by Tobias Jones
But I remain convinced that there is something exceptional and intriguing about the Italian blurring of good and bad. That moral ambiguity is epitomised by a word which is impossible to translate: spregiudicatezza. It means two very contradictory things, both ‘open-mindedness’ and yet, equally, ‘unscrupulousness’. It implies both something admirable and something much less so: both someone who ploughs their own furrow, who bravely goes their own way; but also someone who recognises no moral boundaries. It is thus, unsurprisingly, a word which is frequently used (with admiration) to describe Silvio Berlusconi and to explain his success.1 Only in Italy, I think, could one word encapsulate those two, contradictory extremes of the moral spectrum. One can hardly hold Berlusconi responsible for the interesting existence of a double-edged noun or for the sociological habits of an entire nation. But he brings into sharp relief the nuances of a country in which one can be both ‘open-minded’ and ‘amoral’.
The other consequence of that amoralism is a very surprising paradox. It was pointed out to me by a weary Italian journalist who has lived in London for 20 years. ‘Lawlessness creates abject conformity’, she said. ‘In a country so used to disregarding the rules, one of the only yardsticks for behaviour is other people’s opinions.’ As so often with Italians abroad, her view of her homeland was very jaundiced, but the point seemed to make sense: if conduct is determined not by laws but by the desire for the approval of one’s peers, there will be minimal innovation or eccentricity. It creates a society which, for all its radical disregard for moral boundaries, is paradoxically very conformist. You only need to try putting something original like lamb on your pizza, or wearing a cut or colour which is unfashionable for the season, to realise how suffocating are the laws of public opinion.
It’s uncertain how the gripping, macabre Berlusconi saga will eventually end. For years I thought it perfectly possible that an attempt would be made on his life, either by left-wing extremists or, more likely, by one of the various mafias which might have felt betrayed by his government (as with Salvatore Lima, the mafia-linked Christian Democrat killed in the early 1990s, the politicians who are assassinated are often those who colluded with, rather than attacked, the underworld). The openness with which people countenanced the possibility of an assassination (even, on some occasions, openly hoping for it) seemed to suggest that it wasn’t unthinkable. Now that he is out of power that possibility has, hopefully, receded and the magnate won’t become a martyr. It may be that, now in his 71st year, ill-health will simply take its toll. Even when Prime Minister, he frequently retreated to various clinics; often, by his own admission, merely for hair transplants or another facelift, but on other occasions the visits were more serious. There are persistent rumours that the smiling, sun-tanned face isn’t an accurate reflection of his health. And yet, despite that, it seems inconceivable that Berlusconi will choose to retreat from the stage with dignity. If his health and any new ‘conflict of interests’ legislation permit, he will almost certainly hope to lead the opposition into the next general election. And it seems equally inconceivable that he will ever receive a definitive sentence for any criminal activity, not least because of the Statute of Limitations. The most likely scenario is that he will continue to be the maverick joker in the political pack. Electoral support may slowly ebb away as his novelty decreases and his eccentricities increase, but he will always be deferred to: for as long as his family own three terrestrial television channels, he will be able to bend parliament to his warped vision of reality.
When I was doing book-readings around Italy, there was always one way I could guarantee sympathetic laughter from the audience. Trying to underline how difficult it was to explain Italy to the British, I would use one, very suggestive example: ‘how’, I asked with exasperation, ‘can I possibly explain to the British who Luciano Moggi is?’ They would laugh, nod and roll their eyes. Moggi was the kind of character you had to see to believe. You had to understand the threatening hints and allusions which hid behind his wit and repartee. Ever since I had been in Italy he had been the Director General of Juventus football club. Before that he had been at Torino and at Napoli during the soiled glory days of the Maradona era. Moggi, a former station master, was comic-book bad. Interviewed on TV after every Juventus game, often as a guest in an obsequious studio, Moggi was an awesome performer: breath-taking put-downs accompanied by his trademark droopy eyelids. When he smiled his whole face sparkled and he looked almost boyish, but he did ‘angry’ with frightening whispers. He was a small-time fixer who had risen through the ranks to the summit of power. He was nicknamed Paletta (‘lollipop man’). He was the person who, at the lucrative, powerful nexus of football and television, controlled all the traffic.
For years I had followed Italian football with dismay. I had gone to games and, as described here, witnessed the systematic favouring of Juventus in refereeing decisions. Many were convinced, like me, that something was rotten: Elio, an Italian psychedelic satirist – think Frank Zappa mixed with Vivian Stanshall – sang ironically in 1998 ‘ti amo campionato, non sei falsato’: ‘I love you championship, you’re not falsified’. I often argued late into the night with various Juve supporters trying to get them to admit that something suspicious was happening but they wouldn’t hear of it. One of those devout Juve supporters once quoted at me the motto of the Order of the Garter: ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’, suggesting that if I was suspicious it was because of my own unclean conscience. It was a similar line taken by Moggi during the moviole, those slow-motion replays which analyse every frame of the football action on television: ‘don’t be paranoid’, he would say with a condescending smile as we watched another incredibly unfair decision, ‘and just learn to be good losers’. One cherished mentor even wrote to me to tell me that my chapter on football was disappointing: the repetition of innuendo and vague gut-feeling rather the scholarly presentation of evidence. Suitably chastised, I began to think that, perhaps, I was wrong to cast aspersions on the weird atmosphere of Italian football.
Then, like a bolt of lightning, came ‘Calciopoli’ (an echo of the previous bribery scandal of the 1990s, ‘Tagentopoli’). Within weeks of Prodi’s election victory, phone taps were made public which left no-one in any doubt as to the murky machinations of Lucky Luciano Moggi. It’s hard to render in English the sheer cynicism and vulgarity of his recorded phone conversations. Rather than the formal, slightly stilted Italian which is used in public or between important officials, these conversations were full of slang, first-name chumming and swear-words (‘the English are all shits’ says Moggi during one call). Moggi was revealed as a phone-slinger, a man with 6 handsets and 300 sim cards, a man who made an average of 416 calls a day and dialled or received 100,000 calls over a six-month period. What emerges from those conversations is that Moggi was a tireless dispenser of favours and threats. He could get a 23% discount on Fiat cars which he would then supply to anyone – a referee, linesman, policeman – who had helped his cause. He would arrange for children of financial investigators to get tickets to glamorous Juventus fixtures abroad. He would harangue television presenters about which refereeing decisions they should broadcast and which they should ignore (in return for expensive watches and exclusive interviews with star players). Even the most powerful politicians of the country would grovel to Moggi. The then Finance Minister, Domenico Sinisalco, was recorded phoning Moggi to ask for a ‘piacerone’, a big favour. The Interior Minister called to ask the ‘lollipop man’ for help in saving his local team, Torres Sassari. A few weeks later the team won away for the first time in two years and the Interior Minister was on the phone again, stuttering about his hope that there may be ‘some little hand to save the team from the grave risks’ of relegation.
Moggi emerges as the most influential footballer never to have kicked a ball: he kicked ass instead. Pierluigi Pairetto was the man responsible for picking the referees and he was in constant contact with Moggi. On one occasion Pairetto even pleaded with one of his referees to ‘be
good so that you can see what’s not there sometimes’. Afterwards (3–0 to Juventus, of course) the referee phoned Pairetto to boast, ‘I tried to make the game go in that direction’. It emerged that there was a mathematical usage of yellow and red cards against Juventus’ future opponents so that their key players would be suspended when they played Moggi’s team. For years there had been a lot of tedious repetition about Juventus being the honourable Old Lady of Italian football; suddenly it appeared as if the famous black-and-white stripes resembled an old-fashioned prison uniform. The share price plummeted by 40% as the scandal unravelled and Moggi, and various accomplices, were sacked. One Juventus director, the former player Gianluca Pessotto, tried to commit suicide from the roof of the club headquarters.
By then the 2006 World Cup was underway and one small fact revealed the reach of Moggi’s system. Besides Saudi Arabia, there was only one team at the World Cup whose squad of players was entirely home-based: Italy. Not because all the best Italian footballers played their football in Italy, but because there was pressure to pick only players from Italian clubs. Moggi realised that a club’s assets were boosted by players’ selections for the national team. He had no interest in helping foreign clubs increase their players’ values but he gleefully boasted of his ability to bounce certain home-based players into the Azzurri. By contrast, team managers in Spain or Britain didn’t think it either necessary or possible to lobby for their players to be included in the Italian national side; they were even secretly grateful if their players didn’t risk injury or exhaustion with the additional games. For years there was a tacit acceptance that an Italian footballer going abroad was effectively ending his international career. It meant that Moggi’s power was increased even further because when a player picked a fight with him he could arrange their exile abroad, almost certainly ending their aspirations to play for their country. He famously argued with and humiliated two of Italian football’s brightest stars, Fabrizio Miccoli and Enzo Maresca. Both were Juventus players but were loaned out to Fiorentina and then shunted abroad: Miccoli was a small, speedy striker who had too much independence of mind for Moggi’s liking (‘Tell him to stop being an idiot’, Moggi said of Miccoli in one conversation; ‘He plays in the national team because I sent him.’) Likewise Maresca appeared too much of a maverick for the ‘lollipop man’ who liked to control all the traffic. Miccoli was sent to Benfica and Maresca to Sevilla where he scored two crisp goals in the UEFA cup final of 2006 (4–0 against Middlesbrough). Neither player, obviously, made the squad for the World Cup.
Not for the first time I got that impression that Italy is a very small country. Italians call it, disparagingly, Italietta, implying that the country is in the hands of a select gang of unscrupulous people who do their dirty work in the dark. The world of football was so small that Marcello Lippi – national coach at the 2006 World Cup – was twice Juventus ‘technical commissariat’ working directly with Moggi. Lippi’s son, Davide Lippi, worked with Moggi’s son, Alessandro Moggi, in the infamous GEA sporting agency. The agency represented over 200 footballers who would move incessantly, often inexplicably, from club to club at vastly inflated prices. Other leading lights of the agency were Chiara Geronzi, daughter of the President of the Capitalia Bank (one of the major backers of Lazio football club) and Francesca Tanzi of the curdled Parmalat empire. In the last two seasons the agency’s share of the entire football transfer market was 17.9%; Alessandro Moggi, alone enjoyed a colossal 12.3% of the market. The overlap of interests whereby Moggi senior could buy a player represented by his son, or Lippi could sell a player represented by his son, meant that, as always, nothing was ever ‘disinterested’. There was always a hidden agenda to most deals which had absolutely nothing to do with football tactics and talent. Because of the practise of the cartellino, a player’s ‘deeds’, a human being could be divided into percentages and, for example, Juventus could own 50% of a player’s cartellino and another club the other 50%. When those two teams actually met the players were obviously subject to pressures from two competing masters. Juventus deliberately had an enormous squad so that frequently they could loan players to other teams; again, when those teams met, key players for the opposition would be injured or suddenly find themselves short of form.
Despite all the breathless excitement surrounding the scandal, there was actually nothing particularly astonishing in the news that non-footballers were determining the destinies of various teams. It’s often not clear at the end of a season which division your team will play in next time round because no-one’s quite sure where the Chairman has gone: he could be a fugitive in Santo Domingo (Perugia’s Gaucci), in prison (Lazio’s Cragnotti), on trial (Parma’s Tanzi), or caught red handed giving a suitcase of cash to a fixer (Genoa’s Preziosi). Because clubs are so frequently on the brink of bankruptcy or under investigation, the decision of who actually plays in which league next season is arbitrary. The tortuous process of deciding who goes up or down has become the means by which we slavish followers of Italian football get our fix of football during the long summer months when there are no matches. I don’t know what it was like before I moved to Italy, but ever since I’ve been here each summer is taken up with judicial processes to decide who plays in which league. It’s invariably not decided by the final points tally from the season before (if only). The decision rests with a strange combination of FIGC (the Italian FA) and various court decisions (and appeals). And when something which should be purely mathematical becomes arbitrary, the arbiters become incredibly powerful. Long before Moggi’s system became apparent, teams were openly ‘fished’ into higher leagues by men in suits who were puppeteering the sport. Every summer, one or two teams would be bounced up or down on the basis not of goals scored and conceded, but because of some judicial pronouncement; furious fans would blockade ports or railways during the tourist season; politicians would pronounce their wise solutions; the saga would obsess sunbathers all summer, especially as it carried the threat that – no change here – the start of the season would have to be postponed because of all the confusion. It seemed to be a vicious circle: so many club chairmen were facing legal action that lawyers, not footballers, were the people promoting or demoting teams.
Calciopoli had exploded on to our screens just as the World Cup was getting underway. For once Italy wasn’t amongst the favourites for the competition. There was tension between the players – some of whom had unwisely tried to play down the scandal – and the disillusioned fans. But, as with 1982, the scandal seemed to have galvanised the Italian team and players appeared desperate to redeem the reputation of Italian football. In many previous tournaments players had sulked when left on the bench and managers had gone for the easy option of catenaccio, defensive lock-out. In 2006 something changed. The brilliant and miserly defence was still there, epitomised by those old Parma stalwarts of Gigi Buffon and Fabio Cannavaro; but this time there was the sublime passing of the ‘quarterback’, Andrea Pirlo. His ‘bodyguard’ was his AC Milan colleague, Rino Gattuso. On the wings Fabio Grosso and Gianluca Zambrotta pushed up at every opportunity, feeding lethal forwards like Luca Toni and Alberto Gilardino. When a game was heading for a draw, Lippi would daringly put on another forward (Alessandro Del Piero or Vincenzo Iaquinta) rather than pull one off. It’s true that the Italian team benefited from other traditional advantages: innate cunning (Marco Materazzi’s verbal provocation of Zinedine Zidane) and extraordinary luck (a dubious injury-time penalty against Australia and an absurdly easy route to the semi-finals). But they played muscular, technical, attacking football and, most importantly, they won without the suspicion that Moggi’s mobile had played any part. Once again the country had shown that it was a place of contradictory extremes: in the space of a few short weeks Italian football had shown itself to be very bent and yet, at the same time, the very best in the world.
The ensuing celebrations reminded me of why, despite it all, Italy is a delightful place to be. There are few places that can rival it for a decent part
y. Parma is normally a rather genteel town, but suddenly it went very ‘southern’: immediately after the victory, there were revving mopeds everywhere, often carrying two or three people. There were flags covering every wall and window. Tractors from the surrounding countryside appeared in the middle of the city at midnight with dozens of people on their trailers. People danced and hugged in fountains. You bumped into old friends you hadn’t seen for years. It was so hot that residents on the third and fourth floors of houses in the narrow streets of the centro storico either threw down buckets of water on the grateful, dehydrated crowds or else just put their shower heads, full blast, out of the window. Hilarious chants began, my favourite being Berlusconi porta sfiga (the implication being that the win had happened because Berlusconi had been voted out of office). As always, the pageantry was both striking and spontaneous.