Interview With John Foot
The author of Calcio talks to Sean O'Conor
My first thought was 'At last!' Why has not there been a
comprehensive English language history of Italian football before?
There is not even one in Italy. A couple of journalists have produced
ones but the historians have not taken it on. It is not seen as
a serious subject. In academic circles I still get funny looks!
Lots of writers and poets have addressed football in Italy, just
not historians, which is strange considering how socially important
it has been in Italian history. The more I study it the more important
I think it is.
'Calcio' has a large bibliography and you have obviously
seen a lot of old footage too.
I tried to get hold of some clips from the thirties which were great.
I looked again and again at this penalty when Meazza's shorts were
supposed to have fallen down. As far as I could tell it was not
true!
You unearthed some gems of football history – Reading
beating Milan 5-0 in 1913, Inter losing a bunch of players in WWI
including the Italian national team captain and an armed insurrection
in Viareggio following a match in 1920.
That last story has never been told before and I had always wanted
to tell it, it was so amazing. I came across it years ago doing
my PhD research and thought I had to use it.
It was interesting you found violence has been in Italian
football right from the start.
It has always been there because Italy is a violent society. It
was more spontaneous in the old days though, violent pitch invasions
and so on. It is much more controlled now.
The disunity of the country creates some great football
rivalries.
You can find great derbies all over Italy. If you travel around
you will always find these incredibly passionate local rivalries
that manifest themselves on the football field.
That is the medieval origin of the sport in England.
Like calcio fiorentino, which is unbelievably violent, and
rubbish by the way. The game I saw they had to abandon because it
was too violent. It was unwatchable.
What do you love most about Calcio, having studied it from
top to bottom?
I really got into the '50s and '60s and developed a nostalgia for
something I was not even around to witness. Players like Rivera,
Riva, Gigi Meroni were in an era of such innocence. Football must
have been better to watch then as it was much slower and there was
not a pressing game. They produced some extraordinary players and
the foreigners were the very best in the world. I fell in love with
that period. I liked the 1990s when Milan were on fire too but I
have fallen out of love with that period a bit having watched so
many programmes with men shouting at each other.
I never fail to be amazed at the level of interest in Italy.
There almost could not be greater attention from the media.
Until the 1950s cycling and other sports were up there in interest
levels but now there is no comparison, maybe motor sports occasionally
but that is about it. The domination is extraordinary.
You said there seemed to be a lack of cultural alternatives.
I think we should separate the ultra from the ordinary fan. There
are 26 or 27 million people in Italy who claim to be fans. If you
added up all of the ultras they would probably number around 300,000.
That is a wild guess but in those terms they really are small. For
people who follow the sport generally and read the Gazzetta
you would not really use that explanation. But I recently traveled
back with a school party from Milan and they were communicating
using football chants and not just the boys. Their language was
internalized and I just thought 'wow, this has gone really deep
into Italian society.'
Italian fans seem so serious.
Well there are the long running TV shows like 'Quelli che il calcio'
or 'Mai Dire Gol' which prove they can have a laugh about the game
and you do get the banners in the stadia which can be funny. There
is also a boom in football literature with Fever Pitch rip-offs,
or joke books about Inter and stuff like that but English style
improvised chanting does not exist because the ultras orchestrate
everything. I once stood on the curva by mistake and a big skinhead
asked me why I was not singing and it was not a joke!
I feel sorry for those left out in Italy who don't like
football.
That would be a whole other book, the 25 million Italians who don't
like the sport! That would be a good story, as they do exist!
I was entranced by the whole spectacle in the early '90s.
I still think when you get a great Italian game there is nothing
better as the skill level is so high and a lot of the lower ranked
teams do not just collapse and die like they do in other leagues.
Italian Football was big here in the early 1990s following
the World Cup, when Gazza went there and the Premiership was yet
to be born, but then fell away in popularity.
It had a dip when Sky was not covering it for a while and then English
football got richer
but thanks to Bravo it seems to have come back and it still remains
pretty popular here. Calcio Italia magazine must have a following
to keep going.
Which league is better?
I don't know which I would prefer to watch but I think the technical
level is better in Serie A than in the Premiership. If you look
at in the lower teams in the table in Italy, any defender or common
or garden midfielder has a better technical ability than their equivalent
in the Premiership.
If you like watching a game that is not necessarily attack, attack,
attack but has got some technical skill, then Serie A is for you.
And Italian v Spanish football?
Spanish is probably better to watch as they have more time on the
ball. Sacchi had a lot of good effects but the 'exasperated pressing',
as they call it in Italy, everybody does now and there is not any
space. If it is a bad game, it is a terrible game, and the pitches
are not very good either and that does not help.
Is the Italian game mentality changing at all?
A lot more teams are attacking more than ever and don't want to
sit back as much. I think Chievo changed that surprisingly, when
they realized there is space if you attack right from the start.
They are incredible, an all-Italian team with no money who have
picked players from Serie B & C.
I think Tim Parks picked the wrong Verona team to follow
In many ways!
Why is defence the most important part of the Italian game?
Partly it is win at all costs and wait for the other team to make
a mistake but also catenaccio, according to Pasolini, is a part
of the Italian character. Just like neo-realists did not invent
poverty, it was already there. There was also an inferiority complex
to the English in the early days.
People criticize Italian football for being too negative.
The man to man marking is now dying out but on the flip side of
defending en masse is counter attacking and there is nothing more
exciting than watching a break. Some English sides play catenaccio,
Bolton for instance. Clough used catenaccio to win Forest two European
Cups. I think it has changed since Sacchi. It is more zonal and
the game is faster.
But 'fantasists' like Zola, Di Canio, Carbone & Baggio
were marginalized in the 1990s.
In that particular period everyone was playing a pressing game and
the midfield got squeezed but I think that type of player is coming
back in. Milan have players like Seedorf and Kaka for instance but
they still don't like wingers much in Italy like we do.
Has not English football caught up in terms of technique
in recent years?
I watched Tottenham v Birmingham the other day and half of it was
just crap, booting it up in the air. Italians would never do that.
Generally anyone who plays for a team like Cagliari or Chievo can
play football better than that.
I have looked at kids' games in Italy and it is something that goes
all the way through. I used to watch a team in which the goalkeeper
was not allowed to kick the ball out if he had it in his hands -
he had to throw it and distribute it.
When I played minor league football in Italy it was very
orchestrated.
And that culture runs right through. Even if you are a goal down
with two minutes left you still try to pass your way into the net.
Are Serie A crowds in decline?
Definitely, and the violence and racism are on the increase. It
is not really a fun experience to go to a game in Italy. It is a
scary experience. The crowds are definitely falling. Juve's are
a complete joke and the authorities do not know what to do about
it. They have not got the idea that there is actually something
structurally wrong here.
Is Italy too isolated to learn from England in this area?
No they talk about the British model a lot but they do not understand
it. They have this great myth of the hooligans being eradicated
through repression, which I have tried to explain several times
is the wrong conclusion. Again and again they give the credit to
Thatcher, believe it or not.
They have a lot to learn in policing football.
From what I have seen they tend to send in the riot police much
earlier than we would, the police have guns and there is always
the potential for it to get much nastier more quickly.
Tell me about it, I was in the Stadio Olimpico in 1997 when
the carabinieri waded in to the English fans and started mercilessly
beating them.
That was the moment when perceptions did begin to change a bit.
The memory of Heysel etched the image of English fans as hooligans
into Italian minds and it has been very hard to shake off. Every
little riot in the piazza gets blown up as the 'hooligans inglesi'
again while that goes on every week in Italy.
The other thing was the Liverpool v Juventus games last season when
they began to realize that the English fans had to be protected
from the Italian ones, a reversal since Heysel. But they still don't
really get it because they have not studied England properly. It
was not Heysel that changed English football, it was Hillsborough.
They just don't realize their hooligan problem is far worse
than ours?
There is a normalization going on. For Varese v Como they might
have a few thousand police but in England nowadays it would be inconceivable.
To be fair to them they have the right ideas at times but they don't
implement them because not everyone is on board. The fans need to
be involved too.
Does change have to come from above, and UEFA, then?
A couple of times they have done it but then lots of time they have
not. They came down hard on the racism issue with Roma for instance
but the fault is in society, not in football, because these far
right groups have taken over the curva and love getting their banners
on TV. I would close them down for a season and see what happens.
The power of the Ultras still has not been touched, then?
They have not got the guts to take on the curva but that is really
what it is going to take. It needs a collective effort, it is no
good just one club doing it. The managers and proprietors are scared
of them. It is not about Moratti or one person, though he has been
extremely lax in his dealings with the Ultras, but about a whole
system that has to change.
You said Lazio's replica shirt sales are controlled by the
Ultras.
Yes, that is pretty scary. How much money is that being taken away
from the club?
It is like the kids are running the school.
And it has been going on for twenty years so they are used to running
the school. They can get managers sacked, players sacked. The cost
in England was destroying the atmosphere but that was a price that
we had to pay. If you took out the standing and made everyone go
to where their ticket said instead of all the hard core congregating
in one area that would on its own make a huge difference.
The stuff that is going on does not even get reported. What happened
to those Middlesbrough fans in Rome was shocking but the Italian
press did not mention it. That is a symptom of the bigger problem.
Is the failure of calcio to modernize just a reflection
of Italy itself?
To some extent. It is like a caricature of Italy. Everything is
worse in football than in Italian society as a whole. No financial
rules are obeyed but no club goes bankrupt or hardly ever. Not obeying
the rules is a thing in Italian society in general but it is worse
in football.
You wrote it was laughable that politics could be separated
from Italian football.
I think it is a rather pessimistic time in Italian politics but
it would help if you got rid of the people like Carraro and Matarrese.
They are still the same people who have been running this ridiculous
system for that long.
Plus ca change…
There has to be some sort of renewal and they need to get rid of
the conflicts of interest. People like Galliani and Berlusconi should
not be in football but you need a law to do that. Collective bargaining
for TV rights would help too. The power Juventus wield is massive
and unhealthy while poor Chievo have no money at all. There are
things you could do to rebalance the system.
Why do you think big business and politics have got so into
bed with football in Italy and they have not in England?
That is a good question. I don't know. Why did not Morris and other
companies have teams? You could argue it was by chance that Pirelli
and Fiat saw their opportunity to invest in a growing business and
were forward thinking enough but I don't think there is any great
overarching theory.
I think wealthy or powerful people get involved for fame
unless they are fans.
It has become more common in England the last decade. Maxwell was
an early example of an Italian-style presidente of an English club.
Now you have people like Glazer and Abramovich. But it happened
back in the '20s in Italy. Fiat taking over Juventus was the big
one, Fiat being a national brand leader.
Italy has always been a femme fatale to me, ditto its football.
Yes you cannot fully love it, there is a dark side to it as you
say. They have always had the best players but also all the rubbish
that goes on off the pitch. That is part of the attraction for a
lot of ultras who go for reasons other than football.
A world away from the American concept of sport as entertainment.
Yes, sport is pain and suffering and maybe it has always been like
that in any country but in Italy it has gone too far and so many
people live their whole lives around football.
It all seems a bit gloomy.
There are some really good people involved in Italian football.
There was a great proposal from Fiorentina's manager who suggested
no one should get paid for a year or the Roma player Tomassi insisting
on the minimum wage because he was not sure if he had recovered
enough from injury. Recently Rossi the Roma midfielder handballed
a goal but the referee gave it so he ran up to him and made him
disallow it. Things like that give you hope.
Calcio operates by different moral rules to our football to some
extent, then?
Jay Bothroyd was told off for not going down when tackled to win
a penalty. The manager was in his own way only being honest saying
'you should have dived, we don't have room for heroes and moralists
in football'.
Did you think Joe McGinniss got the wrong end of the stick
about the match-fixing in 'The Miracle of Castel di Sangro'?
I think he was a bit naïve. I like that book but I think I
would not have been surprised by the things he recounts.
I watched this game at the end of the season in Genoa which was
fixed and it is extraordinary watching games whose outcomes have
clearly been decided. But that side of the culture is hard for us
to understand. On the other hand it is hard for them to understand
why anyone would try in an end of season game when there is nothing
to play for. Why not build up some friendship credits for next season
and put some money in the bank? It is not breaking the rules as
it does not state you have to try to win.
I recall going to a Parma game that had clearly been 'arranged'.
I once remember seeing Milan score 'by mistake' against Brescia
and then their whole defence retreated to let Brescia score. But
how many of those games get to the investigation committee? They
will always claim they were trying and no individual will go out
on a limb, like Paolo Di Canio almost did last season around the
Roma-Lazio game.
Di Canio encapsulates much of Italian football?
A lot of people ring me up about him. That is probably the thing
people ask the most. When he was here he had a nice, cosy image.
He has been open about his fascism since he was 17 and had the Mussolini
stuff in his book but nobody here read it. Only when he went back
to Italy did he start doing all those stupid things. What an idiot!
You seemed quite jaded by the end of the book and admit
you have almost fallen out of love with the subject matter.
I am a bit sick of it, not so much the football itself but everything
that surrounds it, the media basically. The season I spent out there
researching the book was a particularly difficult one with a ton
of financial scandals and with the amount of hysteria in the press
it just got a bit wearing after a bit. There was so much full-on
conspiracy theories and I did watch a lot of local TV. I became
as cynical as the Italians are about referees and so on. It is the
worst part of Italian society in that there are just no rules. It
is just ridiculous and it has got worse since I finished the book.
Gaucci* is on the run in Santo Domingo, spreading unbelievable accusations
that every game over the last fifty years has been fixed.
Which team is good to watch now?
I think Milan play the best football at the moment although it pains
me to say it. Ancelotti puts three or four skilful players in his
midfield who are actually nice to watch. I would not want to watch
Inter given a choice but they are my team. Long-suffering is putting
it mildly.
How will Italy do at the World Cup?
Pretty good I hope for my book! If they can avoid the hysterical
reaction to refs and pick the right players, get rid of the old
guard like Vieri, they should be favourites or second favourites.
Have you seen Luca Toni play? He is brilliant, very good in the
air, not a typical Italian forward at all. If he and Gilardino stay
fit, Italy already has the best defense and goalkeeper in the world…Totti
needs to be fit too as he is crucial but I don't see any weaknesses
in them apart from maybe at right back.
You said your son hates football, what went wrong there?
Maybe he does it on purpose! I think I have tried too hard to make
him a fan. I'll remember not to do that next time!
Was your father Paul a football fan?
Yes, he was a mad Plymouth fan and would go to places like Gillingham
on a cold Tuesday night to watch a terrible, absolutely appalling
Plymouth team in the third division. My happiest and most nostalgic
football memories were of my dad taking me to some disgusting ground,
drinking some horrible tea and hearing the players talking. That
is football for me.
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