Читать книгу Calcio: A History of Italian Football - John Foot - Страница 37

One referee-related adage has been constant, in Italian domestic football. Rich clubs are always privileged over poorer clubs. They win more penalties, have fewer people booked, have more goals against them disallowed. On one level this is not very surprising. Rich teams are usually better than poor teams, and thus tend to attack more, leading to more fouls against them in the opposition penalty area, more shots on goal and more corners. Yet, this technical explanation is not enough to explain such a long-term trend in bias. In Italy, the big clubs have also enjoyed ‘favours’ because they are run by powerful and influential people. FIAT was Italy’s most important company throughout the twentieth century. The Agnelli family who founded and managed the huge Turin-based car business were also the owners of Juventus. Money and status are not necessary to oil the workings of favouritism, but they help.

Croneyism, however, has largely been a state of mind. A key phrase here is ‘psychological slavery’. It was referee administrator¹³ Giorgio Bertotto, a Venetian optician in his other life, who first argued – after a 1967 game between Venezia and Inter – that ‘psychological slavery towards the big teams’ was rife amongst Italian referees. It is this ‘institutional bias’ which leads to a widespread cynicism over the outcomes of championships. Hence phrases of the type ‘next year they may let us win’. However, this scepticism does not prevent moral outrage at the ways in which referees favour the big clubs. Often fans will taunt Juventus with the chant sapete solo rubare – ‘you only know how to rob’.

Obviously, one factor enslaving officials is ambition mixed with self-preservation. A referee is unlikely to have a long and glorious career if he gives a series of penalties against Juventus. Journalists will often write, after a particularly cringe-making performance by a referee in favour of a bigger club, that an official will fare carriera – ‘he will have a good career’. Tradition is also important. This is how things have always been done. Minor clubs have always argued that referees tend to ‘liquidate’ them – especially in matches against the richer teams. In the 2002–3 season the president of tiny Como spent the whole season making this very point – even claiming that he would withdraw his team in protest. In 2003–4 the mantle of the persecuted was taken up by Perugia, whose president threatened first to go to court, and then to withdraw his team from the last four matches of the season in order to make his case.

‘Favouritism’ has shifted in interesting ways over time. When big teams play other big teams, things become more complicated. Rich teams have also become poor. Genoa was a big team for a long time – they are now a relatively minor club. The same can be said of Torino, Fiorentina, Napoli and Bologna. Smaller teams have also developed into more powerful concerns after heavy investment, as with Parma in the 1990s. Three clubs have always been big in recent times – Juventus, Inter and Milan.¹⁴ Amongst these perennially powerful clubs, the shift of ‘bias’ has moved with the times – depending on politics, money, and the close-knit nature of the refereeing body. Sometimes, luck or even footballing prowess has come into the picture. Any fan who spent any period of time in Italy came to accept this state of affairs as sad, but inevitable.

In the 1960s, many fans claimed that Inter were preferred over Milan and even over Juventus. The ‘Great Inter’ team of the 1960s went 100 league games without conceding a penalty. During the 1970s Milan fans complained constantly of harsh treatment at the hands of a series of referees. The 1980s saw grumbling and objections from Fiorentina and Roma and in the 1990s Inter felt that they had been robbed. The 2002–2003 season was notable for a series of violent arguments concerning the arbitraggio – the ‘refereeing’ – of Roma matches that began on the first day of the championship and continued right through until June. Many Italians are convinced that Juventus – the biggest and most powerful club of all – have been the most ‘helped’ of all (and the 2006 calciopoli scandals merely strengthened this conviction). This includes Juventus fans themselves, who will shrug their shoulders and grin at the latest refereeing ‘error’ in their favour. One Juventus fan even published a pamphlet entitled Eulogy to theft detailing the pleasure he had taken in various biased decisions over the years.¹⁵ Favouritism amongst the big clubs, it is widely believed, tends to balance out over time. Hence, many fans will claim that Lazio’s last-day defeat in the 1998–1999 championship was ‘balanced out’ by their controversial last-day victory the following year. Similarly, Juventus were ‘repaid’ after losing a championship in the rain at Perugia in 2000 with an easy ride two seasons later. Injustices were righted by further injustices. What goes around, in Italian football, comes around.

This type of reasoning has become a science in Italy, and is known as dietrologia – ‘behindology’. It is a science of all-encompassing conspiracy theories, where every event is explained with reference to the machinations of powerful, unseen forces. Dietrologia is commonly employed in footballing discourse just as it applies to the mafia or to the shady role of the Italian secret services in the 1960s and 1970s. By definition, these explanations are rarely proved to be right or wrong and here lies the source of their power. ‘Behind-the-scenes-ology’ has become a footballing commonplace. Most fans routinely see the game through this mindset.¹⁶

Moggiopoli seemed to prove the dietrologists right. Theories commonly expressed in bars and pubs had become reality. Juventus fans responded with their own conspiracy theory: the entire scandal, they claimed, was organized by Inter through a spider’s web of telephone taps, private detectives and press leaks. Inter’s links with the president of Italian Telecom, Mario Tronchetti Provera (a close friend of Moratti and the club sponsor as part of the Pirelli group), reinforced these theories. It was certainly true that Telecom was at the centre of a very murky world of illegal phone taps and political blackmail, and had contacts with the even murkier world of the Italian secret services. However, there was no proof to connect the Neapolitan magistrates who uncovered the scandal in 2006 with Inter or its employees. When further details emerged in the spring of 2007 of direct phone calls between Luciano Moggi and referees, the conspiracy theorists went quiet. It was obvious that the scandal had not been ‘organized’, but had only surfaced thanks to the patient work of the Neapolitan judiciary.

Within this broad picture of claim and counter-claim, each fan has his or her own cross to bear – a particular decision, match or ‘refereeage’ (arbritraggio) which decided a championship or ‘stole’ a key match. Classic examples of this focus on individual decisions include the 1925 championship won by Bologna against Genoa;¹⁷ Maurizio Turone’s disallowed ‘goal’ for Roma against Juventus in 1981; Fiorentina’s loss in the 1982 championship; Inter and Ronaldo’s lost penalty, again against Juve, in 1998. Some of these controversies relate to normal refereeing decisions during games – penalties given and not given, offsides, sendings-off, ‘ghost-goals’. Others are more complicated – decisions to play on in bad weather, replayed games, disciplinary questions. ¹⁸ For a long time, some games were decided by committees (al tavolino – literally ‘at the table’), leading in turn to manipulation of these rules. Many of these decisions have led to incessant debates, and endless rancour. Legends are easy to create. Whole championships have been registered in the popular imagination as ‘thefts’.

Not all referees are ‘psychologically conditioned’ in the same way. Some officials are viewed as pro or (much more rarely) anti-Juventus, others as more ‘objective’, others as simply erratic, some as just bad. Huge debate thus concentrates in Italy on which referees officiate in which matches, and how they are chosen for particular games. These procedures have changed with bewildering speed and frequency over the years.