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The Crazy Corrupted World of Italian Soccer

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Calcio, i.e. Italian football (soccer), is an open-air cageful of weirdos: political violence, conspiracy theories (all proven truthful!), superstition and crazy cults, bribery and corruption, illegal betting, fraudulent bankruptcy at all levels, monday morning coaching as a national religion.
A British journalist put it quite effectively when he wrote: "This is a nation where the largest selling daily newspaper is dedicated almost entirely to football; where its former ruling party is named after a football chant; and where its former Prime Minister owns one of the league's most famous clubs."
In 2006, the biggest scandal in the history of soccer nearly made the walls tumble down, with chains of domino effects impacting on politics and the economy.
On 2 February 2007, a policeman was allegedly killed by soccer fans during a riot in Catania, Sicily. All soccer matches were suspended nationwide. A few months later, forensic examinations proved that he'd been bumped by a police van driven by colleagues!
On 11 November 2007, a policeman killed a Lazio fan sitting in his car, no apparent motive. The policeman shot across lanes on the Rome-Milan highway. In the following hours anti-police riots broke out in every major city, police stations were assaulted, police vans were burned down, several officers were injured.
Here you'll find useful background information on this nightmarish world.
P.S. If you don't want to see those Google ads on top, download the Firefox browser and add the Adblock extension.

ITALIAN SOCCER AND US

Our bizarre relationship with soccer is best explained here. To cut it short: during the second half of the 1990's we the members of the Wu Ming collective were active in a countercultural network (kind of) known as the Luther Blissett Project. It was inexplicably named after an Afro-British soccer player who had played in Italy's Serie A in the 1983-84 season. This created a lot of interesting short circuits. In fact, Italy is all about short circuits, and soccer is just about the most short-circuited realm in Italian life.
- Books quiz on Italian literature from The Guardian on line (UK). Check out the first question.
- Click here and listen to Mr Blissett discussing his career in Italy and the adoption of his name by the Luther Blissett Project (real audio)
- Click here and watch Luther Blissett answering a question on the Luther Blissett Project.
- Click here and look at the scene described in the "Luther Blissett" Wikipedia entry: "Since the beginning of the project the real Blissett was aware of the 'group' taking his name. However, reports differed widely in saying whether he liked the attention he received because of them. Some reports said he was flattered by the attention, others claimed he was very upset about it.
Blissett dispelled all doubts on 30 June 2004, when he appeared on the British television sports show Fantasy Football League - Euro 2004, broadcast on ITV. During the whole show, Blissett intelligently joked and quipped about his own (alleged) involvement in the Luther Blissett Project."

UPDATES ON SOCCER VIOLENCE IN ITALY (VIA DEL.ICIO.US)

COMPLETE LIST HERE. RSS FEED HERE.
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NEO-FASCIST ACTIVITIES IN ITALIAN SOCCER

Some Famous Cases and Background Info

In the Soccer Stadiums of Italy, a Fight to Break Grip of Racism
From the International Herald Tribune, February 12, 2000.
'Racism has stained big-time soccer in Europe for years, but the extremists at Lazio, a club once favored by Mussolini, have few rivals. In a match against Roma in 1998 - Lazio is theoretically the team of Rome's coarse hinterland, and Roma that of the capital's more cosmopolitan inner city - Lazio ultras put up banners attacking Jews, saying: "Auschwitz is your country, the gas chambers are your home."'
Lazio: Mussolini's Team
Slate, Sept. 11, 2001. "The Shalom Cup, held last week, was the most unlikely soccer tournament in the world. Not because it showcased Jewish soccer players, including Maccabi Haifa, one of the few stellar Israeli sides. What made the Shalom Cup truly unlikely was its host: the Roman club S.S. Lazio [...] Of all the clubs in Europe, each with its own goon squad of skinhead supporters, Lazio fans are easily the most racist, anti-Semitic, pro-fascist, and despicable of the bunch."
Fascist Soccer Players: the case of Paolo Di Canio / 1
From the London Times, January 12, 2005
"Paolo Di Canio is the new poster boy for the far right in Italy. His straight-arm salute after scoring for Lazio in the Rome derby has led to an outbreak of anti-Jewish graffiti in the capital and fascist banners at football grounds. Clearly, his long-standing and welldocumented admiration for Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader, makes him the logical choice for football's new generation of black shirts. After all, Paolo and the Lazio-supporting Benito have so much in common."
Fascist Soccer Players: the case of Paolo Di Canio / 2
from the Daily Telegraph (UK), December 24, 2005
'An Italian footballer defended himself yesterday against a growing chorus of condemnation over his use of a straight-arm salute to a Right-wing crowd by saying "I am a fascist, not a racist".'
Fascist Soccer Players: The case of Paolo Di Canio / 3
Black footballer Hislop: My friendship with Di Canio is over.
"West Ham’s goalkeeper, Shaka Hislop says he feels betrayed and bitterly disappointed by the behaviour of his former team-mate Paolo Di Canio, who has been disciplined by the Italian football league for a second offence of making a fascist salute to Lazio fans earlier this month."

CALCIOPOLI. THE SOCCER HYPER-SCANDAL OF 2006

An intro to the subject and links to useful summing-ups

They were caught red-handed

In May 2006 the Italian public found out (not that we didn't already have suspects...) that Juventus FC, the most powerful club of the League, had fixed matches for years, probably since 1998. Its general manager Luciano Moggi (aptly nicknamed "Lucky Luciano") ruthlessly exercised direct control over referees. On the field, they always did what he wanted. Transcripts of his tapped phone conversations ended up being published on Italian newspapers.
Moggi wasn't the only one to do so: several matches were rigged, and there was much more, involving doping, illegal betting, TV rights, corrupted judges etc. "From what I gather, the investigators have only released 10% of what they know, so there is a lot more to come", said Irish writer and soccer expert Paddy Agnew.

Why not cut all those heads?

A few weeks before the 2006 World Cup, heads started rolling down: general managers, football federation executives, financial police officers, top referees, coaches, TV anchormen etc.
Soccergate was impacting heavily on politics: inquiring magistrates were using machetes to cut into the jumble of conflicts of interest that had shaped both soccer and politics in the past twenty years. And who's the king of conflicts of interest? I say, who's the king of conflicts of interest?
It was the biggest earthquake since the early 1990's Clean Hands investigation on bribery that had destroyed all the oldest political parties and forced Silvio Berlusconi to enter the political field.

Victory is a narcotic

After Italy won the World Cup in Germany (with 8 Juventus players in the national team), some politicians asked for the shelving of the inquiries or, at least, for "leniency". Their argument was: if we've become world champions, things in Italian football can't be so bad... AC Milan and national team midfielder Gennaro Gattuso was among the players who stated they were contrary to anything like that. "As a nation, we'd end up cutting a sorry figure".
On July 14th, five days after the victory in Berlin, the sport tribunal issued its verdict: Juventus was relegated to serie B and given a -30 point penalty. Lazio and Fiorentina were relegated to serie B and given a -7 point penalty. AC Milan was not relegated but was excluded from the 2006-07 Champions' league and given a -15 point penalty. All teams announced they would appeal the verdict. On July 25, the penalties were reduced: Juventus was relegated to serie B and given a -17 point penalty. Lazio and Fiorentina stayed in Serie A but were given -11 and -11 point penalties. AC Milan was given a -9 point penalty and re-included in the Champions' League.

It left a bad taste

The day after, the online edition of La Repubblica daily paper ran a survey: 79% of the readers said that penalties were "too mild". The online edition of Il Corriere della sera daily paper ran another survey: 73% of the readers shared that opinion. In England, readers of the Guardian online edition were even harsher: 86% thought that the corrupt Italian clubs shouldn't have had their punishments reduced.
Juventus and the other clubs announced they would appeal to administrative justice, but they were persuaded not to do it.
In September 2006, only a few weeks after the second, toned-down sentence, the Soccer Federation's government-appointed commissioner Guido Rossi and the head of the Federation's investigation office Francesco Saverio Borrelli resigned and said they'd been left powerless and isolated, for the national soccer establishment didn't want change. A few days later they withdrew the resignation.
So much for sport justice. The criminal inquiries are still going on.

Some Detailed Accounts
Serie A scandal of 2006 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The 2006 Serie A scandal (Italian: Calciopoli) involved alleged match fixing in Italy's top professional football league, Serie A. The scandal was uncovered in May 2006 by Italian police, implicating league champions Juventus, and other major teams including A.C. Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio, and Reggina when a number of telephone interceptions showed a thick network of relations between team managers and referee organisation. Juventus were the champions of Serie A at the time. The teams have been accused of rigging games by selecting favourable referees. [Check the "Latest Developments" section]
What's black and white and has a foul smell? Ask Signor Moggi
The London Times, May 27, 2006. THERE ARE 58 million people living in Italy but it's a small world. Italians call it Italietta, a pejorative term implying that the control of the country is in the hands of a select gang of unscrupulous people. For almost a month now, Italians have been learning, with bitterness, just how small their country is. Football is at the centre of the scandal and the lead role is played brilliantly by Luciano Moggi.
Luciano Moggi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses. Luciano Moggi (born July 10, 1937)
...and guess who's the boss? (not Moggi)
From the New York Times: Berlusconi and the soccer scandal
Italian football scandal latest
A frequently updated summation of the scandal, from the BBC website. The Background, the investigations, wider implications for Italian soccer.
Makings of a scandal: Juventus' match-fixing system copied by their rivals
From The Independent, 15 July 2006
The Observer | Sport | Paradiso to inferno
Within a week of Italy winning the World Cup, the clubs that had provided 13 players of the triumphant squad were punished in devastating fashion. One man used his influence through media, politics and football. This is how Luciano Moggi brought down one of Europe's greatest clubs - and shamed a nation
Winning at All Costs
In 2006, three billion people--including 20 million in the United States--watched Italy's extraordinary victory over France in the World Cup final. It was a down and dirty game, marred by French superstar Zidane's headbutting of Italian defender Materazzi. But millions of Americans were also exposed to the poetry, force and excellence of the Italian game. As operatic as Verdi and as cunning as Machiavelli, the Italian game seemed to open a window into the Italian soul.
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UPDATES ON THE SCANDAL (VIA DEL.ICIO.US)

These pieces of coverage were hand-picked (by yours truly) from English language newspapers and mags, and frequently updated in the heyday of the 2006 scandal. Now the running stream has become a slow trickle :-(
COMPLETE LIST HERE.
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YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND ITALY IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS

Examples of what soccer looks like in this country

AC Milan vs. Inter Milan, February 21, 2004.
Streaming video, 02:14. Telelombardia Sports Commentators Tiziano Crudeli and Gianluca Rossi going completely crazy during the match. Crudeli, the older guy, looks like he needs a straitjacket!

"Teste di cazzo!"
Streaming video, 00:56. On May 15, after the scandal broke out, the audience at a popular soccer chat show booed Giampiero Mughini (the guy in the pic), a writer and a querulous juventino who frequently talks about soccer on TV. He retorted by repeatedly calling them "teste di cazzo" (i.e. he stated that their heads had the appearance of masculine genital organs).

AC Milan vs. Livorno, September 10, 2004
Video streaming, 00:21. Thousands of Livorno leftist supporters are chanting "Berlusconi pezzo di merda". That's a rather foul comparison between the former prime minister (and AC Milan owner) and a clot of fecal matter.

Heil Paolo
Video streaming, 00:11. Neo-fascist Lazio supporters lift their arms when Paolo Di Canio enters the pitch. "Ave Paolo" (typical fascist salute).

AC Milan vs. Juventus, March 23, 2003.
Video streaming, 01:22. White riot! I wanna riot! Hooligans throw molotov cocktails at the police.

CALCIO: A HISTORY OF ITALIAN FOOTBALL. BY JOHN FOOT

The background, the context, the conflicts of interest that made corruption possible

You need more background info. Here's a powerful book, Calcio: A History of Italian Football by John Foot (Fourth Estate, London, £ 15). We ordered it after reading a review on The Independent (see below). A particular passage of the review drew our attention:

There is a particularly comic chapter on the many disastrous foreigners who have starred (if that's the right word) in the Italian game and which boasts three British players in its line up (an ineffective Ian Rush, a perpetually injured, drunk and belching Paul Gascoigne and the unfortunate Luther Blisset, whose uselessness was so legendary that his name, bizarrely, was later adopted by a group of avant-garde artists and pranksters.

Yeah, that's us.
We'd long been looking forward to reading a history of calcio written by an English scholar and football fan. However, the reason we immediately ordered the book is: we were curious to read whatever speculation Mr Foot had entertained about Luther Blissett, the rise of the multiple name, and the activities of the Luther Blissett Project.
The chapter is titled "Luther Blissett: from Super-bidone to agent saboteur". [Bidone (literally "trash can") is Italian slang for "dead loss", "bad deal", or "rip off".] It is a funny, decent recapitulation of the founding myth. There are a few minor inaccuracies concerning some of our pranks, but then, weren't inaccuracies themselves part of the pranks?
What amazed us, and left us flabbergasted, is the fact that Mr Foot translated and inserted in the book a rather obscure (albeit crucial) piece of Blissettiana, "Negative Heroes: Luther Blissett and the Refusal to Work". This short text appeared on the web in 1996-97, we never knew who wrote it, it was never translated in any other language before Mr Foot decided to do it.

N.B. The book was published a few days before the big 2006 scandal broke out. Some of the conspiracy theories concerning corrupt referees that Mr Foot considered exaggerated were indeed perfectly plausible, nay, some of them were undisputably true, even slightly approximated by defect.

JOHN FOOT'S BOOK: REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS

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Excerpt from "NEGATIVE HEROES: LUTHER BLISSETT AND THE REFUSAL TO WORK" (1996)

Translated by John Foot

"Comrade Luther was well aware that his daily life was both a means and an outcome of the struggle. Sold by the music and word merchant Elton John to a pre-Berlusconian Milan, he immediately assumed the role of a producer of immaterial symbolic power, overturning the sense of his every gesture and highlighting his rebellion against the system. Only the blindness of a young fan led me to hate him, then, for those badly-treated footballs, or for that misplaced trap against Roma, after a pass that had almost stopped in front of him. In reality, he was a saboteur, he revealed himself to 80,000 consumer-producers as a wooden wedge [used to stop assembly lines by militant workers in the 1970s], a sabot stuck into the production line by a worker: and he prefiguered, at the same time, the later role of computer viruses within a society based on control and communication. Blissett refused to be integrated; he understood that capital is a parasite that sucks away our humanity. The game of football was made up of interaction, communication, intelligence and knowledge, and he understood that this system was part of a valorization of goods."

Full text here.

ITALIAN SOCCER: MORE BOOKS

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FOOTBALL AND FASCISM: THE NATIONAL GAME UNDER MUSSOLINI. BY SIMON MARTIN

Free Image Hosting at allyoucanupload.com
John Foot Reviews Football and Fascism on The Guardian
"Martin shows how the tensions within fascism were translated into footballing policies. Modernist stadiums were built in some cities - such as Florence - while other clubs plumped for more classical structures, harking back to the Roman empire. Football also created problems for the regime. Clearly, fandom encouraged regionalism and created tensions between city rivals. This "idiotic localism", as one fascist called it, contrasted starkly with the radical nationalism that was at the heart of Mussolini's project."
The Author comments on Foot's review
"John's synopsis of the book's broad content is also an accurate reflection of my attempt to show just how deeply the regime attempted to penetrate daily life through football, thereby creating consent with the carrot rather than the stick. However, as he rightly points out, this was not always the case and the game often exposed irresolvable tensions and fissures in society."
Three Monkeys reviews Football and Fascism
""They did play around with the idea of fascist theatre, a theatre for the masses, and they tried this experiment of a theatre for 20,000 people in Florence. It took a lot of money, and a lot of effort, and it wasn't very successful. With football they realised straight away that, while they were spending all this money elsewhere, every weekend there were maybe 200,000 people more going to see football matches, along with the people who don't go but are interested in it"

SOCCER AND VIOLENCE ON AMAZON

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SOCCER AND POLITICS: A GLOBAL VIEW

Hand-picked essays and articles on soccer, politics, society, diplomacy. Complete list here.
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NUGGETS + READER FEEDBACK

"It's either everybody's fault, or nobody's fault. They're trying to implicate AC Milan, but our team won on the field."
- Silvio Berlusconi, billionaire and right-wing politician, June 5th, 2006

"Those who say that wiretap transcripts published in the press give only a vague idea of the real tone of phone conversations and can't help but distorting their meaning ought to read what Bologna FC goalkeeper Gianluca Pagliuca said after his testimony before the magistrates:
'It's terrible. When you read the transcripts on a newspaper or listen to actors reading them on TV, that's one thing, but when you listen to the actual tapes, that's scary, I had gooseflesh all over me. Those are dirty conversations. Once prosecutors have listened to those tapes, you can't expect them to handle the matter with a velvet glove.'
We should credit prosecutors with the virtue of self-control. They have to question a string of billionaires claiming to not remember, playing tricks, and invariably defending themselves by saying both: 'I didn't know!' and 'Everybody did it!' Nobody seems to understand that those are two antithetical statements, that they annul each other."
- Rudi Ghedini, writer and Inter Milan fan, June 14th, 2006

Have you got something to say about soccer and Italy, soccer and politics, corruption and the World Cup etc.? Leave comments, rants, reviews, links to more stuff, etc.

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    Yes it is true, Italian football is miserable as the government. Only one mistake in your articles. The 8 juventus players were engaged for 1982 world cup (won by Italy) and not for the Germany one (won by Italy too).
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In 1994, hundreds of European artists, activists and pranksters adopted and shared the same identity.
They all called themselves Luther Blissett and s... more »

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