The Dark Heart of Italy (10 page)

‘Listen, it’s all a fix,’ I say to Ciccio before kick-off, repeating what I’ve heard for months on television debates about football-fixing; ‘everyone knows that the referee will have been given a script by Juventus …’

‘Why do you have to show your lack of intelligence speaking like that?’ says Ciccio, smiling. He will never admit it, but he knows that the Old Lady of Italian football simply has a greater chance of winning than Parma, and not simply because of who’s on the pitch. Juventus seems quite literally to have all the luck,
which is related to the immense power it has off the pitch. ‘Being cynical’ in British football means being able to decide a game with a well-taken goal against the odds. In Italy, being ‘cynical’ in football implies having a ‘society’ (a club structure) that brings pressure to bear on everyone involved in the sport. The more one watches football in Italy, the more one suspects that the real game is not on the grass, but in the boardrooms, corridors and presidential suites. The more powerful the president (Berlusconi, Agnelli etc), the more chance you have of winning.

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.