EURO 2024 Azzurri’s Fiasco

17 July 2024

Italian football: mirror of a society where no one pays

Italian football is the mirror of our society: it means organized crime connections, both at top management level or at mafia and camorra rank; it means corruption, in match fixing, slush funds creation and drug use; it means another weapon of mass consent in the hand of the demagogical political candidate. But it also means beauty and aestheticism.

These are the opening lines, which I wrote in 2014, of Corruption, violence, beauty in Italian football: a mirror of society, the chapter I dedicated to our national sport in the book Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy. Alas, after the tragicomic performance of our national team at Euro 2024, which looked like a sketch of the joke television series Scherzi a Parte, let’s admit that, ten years later, beauty and aestheticism are almost gone. A few years before, in his outstanding The Dark Heart of Italy, Tobias Jones had written:

Comparing Italian and British football is like comparing snooker with darts. One is cerebral, stylish, slipping the ball across the smooth green felt; the other a bit overweight, slightly raucous, throwing the occasional arrow in the right direction. The more you watch Italian football, the more you realise why Italy … has won three World Cups [actually four]: Italians are simply very good at the game. They play the most beautiful, cultured and skilful football imaginable. Talk to any Italian about the strengths of the Italian game, and they will always mention the two vital ingredients lacking in Britain: fantasia e furbizia — fantasy and cunning.

I agreed then, but I also noticed that the seeds of decay were already there. I wrote: Sure enough there has always been aestheticism in our football, which is at present being blown away because of the development of the athletic part of the game and of its global standardization, an evolution which holds inside an involution process similar to the erosion of the hallmarks of the country – from creativeness to moral values – done by commercial television in this second ventennio (end of quote).

Today, ten years later, that involution process has become an indisputable fact. This is the conclusion of the same chapter in the 2023 definitive edition of Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy:

The disastrous performances of the azzurri continued in this last decade: the team did not even qualify for the final phase for the last two World Cups, provoking national shock and mourning. In between, unexpectedly, Italy won the 2020 European Championship, actually played in 2021 because of the covid pandemic, under the leadership of the head coach Roberto Mancini. Mancini was confirmed as manager after the 2022 World Cup fiasco but, a few days before the start of the new season of Euro 2024 qualifiers, he left out of the blue. The reason became clear a few days afterwards when the Arabian Emirates announced he signed a 20m euro a year contract to train their national team until 2026 in order to bring the Arabian National team to higher soccer grounds. It is the last example of the Arabian football hurricane which has stormed Europe and South America for the last few years. Not only they buy clubs abroad, now they bring top players home with offers that can’t be refused, a trend that started with the hiring of Cristiano Ronaldo after World Cup 2022. Money can’t buy me love, maybe, but can all the rest. Football as we know it is disappearing, kidnapped by the Arabian oil dollars and, in general, by the money it generates. Let’s watch it while we can, it is the best game worldwide, mysteriously. For goodness’ sake, why all over the planet do people of different ethnicities, creeds and lifestyles go crazy for twenty-two guys who tried to throw a ball into a net? What is the mystery? Where is the spell?

Of course, head coach/popular philosopher Luciano Spalletti and all the Italian Football top representatives are not stepping down. Why should they, when our politics teaches everyone to stay where they are, notwithstanding accusations, suspicions or even guilty verdicts? It’s another dark custom of our country, installed in the popular mind. Tobias Jones, in the chapter titled Penalties and Impunities, makes it very clear: in Italy nobody pays, non paga nessuno, and consequently crime keeps operating. The Berlusconi period boosted an attitude that was already in Italy’s DNA, and made it a normal public behaviour. Look around: former Berlusconi’s delfino – heir apparent –, Giovanni Toti, now Liguria governor, was arrested two months ago with heavy accusations of corruption. Of course, he keeps his office and keeps working from home, where he is confined. Hereafter are Jones’s words:

… as Italy’s moral minority always complains, non paga nessuno, which basically means that no one in Italy is ever, ever punished for anything: ‘nobody pays’. … In Italy there are no penalties other than on the football pitch. Crime is never followed by punishment because, at least for the powers-that-be, there’s guaranteed impunity. You can get away with anything. As long as you play the game, you’ll be played onside. Take Nandrolone, field illegal players, fiddle the accounts, put up fascist banners [I add, as an update, have a cupola to buy referees, dope players, fix matches for betting]: non paga nessuno.

‘What were the Swiss doing on our pitch?’ our nation asks: according to the non paga nessuno philosophy, when you are caught in bed with a lover by your wife, you have to tell her: ‘I was wondering what a stranger is doing in my bed’, and, according to that thinking, you are sure to get away with it. Unluckily, at international level, that philosophy does not work: this time they (The Swiss) got away with it and we just got back home.

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