Italian Football: Serie A Scandal

A Football Scandal 'Made in Italy'

Sean O'Conor

So the 'calciogate' scandal has finally come full circle and the verdicts issued.

Juventus, Fiorentina and Lazio are relegated to Serie B, Milan will stay in Serie A with a 15-point handicap and had their previous campaign tally reduced by 44 points. Juve are stripped of the previous two seasons' titles and the clubs needless to say will not be competing in Europe this season.

Juventus missed the ultimate humiliation of a fall to Serie C but will start with a whopping thirty point handicap, Lazio with seven points deducted and Fiorentina twelve in the second flight.

The list of the accused individuals reads like a who's who of Italian football's hierarchy, which of course it is as the board of the FIGC, calcio's governing body, resigned en masse when their involvement became clear.

The bans for these people are up to five years and the fines no greater than €50,000 – Luciano Moggi, the architect of the scandal, is top of the league on both counts.

The investigation came to light when the Italian press revealed police had tapped Juventus chairman Moggi speaking to the Italian FA to arrange specific referees for Juve games. The guilt of the other teams accused was probable, but the proof less concrete, raising questions of whether the evidence would have stood up in another country's court and how the process was connected to the fact the first post-Berlusconi government has been newly elected in the peninsula.

Fiorentina directors were recorded complaining about the refereeing and implying there was a quid pro quo agreement in place in return for refereeing favours.

Lazio's President Claudio Lotito was taped talking about communicating with Fiorentina regarding the possible outcome of an end of season match, which it must be said is unofficially normal practice in Italy.

When a club has nothing to lose it is far from unusual to store up friendship credits with another team who need the points by taking it easy.

Milan financial manager Leonardo Meani was recorded complaining to the FIGC about a linesman after his side had lost 2-1 to Siena ("be very careful next time!") and was proven to have arranged a linesman who was a noted Milan fan for a game against Chievo.

Meani acted with the complicity of Milan supremo Adriano Galliani, also president of the Italian league. Surely it was unhealthy that a major club president held a position of influence at the nation's FA but then one might equally ask what Arsenal's David Dein is doing working at Soho Square and helping select the next England manager.

The Italian FA comes out of it worst in many ways. Pierluigi Pairetto informed Juventus of the referee for a Champions League game in 2004 two weeks beforehand, when UEFA rules stipulate the information can be released no earlier than 48 hours before kick off in order to prevent any possible influencing.

So what emerged was not a smoking gun of fixed results per se, but clear evidence of clubs trying to select officials they believed would be favourable to them, a tangled web of complicity between governing body and clubs actively trying to interfere.

The picture was murky but clear: a football culture where the clubs do all they can to influence the law makers by inserting themselves into their milieu and actively courting their friendship and trust, instead of standing off and following orders like they should.

This is unacceptable of course but also very Italian, where a nuanced morality holds sway.

Italy is a clientelist society where influence is always being sought through unofficial lines of communication, where there is not an automatic respect for law imposed from above and where doing things independently, locally and through personal contact is commonly preferred to obeying officialdom.

Anyone who has lived or even traveled in Italy will be aware of how discounts are always offered and prices and rules are often seen as negotiable and not necessarily set in stone.

At its extremity, this belief in the subversion of law manifests itself in the huge organised crime syndicates at large in the south of the country, at a simple level when a street vendor invites a consumer to barter the advertised price of goods.

Of course, bribery and cheating and football match-fixing go on in other EU countries but not to the extent they do in Italy. With its Byzantine legal system, unstable governments, fierce regional identities and the ability for a (now ex-) Prime Minister in Silvio Berlusconi to effectively control the nation's public and private sectors and media, the country would come nowhere near to EU membership if it applied today.

The collapse in 2003 of Parmalat, a multinational based in a city that was an apparent paragon of Italian virtue, gave proof that the whole system was rotten to the core.

The opening of the books of what came to be known as 'Europe's Enron' revealed a creativity unmatched since the days of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Set against this backdrop, 'calciogate', 'clean feet' or 'Moggiopoly' as it has been called, should come as no surprise.

But it was still arresting to hear of the Juve supremo intimidating journalists to the extent of telephoning TV stations to order them not to show a replay of a particular incident.

But getting back to football, this is not the first time Italian football has been in the dock and nor will it be the last. The only slight defence they might offer is that the particularly Italian fear of corrupt match officials is worth noting.

Italians believe far more than most people that the match official makes a big difference to a game's outcome, a thesis seemingly 'proved' to their satisfaction in the 2002 World Cup when Ecuador's Byron Moreno served up an extraordinarily bonkers display of refereeing in Italy's 2-1 quarter final defeat to South Korea.

Serie A now features the likes of Catania, Livorno, Messina and Treviso, the latter two avoiding relegation along with Lecce doubtless to the delight of their fans, while Inter may scent the gifted chance of ending their seventeen year wait for a scudetto.

The nerazzurri will play in the Champions League group stages with Roma while Chievo and Palermo enter at the qualifying stage this Autumn. Livorno, Empoli and Parma will play in the UEFA Cup.

While the fans argue left, right and centre over who should have got what in the sentencing, as expected all four clubs involved announced they would be appealing against the apparent injustice of the sentences handed out, while the rest of Europe's big clubs are eyeing Juventus' squad with beady eyes.

The bianconeri's ranks include five of Italy's World Cup winning squad plus Pavel Nedved, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, David Trezeguet, Patrick Vieira and Lilian Thuram.

Perhaps only when the appeals have been heard and hopefully dismissed and the new season begins with an unfamiliar look will the reality of this extraordinary period in Italian football sink in.

This was a scandal made in Italy and whether the removal of Italian football's top brass, many of whom including Franco Carraro, president of the FIGC as long ago as 1976, were well past their sell-by dates, heralds a new era or just a lopping of the Hydra's soon to regrow heads remains to be seen.

In a country where subversion of the law is the norm, there remain few grounds for optimism, however encouraging this piece of law-enforcement has been.

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Sean O'Conor

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