading the police or other fans into close-quarter fights, train stations vandalised, cars repeatedly set on fire. Every Sunday evening there seemed to be new pictures of looted shops seen through the haze of police tear gas. In one post-match incident, a player from Como, Massimo Ferrigno, punched his former team-mate Francesco Bertolotti into a coma which lasted over a week. A month later, a bomb was thrown into the home of the co-owner of Napoli, Corrado Ferlaino, because the club was performing badly. (The same reason was given for the calf’s head sent in the post to the President of Reggina.) Worse was the volley of smoke-flares which, at almost every match, went to and fro between fans like a gently lobbed tennis ball. It looked quite picturesque unless you saw it up close: one policeman had to have a finger amputated. In an even more tragic incident, a fan was killed as a paper-bomb was thrown from opposing fans during a play-off in Sicily.

  Towards the close of the 2000–2001 season, Parma were placed just behind the chasing pack for the title; with Inter Milan and AC Milan struggling, a Champions’ League place looked certain. ‘Huh,’ said Filippo, my taciturn and supremely cynical friend with whom I often watch the games from the Curva Nord, ‘you just watch in the next few weeks. The teams from Milan will do anything they can to get into the Champions’ League …’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘You just watch the penalties they’re awarded,’ he said, laughing bitterly.

  Parma, though, was itself to become the centre of suspicion. When one of the Parma players scored a goal against Lecce, he looked embarrassed, as if he had messed up the script. There was no celebration, only a banging of his fists against the post. Then Parma were playing Verona. Suspicions were raised before the game by the fact that the Verona and Parma presidents are good friends and business partners. Giambattista Pastorello borrowed money from the Tanzi family – the Parma benefactors – to buy Verona, so the relationship is, to say the least, intimate. They often loan players one way or the other to help each other out. The teams even wear the same yellow-blue strip. During the penultimate game of the season, with Parma already guaranteed a Champions’ League place and Verona desperate to avoid the drop, Parma lost 2-1 at home. There was, of course, more conspiracy theorising for days on end.

  It may be, of course, that Juventus and Italian football are actually clean and free of corruption. It may be that people from Parma are just bad losers. ‘But,’ as Filippo says, ‘I wouldn’t bet on it. I wouldn’t bet on anything here unless I knew the score. Literally.’

  Most neutrals, for various reasons, wanted Roma to win the title, mainly for the worthy reason that Roma had played the best football. Also, the Argentine Batistuta, having delighted Italian aesthetes for a decade without winning much, was reaching the twilight of his career, and most people wished him well. The other, well-publicised reason for neutrals supporting Roma was a promise made by an actress. Sabrina Ferilli is a romanista and the owner of Italy’s most famous pair of breasts – in various B-movies they’re shown off like caciocavallo, those huge tear-drops of smooth creamy cheese. She had promised to perform a striptease should Roma manage to win the title. In the run-up to the end of the championship, news programmes could talk about little else other than the prospect of ‘la Ferilli’ baring her bosom. It was, literally, ‘big news’. Roma did, of course, win the title, and ‘la Ferilli’ did her teasing striptease (down to a skin-coloured bikini).

  The season, though, didn’t end there: as ever, there were legal cases that promised to drag on for years. The President of Napoli, a man whose face is like an over-inflated football, half of it covered by a hedge-like moustache, began legal action: he insisted that Parma and Verona must have come to an agreement, and that Napoli had been the victims, dropping down to Serie B. More seriously, and probably more based on fact, at the beginning of July it was announced that two of the leading lights of Juventus, the amministratore delegato Antonio Giraudo and the doctor Riccardo Agricola, were to be tried for ‘sporting fraud’ for administering illegal pills and illicit syringes to Juventus players. The man who had conducted the investigations was even, the press noted gleefully, a Juventus supporter.

  At the beginning of the following season, Edgar Davids’ ban from football was reduced. Nobody really noticed. In short paragraphs at the back of the sports pages, it was reported that the magistrature had decided to reduce the Juventus midfielder’s ban to just four months. Since a large part of the ban had been served during the summer months, he would be allowed to return to football almost immediately (17 September). All the other sentences were reduced or annulled, be they for forging passports, match-fixing or use of Nandrolone.

  All of which made me think that the real problem wasn’t about penalties, about whether the referees lean slightly towards the Old Lady of Italian football or the Prime Mi
nister’s team when they blow their whistles and point to the spot. The debate is really about another type of penalty, or the lack of it. It’s the fact that, as Italy’s moral minority always complains, non paga nessuno, which basically means that no one in Italy is ever, ever punished for anything: ‘nobody pays’. Ever since I had arrived I had heard one half of the country, that law-abiding half, complain bitterly and incessantly about the furbi who appear to bend and break the law at will, without ever facing the consequences. In Italy there are no penalties other than on the football pitch. Crime is never followed by punishment because, at least for the powers-that-be, there’s guaranteed impunity. You can get away with anything. As long as you play the game, you’ll be played onside. Take Nandrolone, field illegal players, fiddle the accounts, put up Fascist banners: non paga nessuno.

  Perhaps none of which really matters. Italian football remains the most stylish and cultured and clever incarnation of the sport. The Azzurri will always be the hot favourites to win any international tournament because, whatever goes on in the boardrooms, the actual foot-soldiers are still the best in the world. Also, I would rather play football in Italy – in the parks or on the beaches – than anywhere else. When you roll up with a friend, looking for a game, everyone will instinctively welcome you. Then, once they realise you’re English, they will pretend to be having second thoughts: ‘Mamma mia, not an English footballer!’ The seriousness with which they play, whispering advice to each other as they sprint across the sand, or signalling where you should put the ball just by moving their eyes, is incredible. They hardly ever foul; if, by accident they do, they will pick you up, bow and apologise. That’s the nobility of Italian football. Afterwards, once you’re in a bar with them all, it’s normally impossible – thanks to their hospitality and generosity – to buy even one drink.