Kitabı oku: «Calcio: A History of Italian Football», sayfa 5

Fascism and Football

Italian fascism had been created in 1919 from a ragbag group of nationalists, ex-socialists and futurist artists. By 1922 the violent anti-socialism of the fascists had destroyed the nation’s powerful socialist and trade union movement through the use of systematic violence, with the support of many ordinary middle-class citizens and the backing of big business. Their next prize was the state itself. In October 1922 fascist leader Benito Mussolini led a ‘March on Rome’. The idea was to frighten the fragile liberal elites, and the King, into submission. It worked. Meekly, in the face of the threat of an illegal armed insurrection, the King made the head of that insurrection prime minister. Mussolini was to remain in power for the next 21 years. By 1926, all vestiges of democracy had been wiped out through repressive laws and brutal violence. A dictatorship was in place. Opposition parties were dissolved, their leaders arrested or forced into exile, or murdered.

Football went on, regardless. Fascism was to see Italy become, officially, the greatest football team in the world, and the national league reach levels of popularity that challenged all other sports and pastimes. Under Mussolini, calcio became Italy’s national sport, new stadiums were built in most Italian cities and the national league became a reality. During the Duce’s reign, Italy won two world cups and an Olympic gold medal. Fascism was good for Italian football, and football was good for fascism. Individual fascists also made their mark on the game, as with the infamous events which closed the 1925 championship.

The first ‘theft’. Bologna, Genoa and the 1925 playoff final

In 1925, as Italy teetered on the brink of absolute dictatorship, fascism made its first, direct intervention into the football world. Leandro Arpinati had been the local leader of the fascist squads who roamed the Bolognese countryside and city in the post-war period. Using batons, guns and castor oil, these gangs wrought havoc as they ‘brought order’ to a socialist region. With the ascent of the fascists to power and the progressive move towards dictatorship the violence was toned down. It was no longer needed. Most people were too scared to protest, or had fled.

The 1924–25 season witnessed a titanic struggle between Bologna – Arpinati’s team – and Genoa. There were no penalty shoot-outs, so drawn games were simply replayed. Five playoffs were needed to decide the fate of the championship. The third game in this series – played in Milan on 7 June 1925 – proved to be the most dramatic and controversial match in the short history of calcio. A massive crowd of some 20,000 fans turned up, including Arpinati himself, and many threatened to spill onto the pitch. Giovanni Mauro, lawyer and ex-player for both Inter and Milan, was the referee. One of the most authoritative figures in the game, he had been an influential member of various committees for over ten years, whilst continuing to officiate in important matches.

William Garbutt’s Genoa were 2–0 up by half-time and the title seemed theirs. Midway through the second half, Bologna were on the attack when a close-range shot came in towards the Genoa goal. The goalkeeper spread himself, and Mauro gave a corner to Bologna. At that point, there was a pitch invasion, led by a group of black-shirted fascists. Arpinati stayed in the stands. The referee was surrounded for at least fifteen minutes. In the end – scared, it is said – he changed his decision and gave a goal. Bologna then ‘equalized’ with eight minutes left, but Genoa refused to accept the draw and play extra-time. Under federation rules, after the pitch invasion the game (and therefore the championship) should have been awarded to Genoa. However, Mauro, under pressure from Arpinati, wrote a bland report which mentioned the pitch invasion, but assigned no blame for it. The federation ordered yet another playoff.

The fourth final was played in Turin on 5 July, and ended in another draw. Genoa and Bologna fans clashed at the city’s Porta Nuova station after the game, and gunshots were fired from the Bologna train. Most reports mention either two or four shots, but some put the number as high as twenty, and the fascist daily paper at the time wrote of ‘quite a few revolver rounds’. At least two Genoa fans were injured, and one was taken to hospital. Bologna received a small fine, but the incidents caused national outrage, a long inquiry by the federation and a debate in Parliament. The federation decided on yet another game in Turin – this time with no crowd. However, the city’s authorities refused to give permission for the match to take place.³² Football had become a public-order problem.

The drama came to an end in August with a game behind closed doors on the outskirts of Milan at 7.30 in the morning. More than a month had passed since the violent events of Turin, and more than two months since the bizarre ‘no-goal’ game in Milan. Most of the Genoa team were called back from their holidays to play. The press was ordered to keep the location of the game secret, or to pretend it was in Turin. In the ‘crowd’ there were a few journalists, some club officials and assorted locals. The whole pitch was surrounded by carabinieri on horseback. Bologna won, 2–0, despite having one man sent off just four minutes into the second half, and another towards the end for ‘insulting his opponents after a goal’.

Bologna’s all-Italian team duly won their first championship, the national playoff with the southern champions being the usual formality, but in Genoa and elsewhere this success would always be known as ‘the great theft’. As film-maker Giuliano Montaldo wrote in the 1990s, ‘It is hard to believe now but before the war this was the main talking point at the Marassi [Genoa’s ground]. The wound has only been healed in the last twenty years. Before that, when we said “Bologna” we meant “the thieves”.’ The sense of injustice was exacerbated by the rest of the club’s history as Genoa were never to win another scudetto. The team was thus denied its tenth championship, an honour that gives clubs the right to sew a special star on their shirts. Inter and Milan currently have one star and Juventus have two.³³ Genoa have never got close to their star again and have been stuck on nine championships for eighty years. As is to be expected, Bologna’s version of events is rather different. Fan websites hint at a ‘hole in the goal net’ which would explain the events of that day and leave us in doubt as to whether their team had actually scored, whilst Mauro’s report is glossed over and the pitch invasion is blamed on both sets of fans. This version remains limited to one category of people – Bologna supporters.

In 1925, Bologna’s powerful backers decided which version of events was made public. In 1926 Arpinati was appointed as the new podestà – unelected Mayor – of the city and in the same year he became president of the Italian football federation, a job he would hold until 1933. He reigned supreme over football, his club and his city until financial scandal brought him down in 1934.³⁴

The referees’ strike of 1925 and the first ‘suspicions’

Referees in the Italian leagues were increasingly unhappy with the pressure they were under by the mid-1920s. Giovanni Mauro, president of the referees’ association (the AIA), called time and again for more protection for his members and less control over their activities. His organization was vehemently opposed to a blacklist of referees that had been compiled – in secret – by certain powerful clubs. In 1925 Mauro wrote in his magazine, The Referee, that there was a need to re-establish ‘minimal levels of deference and respect towards referees whose current position is no longer like that of a judge, but more like that of a clown’. In 1926 a match between Casale and Torino was declared null and void because the referee had not officiated with ‘the correct serenity of spirit’. This was code (and remains so, even today) for clearly biased refereeing. This besmirching of their reputation pushed the referees into strike action. Almost everyone in Italy had gone on strike in the wake of World War One. There was even a priests’ strike. However, referees had never withdrawn their labour. In the mid-1920s this taboo was broken.

The action was moderate. The men in black simply refused to go to matches. Someone as conservative as Mauro, who had often linked his job to a lofty patriotic ideal, was hardly likely to organize picket lines and burning braziers outside grounds. In any case, the very threat of such a strike gave fascism a perfect opportunity to impose its will on Italian football. A commission was set up to draw up plans for sweeping reforms that would bring an end to the chaos in the game. In 1926, this led to the Viareggio Charter, the most important set of rules since 1909 and the basis for calcio’s re-organization under the regime.³⁵

The Viareggio Charter. Calcio’s constitution

In 1926, the tortuous history of the Italian football federation, with its splits, rivalries and scandals, led to the imposition of unity from above. The Viareggio Charter was drawn up by three self-styled experts in the elegant seaside town that had seen the ‘football riot’ of 1920. Viareggio’s new rules revolutionized the game. First, professionalism was legalized.

This had been made inevitable by the increasing numbers of working-class footballers, who found it difficult to work and play professionally.³⁶ It was one thing being an accountant and a professional footballer – like Fulvio Bernardini of Roma. It was quite another trying to combine other, more humble professions with the demands of a full-time national championship.

Moreover, the charter clarified the role of foreign players: they were banned. The boom in players from the new frontiers of calcio – above all Hungary and Austria – was brought to a swift halt by these new rules. There were more than 80 such players in the Italian championship in the 1925–6 season. These foreigners were all forced to find work elsewhere, or as something else. Some became managers, like the Hungarian Arpad Veisz, who won the first Serie A national championship as coach of Inter in 1929–30 and two other titles in charge of Bologna in the 1930s.

Like many Italian laws and rules, however, the charter’s procedures contained a big loophole. Who was Italian, and who was a foreigner? Banned from buying Hungarians and Austrians, the top Italian clubs began to look for ‘Italians’ amongst the millions of their fellow citizens who had left the country to find fortune elsewhere in the world. The hybrid category of the Italian oriundo (a person of Italian extraction) became part of footballing parlance. Oriundi were Italians who had been brought up or born in other countries, but were of Italian origin (an Italian grandparent was usually enough). For a long time after 1926, the history of foreigners in the Italian game – right up until the end of the 1940s, and in various phases after that – was synonymous with that of the oriundi.

Thanks to the charter, a unified national league was made inevitable by further rationalization of the championship, leading directly to a national Serie A and Serie B in 1929–30. As if to underline the central role of fascist leader Leandro Arpinati the offices of the football federation were moved to Bologna, away from the traditional centres of football power – Turin and Milan. These offices followed Arpinati to Rome in 1929, when he became undersecretary in the Interior Ministry. Finally, the Viareggio Charter abolished the referees’ association, reducing their autonomy, but increasing their prestige. A special committee was given the power to select referees for specific games. Referees remained amateurs. Giovanni Mauro, Arpinati’s ally in the 1925 Bologna ‘theft’, took control of this new body until well into the 1930s. His decisions in that 1925 final had done his career no harm at all.

The inauguration which changed Italy

For Italy, 1926 was a key year, as Benito Mussolini was anxious to move the country further towards a fascist dictatorship. The spark which led to the final destruction of the country’s fragile democracy was linked to football. Arpinati had ordered the construction of a spanking new stadium in Bologna in 1924 and by the end of October 1926 the ground was ready for an official inauguration, to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the March on Rome. Mussolini came to Bologna for the occasion, and entered the stadium on a white horse to huge applause. After making a speech and opening a fascist foundation, Mussolini was driven to the station by Arpinati himself, in an open limo known as a ‘torpedo’. As the dictator passed through the crowds, a gunshot was fired into the car, missing everyone and, allegedly, passing through Mussolini’s scarf. In the chaos that ensued, a fifteen-year-old boy was beaten to death by the crowd and identified as the potential assassin. The boy, Anteo Zamboni, was the son of a well-known local exanarchist. The whole Zamboni family was sent into internal exile for having organized the supposed attempt on the Duce’s life. Years later, a plaque was unveiled where Zamboni had been killed.³⁷

There are strong doubts about the role of Zamboni, and many historians claim that the shot was the work of dissident fascists or even the Italian secret services.³⁸ Arpinati, to his credit, pressed for an amnesty for the family – he was a friend of the boy’s father. Meanwhile, the consequences for Italy of Mussolini’s trip to Bologna for the new stadium were dramatic. In November 1926 new laws were passed reintroducing the death penalty that had been abolished in 1888. All political parties apart from the Fascist Party were banned along with their newspapers and a special fascist secret police service was set up. The last vestiges of free speech and democracy had been removed.

Calcio and Italian capitalism

From the very beginning, Italy’s business leaders were interested in calcio. One of the founders of AC Milan was Piero Pirelli, industrialist and part of the huge Pirelli rubber business set up in the city in 1872. Pirelli ran Milan from 1908 to 1929 and was responsible for the construction of the San Siro stadium in 1926. Senatore Borletti, another Milanese industrialist with various interests in the city (alarm clocks, bullets, watches, department stores, basketball), was president of Inter from 1926 to 1929. Most important of all, however, was the role of FIAT. Formed in 1899 in Turin, by the end of World War One FIAT had become one of Italy’s biggest companies. By the 1920s, FIAT was producing 90 per cent of Italy’s cars and the Agnelli family controlled 70 per cent of the company. In 1923, Edoardo Agnelli (who was just over 30 at the time) took control of Juventus and remained president until 1935, overseeing a series of astonishing victories in the 1930s. Edoardo was the son of Giovanni Agnelli, founder of the company. FIAT have been linked to Juventus ever since. Edoardo used to take his son Gianni with him to the stadium, and Gianni Agnelli was part of Juve’s history until his death in 2003.³⁹

In a way that is unique, Italy’s biggest company has run Italy’s biggest football club, and this alliance has created love, hate, loyalty and jealousy in equal measure. FIAT’s wealth, and its business ethics, made Juve into the greatest producer of victories in Italian football, with a fan-base that spread across the whole country and dwarfed that of the other clubs. FIAT used Juventus to make money, but also to create consensus and popularity, with Turin workers but above all among ordinary Italians across the peninsula. Every victory was identified with the car company that paid the players’ wages. By the 1930s Juventus could count on a fan-base bigger than that of all the other clubs put together.

From calcio to football. A mass sport is born

By the end of the 1920s, calcio had become football. Italy had a professional game, with a national league. The history of calcio since 1929 is synonymous with the history of Serie A and Serie B. Italy also had a national team that was on the verge of making its mark as a world footballing power. There were stadiums all over the country, and many people – men and women – now saw themselves as fans. A series of spectacular scandals had rocked the game, including a playoff behind closed doors and cases of bribery and corruption. Shots had been fired between rival fans, and referees had gone on strike. Politics had intermeshed itself deeply into the organization, running and structure of the game, and of individual clubs. Money was also being made from football, and footballers could now live by the game alone. In just three decades, Italian football had moved on from a few tubby Englishmen kicking a heavy ball around on the dockside to a mass sport, which attracted millions of followers. Italian football had come a long way, in a short time, and it was never to look back.

CHAPTER 2 The Referee

‘Rules exist, but they are not easy to interpret’

PAUL GINSBORG

‘Perhaps the history of football would be best understood as a history of referees, and not through the histories of federations, national teams, big tournaments, managers, bosses’

GIAN PAOLO ORMEZZANO

‘In Italy the referee question is more important than the southern question’

FABIO BALDAS (former referee)

Hunt the Ref! Akkiappa L’Arbitro!

In 2003 Enrico Preziosi, games entrepreneur and football chairman, launched a new board game onto the lucrative Italian market. The game was part of a series. It was called Akkiappa L’Arbitro – which loosely translates as ‘Hunt the Referee’ (a dog-catcher is an acchiappacane). The ‘Ks’ instead of the ‘Cs’ are an extra insult, common in Italy but very hard to explain to foreigners.¹ The winner, the box says, is the player ‘who hunts down the highest number of characters’. Two large salivating fans are depicted on the front of the game box, cheering. On the back there is a referee, running away. It is a simple game: you are provided with a small plastic football pitch upon which are attached a number of equally big-headed plastic referees, with light-buttons on their tops. Some are completely bald, like Pierluigi Collina, Italy’s most famous match official. Two padded gloves are also included. The object of the game? Hit (akkiappa!) the referee that lights up, in the quickest time possible. That’s it. Hit as many referees, on the head, before your opponent does so, with a padded glove whilst the score is kept, automatically. As a game, Akkiappa L’Arbitro leaves something to be desired. As a metaphor for the relationship between Italians and referees, it is perfect. Not surprisingly, the referees’ association complained about Akkiappa. Preziosi, who had spent the entire 2002–3 season moaning that his then team – Como – had been harshly treated by referees, apologized and said that he would withdraw the game from the shops. In 2004 it was still available. I purchased one in Milan (for £35) in January of that year.

All this might be seen as comic if it were not for the inflammatory consequences of Preziosi’s frequent outbursts. In that same season, when Como were quite clearly not good enough for Serie A, a small group of their fans went crazy after a referee gave three penalties against them in a home match with Udinese. They decided to akkiappare l’arbitro in real life. After a semi-riot, the game was abandoned. It is not difficult to link Preziosi’s conspiracy theories with this violence, and such attitudes rarely bring results. On the contrary, they give the players a great excuse for not trying very hard. It is all the referee’s fault, so why bother running around too much? Akkiappa identified the guilty party in the chaos of Italian football as the referee. He was responsible for all the game’s ills, and as such deserved to be hunted down, beaten up, punished.

A book published in 2004 (and to be found in the ‘comedy’ section of bookstores) was simply a list of incidents involving referees from right across Italy, in minor games of all kinds.² Here are some examples, from all parts of the peninsula and its islands:

Mortara (Lombardy): ‘after a player was sent off his son came onto the pitch without permission screaming: “referee, you are murdering my players”. Asked to leave by the official, he first struck the ball violently towards the referee, and then kicked him in the leg, causing a strong bruise to emerge; the game had to be abandoned.’

Vercelli (Piedmont), January 1995: ‘The referee of Pro Vercelli-Olbia (Serie C2) gave a penalty to Olbia in injury time at the end of the game. They scored, and the referee blew the final whistle. At this point, he was chased by some Pro Vercelli players to the dressing room, where he remained “barricaded in” for half an hour or so, until the police came to his rescue.’

Carini (Sicily): ‘A player was banned for five years after headbutting the referee, breaking his nose and a tooth. The game was called off.’

Montecchio (Emilia): ‘After the game had finished, a supporter chased the referee on his motorbike for fifteen km, unsettling his driving.’

Calabria: ‘After a player was booked, the same player punched the referee in the face, who was then surrounded by the whole team, spat on, struck and kicked. The group included the stand-in linesman (who was from the same team) who hit the referee with his flag. The game was called off, but the same group of players tried to force the referee to continue and followed him to the dressing room.’

There are 202 pages of stories like this, chosen from official reports, and this is only a small selection of what has become a violent epidemic in Italian sport: Hunt the ref!