by Tim Parks
‘Is Mutu really injured?’ I demand. ‘Is that why he isn’t here?’ On The Wall everybody has been wondering if Mutu has really been out of the team because he insists on playing prima donna.
Again Foschi insists on how difficult it all is. ‘Durissimo.’ Mutu, it seems, is immensely talented, but thinks he’s God. ‘You have to be diplomatic. If I’d told Adrian what I thought of him, you know, these last couple of months, he’d have walked out and we’d never have seen him again.’ Foschi repeats this concept two or three times. ‘God, if I’d told him what I thought of him. But you can’t. You leave him on the bench for a few games. You have to make him understand he has to work for the team.’
‘And Laursen?’
‘Laursen injured himself training over Christmas.’
Agnolin comes up and begins to talk about Il presidente. ‘Professore!’ Foschi exclaims, embracing him. ‘Professore!’ My moment is over. ‘I’ll talk to you any time,’ Foschi tells me, ‘any time,’ and the two of them walk away together.
‘I need to play,’ Piovanelli tells me very frankly.
On the flight from Rome to Brindisi I have once again been seated next to Perotti. Again he has the window seat, though this time to my left. Again he very determinedly pulls out his book. Glancing over his shoulder, I see he’s already up to here. I can’t remember when I last read so many pages so quickly. At this pace the weekend for him will mainly take place in Moscow, and not in southern Italy at all. On my right, Marco Piovanelli, twenty-six yean old, is one of those who almost never plays. It was only thanks to the seven injuries and a couple of suspensions that he was brought on in the second half against Fiorentina, in left midfield.
‘I thought you were good.’ I’m being diplomatic, but honest too. He seemed solid and vigorous. He gave the feeling of being more experienced than the young Cassetti. Piovanelli has a mischievous pink face, bright eyes, spiky hair. ‘Yeah, I played well. But you need to play regularly. Not just half an hour once a year.’ ‘Will you be playing Sunday?’ ‘Doubt if I’ll even be on the bench.’ He is slumped back in his seat, eating from a crisp packet and he keeps turning to talk to Seric who is just across the aisle. He too got his first game of the season in Florence.
‘Does it get depressing?’
Piovanelli shrugs. ‘There are thirty people in the squad. The Mister has his own ideas.’
Perhaps because the modern game was brought to Italy by the English, the coach is always referred to as the Mister.
Then Piovanelli added, ‘You see, the club has its plans for particular players. That’s inevitable. Someone’s going to stay out.’
I didn’t understand what he meant by the club having plans for certain players, but felt I’d look stupid if I asked.
‘Are you English?’ Seric leans over to ask. It turns out that though officially Croatian, Seric actually grew up in Australia. Anthony Seric, he’s called. We switch languages. How strange to be suddenly hearing this Sydney accent.
‘Italians. They take it all so seriously,’ he laughs.
Perotti has reached here. I ask him for a summary of the plot and get confused by all its complexities. ‘A book has to grab me in the opening pages,’ the coach explains. In that regard it’s like a game of football, if you’re not supporting one of the teams. It has to grab you in the first few minutes or you don’t bother. But he doesn’t always read thrillers. ‘I really enjoyed The Name of the Rose. Film was rubbish though.’ He sighs, then returns to his drugs and missiles and beautiful spies. Still nobody has mentioned Sunday’s game. Nobody has said what they think of Lecce, nobody has reflected on our chances.
All the same, in the car driving from Brindisi to Lecce, Agnolin is informative about money. Lecce is about fifty kilometres south of Brindisi. The team have a bus which is waiting for them under police guard. We are travelling in a hired car.
‘Is there anything you need to know?’ Agnolin asks. The professor/referee has a forthright way of driving. He brakes hard, stops in the middle of a fast road, buzzes down the window and shouts at a cyclist to have directions. Someone honks loudly as he tries to quiz the driver in a car coming the other way that has stopped to make a left turn. Again he buzzes down his window. The guy behind is going mad. It’s unnerving. ‘The roads are much better down south,’ Agnolin confides. ‘A well-kept secret. The government spends so much here on public works. Keep people busy.’
‘Tell me about the club’s income and expenses.’
The professor is concerned at how little I know in this regard. He brushes aside my preconceptions. ‘Running costs around forty-six billion lire. OK?’ A billion lire is about 330,000 pounds. ‘Of which the biggest part is the players’ salaries, twenty-five billion.’
‘Twenty-five? I thought around twenty.’
He looks at me. ‘No, more than that.’
Aside from the players there are only about ten employees. ‘For the stadium, owned by the town – you know that Italian teams don’t own their stadiums – we pay a percentage of the gate and above all the garbage collection tax, which is based on the same principle as for any industrial space, that is we pay by the square metre, which is ridiculous. Don’t you think? For a stadium. Drives us mad. Where’s the sense in paying the same price for garbage collection as a huge factory that produces tons of waste every day?’
Indeed. Everybody in Italy hates the garbage tax, one of the few the government manages to collect.
‘OK, so how are the costs met?’
The professor is now driving south at a speed of a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour.
‘Fourteen billion from pay TV. Every Serie A club gets that, for games televised throughout the year. Then seven billion from the Football Federation. That’s money state TV gives the Federation and they share out between the clubs. Then about eight and a half billion from the gate.’
‘Not much.’
‘Not much. Then one and a half from the sponsor.’
This is far less than I expected.
‘It depends on the club and the sponsor. For a club like Verona that’s not bad. Anyway, altogether the income is about thirty-one billion, which means that every year the company has to make fifteen billion in buying and selling players.’
The countryside is flat and nondescript. The evening is warm compared with Verona, a thousand kilometres to the north. Remembering what Piovanelli said about the club having plans for particular players, I suggest, ‘Doesn’t that mean that the coach will be under pressure to field the players the club has bought young and cheap in order to increase their value rapidly on the market? I mean, we get to a situation where we’re more worried about long-term club finance than the game in hand.’
Agnolin hesitates. ‘No,’ he sighs. Is he a Professor of Economics, I wonder. Or Marketing perhaps? I know that referees even at the highest levels hold other jobs. Finally, he says, ‘All things being equal, one might sometimes act that way. I mean, if there’s no other reason for choosing between two players. But remember the coach’s job is to win the game.’
Then he starts to explain that when you sell a player, that goes on the balance sheet this year, but when you buy him it’s deducted from the balance next year. Naturally that can effect the timing of a lot of decisions. But now we’re getting into town. The car stops abruptly. Agnolin leans out of the window and asks two pretty young girls if they could tell us the way to our hotel.
At the buffet in the dining room I introduce myself to Adailton and Melis. We’re choosing from a generous selection of salads and cooked vegetables. Adailton says his girlfriend’s English. He met her when he was playing for Paris St Germain. ‘Worst year of my life,’ he says happily. More soberly, Melis admits that after only a couple of years he’s become one of Hellas Verona’s senators. ‘With all the buying and selling there’s not much continuity.’
Then I’m just turning to sit with these two friendly players when Massimiliano touches my shoulder. Another sacred rule is that the players eat separately,
all together round one long table. No one shares their meals with them. There is no wine at that table. No temptation. They are being set apart, purified for the sacrifice.
And now comes one of the most difficult moments in this process of saying what happened at Lecce. How can I write down what was said at Friday dinner, without appearing to be ungrateful, without appearing to write the merest gossip, above all without Professor Agnolin shaking his noble grey head and saying, I knew we should never have invited that writer?
Let’s do it this way. Let’s say that there are eleven staff accompanying the players on this trip: Agnolin, Foschi, Perotti, Speggiorin, Fiorini, Beppe the masseur, Marco the work-out expert, De Palma who trains the keepers, the older man who handles the gear, Fillipini the team doctor, and Massimiliano who handles the press. Then let’s say that I’m sitting at a table with five of these guys of whom I will name but one, Agnolin himself. And I name the professor for the simple reason that he took no part at all in the conversation, but concentrated, somewhat gloomily, on maintaining his diet. ‘Nearly all my life I’ve been trim,’ he explained to me, ‘as a big-time referee should be.’ But since his wife’s sad and sudden death he has put on a bit of weight. Now he has set himself a couple of months to get it off again. While the others go for three courses – the pasta, the fish, the sweets – Agnolin stays with his salad and looks on with the referee’s critical eye as everybody starts to talk about … sex.
It begins, childishly enough, with the word pompelmo, a grapefruit. Someone says that grapefruits are particularly good for you because they eat up negative cholesterol. Someone replies that pompini are even better for getting rid of negative energy. A pompino is a blow job. But isn’t a blow job only a poor second best when one can’t actually fuck? In the car for example. In your car! Oh the stains in his car! For heaven’s sake. I don’t know how you could even find a woman who would sit in that car. Well, someone says, his fossilised mistress, maybe. Better an old mistress than none at all. You need ‘turnover’ with mistresses, someone says, using the word usually used to mean putting in different players for midweek and Sunday games to give the stars a rest. The girls at the discotheques these days, somebody else announces, they just want it. Not from you they don’t. They lean against the wall, they’re dying for it. Not from you they’re not. A guy just comes and rubs up against them. How about it? That’s it. Not with you it isn’t. Picking up girls at a discotheque, someone else rebukes, is like shooting farm-bred pheasants. The real challenge is to hunt down a bird in the wild. Wild? Who’s wild?
Etc. Etc. It goes on and on with spiralling scabrosity. It’s actually one of the funniest group male conversations about sex I’ve ever heard. And participated in. I wouldn’t want to be left out. And even as it’s happening I’m furious that I won’t be able to report it with the flourish and detail it deserves, won’t be able to characterise the various approaches, attach this or that phrase to this or that person. Because this is such a tediously Catholic country and the press would scream scandal, the Gazzetta dello Sport above all would say, how scandalous! How immoral! ‘After being knocked out by Romania, instead of going to their hotel rooms to meditate on their miserable performance, the English players were out drinking until four in the morning. Shame!’ Thus the Gazzetta dello Sport during the European Cup. As if one should wear sackcloth and ashes after losing a game of football. The same edition ran a two-page feature on how important Inzaghi and Totti felt it was to have their mothers near them during the competition.
So no, I can’t say who said what on this occasion, or even exactly what was said, only that the conversation fizzed with wit and tease, and all the more so because it was immediately clear to all of us that no one was actually thinking of sex at all. Not even remotely. They were thinking of the game. They know the season is about to turn a corner. We’ve won only one point from the last three games. The team can either break out of it, or begin its descent into the underworld. Talking about sex, like Perotti’s reading Il codice zero, is just another way of admitting how important this game is.
‘I’m going to bed,’ someone suddenly says. He stands up. The temperature around the table seems to have dropped about ten degrees. In just a few moments everyone has gone to bed. They can’t keep up the pretence. They want to be alone. But it’s only nine-fifteen! ‘Doesn’t anybody want to walk into town?’ I ask as people hurry across the lobby. ‘No. We’re tired.’ The players, it seems, all went to bed half an hour ago. ‘Don’t you need to watch them, see they don’t slip off and go out on the town?’ ‘No, they’ve brought their play-stations and computers. They play games, get on chat lines. Ten years ago you had to watch people, not now.’ Only Agnolin has hung on a moment. He accosts me by the door. ‘That was just to release tension,’ he explains of the dinner-time conversation. ‘It wasn’t serious at all. None of it’s true.’ Is he a Professor of Psychology, perhaps, I ask myself.
I wander alone into town. All I have to do is follow a straight street that takes me back in time through various architectural periods, from the seventies to the fifties, then the thirties, the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century and finally the baroque. As in Catania I’m struck by the predictability of it all. The passeggiata tugs me into the centre. I don’t have to ask where it is. The first piazza is full of stalls selling dry fruit, candies various, nuts, toys. Exactly as in Catania, or Verona for that matter. Perhaps the people are slightly smaller, the shops less obviously fashionable.
But there is nothing ‘less’ about Piazza Duomo when I get there. It’s a revelation. With only one narrow opening on to the main street the whole generous space is built in a sugary yellow-white limestone carved into a textbook rehearsal of every baroque flourish and motif: columns, saints, angels. In the evening floodlights the stone is luminous, almost too bright, the sky black above but for a full moon. On the cobbles two or three couples are kissing, as if this were the only appropriate thing to do here. I retire to a bar.
It’s a smart place with granite and chrome fittings. Elegant young customers occasionally raise their groomed heads to a huge screen on the back wall showing a series of fashion parades. Presumably it’s a video. There are collections of various levels of prurience, collections where you look at least partly at the clothes, or perhaps faces, and collections where you can only see the astonishing bodies of people who, like football players, can rarely spend the evening drinking in a bar. I order a whisky. One spends half one’s life, I reflect, watching those who in some way deprive themselves for our sake. The music is loud. It’s hard to study local physiognomies, with these perfect buttocks dipping and bobbing on the wall. Some sequences, like goals, are repeated ten and even twenty times. We mustn’t lose this game, I tell myself. I order a second whisky. ‘Lecce, Lecce,’ I mouth at the mirror behind the bar, ‘vaffanculo!’
La Befana
Isn’t there some Arab sheikh interested in buying Verona? Our presidents are always crap. I can’t handle it.
Franco (Verona, Italia), Fuckingfedup.it
Please, Bill Gates, buy Verona.
Desper@do
L’EPIFANIA, TUTTE LE feste si porta via – Epiphany carries off the last holiday. So goes the proverb. It’s 6 January, the Twelfth Night, the last flicker of the Christmas–New Year binge. Crossing the street before breakfast with the local newspapers in my hand, I read the headline: La Befana ci riporta il calcio.
Befana is another word for the same festival: ‘Epiphany brings back football.’ More exactly, the Befana is the name of a legendary old woman who was too busy to see the Magi when they passed by on their way to Bethlehem. She would catch them on their way home, she thought. The Magi returned by a different route and two thousand years later she is still roving the world looking out for them. On 6 January, her busy day, she brings presents to Italy’s children. So her missed opportunity becomes our gift. Today La Nazione, a southern paper, subverts the old proverb about carrying off the holidays to say that in fact La Befana is bringing u
s children our football back. My suspicion of a complicity between the Christian and Serie A calendars is confirmed. When one enchantment wearies, the other kicks in again: Vicenza and Bari are playing this afternoon, Juventus and Fiorentina this evening. I’m going to watch them on TV with the players of Hellas Verona.
Meantime the local section of the paper gives three full pages to a ‘far west’ shootout in a village just a few miles from Lecce. Ten minutes of heavy gunfire. Over breakfast in the hotel, the news provokes the inevitable reflections on the south. ‘They shoot at each other, then whine about it.’ Certainly this would be rare news indeed in Verona.
I find myself at table with Beppe the masseur, Vincenzo the man who trains the keepers and Marco the kit man. Beppe had tried to be a footballer as a kid. At fourteen he was selected for a football college down in Rome. It didn’t work out. When they sent him away he was so depressed he couldn’t watch football for ages. Eventually he came back in via massage. All three of them agree that twenty years ago the players were more skilled. ‘When we trapped a ball, we trapped it dead. If it escaped even half a metre from your feet you were out.’ Thus Beppe. ‘But today. Half of them can barely trap the ball at all.’
I sense the man is still bitter about the day they told him his trial was over.
‘So what are the trainers looking for now?’
‘You have to be strong as an ox and then mentally willing to fit in with all these rigid schemes and mechanisms they have these days.’
But having said this, Beppe goes on to praise ex-coach Cesare Prandelli for the complicated patterns and strategies that he taught his players. As soon as the men start talking about Prandelli, you can hear an excitement in their voices which is also a resentment. They are proud to have worked with him, feel betrayed by his departure. In the still air of the dining room, you can sense the charisma he transmitted to them; it’s as if a ghost had sat at the table: Cesare Prandelli still haunts Hellas Verona.