It's not a great time to be an Italian soccer fan.
The Serie A, Italy's premier domestic soccer league, is in absolute disarray. Political scandals and double-dealings, the likes of which would impress Lorenzo de Medici, have given some of Italy's most recognizable clubs sizeable black eyes, and recent fan riots have led to an unprecedented government crackdown on lax stadium safety standards.
Italian soccer has always been rife with corruption - in the past, teams have been relegated to lower divisions for various offenses - but last year's match-fixing scandal provoked an unmatched uproar in the country. Telephone transcripts revealed that five of Serie A's most renowned teams, including Juventus, A.C. Milan, and Lazio, had been influencing referee selections for their matches to ensure that only the referees that favored those clubs would be assigned to their games.
That information was a bombshell in the Serie A. When the dust had settled, the head of the Italian Football Federation and all of Juventus' board of directors had resigned; Juventus had been relegated to Serie B for the first time in club history, was stripped of its 2005 and 2006 league titles, and had virtually every star player demand a transfer to a different club; the other four clubs implicated all faced points penalties in the 2006-2007 Serie A standings; and Inter Milan, which finished third, was awarded the 2005-2006 title.
To equate this with an American sport, this is the Lakers losing their 2001 and 2002 championships, playing D-League games against the Fort Worth Flyers and the Idaho Stampede for at least a year, Phil Jackson and Mitch Kupchak resigning in disgrace, and Kobe and Shaq getting traded for pennies on the dollar to the Spurs and the Mavericks. "Ouch" does not begin to cover it.
To thicken the plot, Paolo Bergamo, the official in charge of assigning referees, said that all major clubs had the same level of contact with him, and he wondered aloud why all the relevant calls he received from team managers - including from Inter Milan - were not exposed during the investigation. As it happens, Telecom Italia, the Chief Operating Officer of the telecommunications company that placed the initial wiretaps, is also the vice-president of Inter Milan. Furious Juve fans have contended that Inter, which bought Juventus stars Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Patrick Vieira for a pittance after the relegation and also was awarded the league title, leaned on Telecom Italia to make the tapes implicating Inter disappear, though there is no evidence to back this assertion.
As if the match-fixing of last season wasn't bad enough, on Feb. 2, rioters in Catania murdered a police officer after violence in a Serie A match between Catania and Palermo spilled into the streets. After Catania supporters began throwing firecrackers and smoke bombs during the second half of the contest, the police responded with tear gas canisters, and the referees suspended the match. Thirty-eight-year-old police officer Filippo Raciti was killed in the violent riot that subsequently erupted.
The events in Catania, combined with the murder of an amateur football club official in a riot just a week earlier, led the Italian Football Federation to suspend all Italian soccer matches, from children's leagues to national team play, for over a week. The Italian government decreed that all stadiums that did not have sufficient countermeasures in place to prevent hooliganism, such as greater ticket controls, ticket-readable turnstiles and closed-circuit surveillance cameras within the stadium grounds, would not be permitted to have fans attend games until the regulations were implemented.
But fan violence is such an entrenched part of Italian soccer that some clubs seem more concerned with the loss of revenue than the felonious actions of their supporters. Napoli's team president called the government's crackdown "fascist" and said that the closed stadiums were "a ridiculous idea." The mayor of Livorno, whose team plays in the Serie A, announced that Italian clubs would probably go on strike rather than implement the safety standards. And when the week-long suspension was lifted, some fans whistled, turned their backs, and threw bottles onto the field during a minute of silence in remembrance of Raciti.
These might not be representative examples, and soccer fans should hope they're not. Change isn't impossible: English soccer has virtually stamped out its hooliganism and the atmosphere of the games has drastically improved since the mid-1980s. Let's hope that the Italians can follow that blueprint.
-Matthew Mertens is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major.
