by Tan Copsey
I have always loved Italian football. The spectacle of the world’s greatest players playing in front of the world’s maddest fans always proved far too much to resist. This tendency was compounded by the coaches of my 14 year old team, who required a vigorous and nuanced tactical understanding of the merits of catennaccio football – not that this stopped us losing games in a terribly un-Italian fashion.
Italian football is now submerged in the deepest of a series of crises, with the death of a policeman in Sicily, following close on the heels of the kicking to death of a referee in a low level local game. Professional football from Serie A down is now unlikely to resume until February the 18th – utterly scuppering my plans to pull a sneaky one on my girlfriend this weekend by taking her to see Napoli. Still given the apparent danger involved in such an activity, it might not really be the best birthday present. It now seems likely that a lot of the rest of the season will be played behind closed doors as most stadiums, it has finally been acknowledged, do not meet basic safety standards.
Mark Wilson has described how throughout Italian history ‘Football, fate and fascism made for an explosive combination’.
Violence and fascism within the Italian game is therefore by no means a new phenomenon, nor is the utterly unedifying corruption revealed over the summer. One need not go back to far to unearth memories of incredibly nasty banners unfurled by Ultras at Lazio games, glorifying the ‘Tiger’ Arkan, in honour of an equally nasty Serb-nationalist on the field Siniša Mihajlović. Mussolini also played a part in Italy’s success in the 1934 and 38 world cups, having productive pre-match chats with Referee’s.
But are things comparatively that bad in Serie A? Whilst no-one can argue that hooliganism is not on the wane in the UK, there remain problems with sexism, corruption, and the fact that our football clubs are being sold to some of the dodgiest characters on the planet. Racism still blights the apparently successful Spanish game, German football was not so long ago shocked by a scandal involving marvellously corrupt referee’s, some teams rest black players when playing in Eastern Europe, whilst the abuse suffered by Israeli-Arab striker Abbas Suan by fans of Betar Jerusalem demonstrate that the ugly side of the beautiful game is a truly global phenomenon.
But a policeman is still dead, and the murder is now considered pre-meditated. It seems sad but this will likely reinforce existing flows of great players away from Italian football – Branko Milanovic, interviewed recently in and oD podcast, rather memorably described this as the ‘leg-drain’. Financial flows have also already been affected with the relegation of some of the most prominent clubs for match fixing decreasing the competitiveness of fixtures and as a result the interest of viewers and sponsors. The fall of Serie A, whilst perhaps not all that surprising in historical context, is still shocking given how recently the league occupied a pre-eminent place in the global football psyche.
Following the success of the Italian team in last summer’s world cup Geoff Andrew’s rather optimistically speculated that this triumph might inspire a renaissance in the country's public life. Now one wonders about the darker effects of such an accumulation of violence and corruption on a country where this great sport is such an essential aspect of culture and identity.
