The Dark Heart of Italy (11 page)

In Italy, political power has always been intimately linked to football,
and there’s nothing new about one determining the other. If you’re an
important politician, chances are that you also own a football team; if
you’re a football president, you’re probably also in parliament, or else
very close to it. The conflation of football and politics is the reason that
Italians, as is well known, ‘lose wars as if they were games of football,
and lose games of football as if they were wars’
.

Mussolini was probably the first politician who fully understood the
political implications of the sport. Physical perfection and sporting
finesse became metaphors for the virility of Fascism, as athletic organisations
drilled millions of Italians in gymnasia. Local governments
were forced to build ‘lictorian’ (Fascist) sports grounds; by 1930 there
were over
3
,000 across the country.
Bologna’s
was inaugurated in 1926,
followed by the Berta stadium in Florence, the Mussolini stadium in
Turin and the
Vittoria
stadium in Bari. Footballing triumphs came to
be exploited as examples of the strength or superiority of Fascism (Italy
won the World Cup twice during the 1930s)
.

The suspicion about Italian footballing stitch-ups dates from that
period: Bologna, il
Duce’s
home team and almost home town, won a
succession of championships towards the end of the regime (1936,
1937, 1939 and 1941). Given Mussolini’s connections to Bologna, and
given the fact that both the football and gymnastics federations were
under the leadership of the Bolognese Fascist
Leandro
Arpinati
,
those victories are still seen by conspiracy theorists as examples of
the dubious continuum between football and politics: when it’s
politically convenient, teams can be helped to win titles. Indeed,
when during the war it was necessary to reinvent Rome as the all
-
important imperial capital, the city duly won its own Scudetto in
1942. Football had become, say the suspicious, the most watchable,
political propaganda
.

The result is that, when teams now win titles, it’s almost obligatory
for the losers to claim that the powers that be had penalised them.
Massimo D’Alema, when he was the country’s Prime Minister in the
late 1990s, bemoaned the prejudice against his team AC Roma,
blaming the cartel of northern powers for the fact that, throughout
the 1990s, only Juventus and AC Milan (belonging to Gianni Agnelli
and Silvio Berlusconi respectively) won the Scudetto. A Scudetto for
Rome, he said, would be worth three championships, such was the
prejudice against any team from the capital. He openly referred to
what, for any
romanista
, is the open wound of 1981: it was another
crucial match for the championship, three days before its conclusion.
As usual it involved Juventus, this time against Roma. Once again, it
was being played in Turin, and the visitors had a legitimate goal by
Ramon
Turone
disallowed for a phantom offside. Had they won that
match, Roma would have almost certainly won the championship.
But the goal was disallowed, and Juventus took the title. Another
example, for many, of the Old
Lady’s
uncanny ability to benefit from
glaring refereeing errors
.

Much of the suspicion surrounding football comes from the fact
that the owners of Italy’s football teams are the country’s most
powerful men, rather like medieval barons who countenance no
dissent. Silvio Berlusconi at Milan, Gianni Agnelli at Juventus,
Cecchi Gori at Fiorentina: all three are or have been parliamentarians
with extensive media control (Cecchi Gori was until recently the
owner of Tele Monte Carlo, the third pole of Italian television after
RAI and Berlusconi’s Mediaset). A football president probably doubles
as a newspaper owner, owner of a television channel, head of his
own financial empire and patriarch of a famous family. Matches
probably aren’t fixed, but (it’s hard to explain this to someone outside
Italy) the psychological pressure on a referee not to give a penalty
against the Prime Minister’s team is surely felt. Thus, the little teams
with lesser presidents –
Lecce
,
Reggina
,
Perugia
, Verona – frequently
and rightly complain that they’ve been penalised because they’re not
important, or else because their presidents aren’t part of a political
entourage. (The big clubs are called the Seven Sisters, of which
Parma is the obvious Cinderella. But even in the Duchy of Parma,
the football team is owned and sponsored, filmed and broadcast, by
different organs of the Parmalat empire, which is owned by the
Tanzi family.)

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’, al
l
-
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.
’