Buat fans Serie A atau fan salah satu club Serie A:
jangan kaget membaca cerita dibawah ini, karena seperti ini lah wajah
sepakbola italia.
kalau anda shock dan sulit menerima, silahkan dukung liga kelas 2
lainnya di eropa, tapi buat gue pribadi, ini sudah merupakan bagian
dari gaya hidup sepakbola, yg justru membuat gue makin demen sama
Serie A, dengan segala intrik dan polemik didalamnya, yg semakin
menarik buat digali, yg mana segala sesuatunya tidak hanya hadir
diatas lapangan rumput.
dari berbagai sumber:
Calcio, i.e. Italian football (soccer), is an open-air cageful of
weirdos: political violence, conspiracy theories (all proven
truthful!), superstition and crazy cults, bribery and corruption,
illegal betting, fraudulent bankruptcy at all levels, monday morning
coaching as a national religion.
A British journalist put it quite effectively when he wrote:
"This is a nation where the largest selling daily newspaper is
dedicated almost entirely to football; where its former ruling party
is named after a football chant; and where its former Prime Minister
owns one of the league's most famous clubs."
Currently, the biggest scandal in the history of soccer is making all
the walls tumble down, with chains of domino effects impacting on
politics and the economy.
What's black and white and has a foul smell? Ask Signor Moggi
by Tobias Jones (the times)
THERE ARE 58 million people living in Italy but it's a small world.
Italians call it Italietta, a pejorative term implying that the
control of the country is in the hands of a select gang of
unscrupulous people. For almost a month now, Italians have been
learning, with bitterness, just how small their country is. Football
is at the centre of the scandal and the lead role is played
brilliantly by Luciano Moggi.
Moggi is comic-book bad. His put-downs are awesome, especially because
of his trademark droopy eyelids. When he smiles, his whole face
sparkles, but he does "angry" with whispers and shouts. This is a
former station master nicknamed Paletta ("lollipop man"), a small-time
fixer who reached the summit of power: he was until two weeks ago
director-general of Juventus, the Rolls-Royce of Italian football
teams.
You know the story by now: he was a phone-slinger from down south. He
won games from the stands, kicking ass instead of leather. Juventus
were systematically favoured by hand-picked referees ("see also what's
not there sometimes" was one instruction relayed to a referee). It was
favoured by a mathematical usage of yellow and red cards against their
future opponents. Surprise, surprise: Serie A was more bent than the
Charlton attack.
It's hard not to scream through embittered lips that "we told you so".
For years it has been a running joke in Italy. We whingers who stood
in the stands for Parma-Juventus matches had felt hard done by for
years: Parma reduced to nine men, another Del Piero penalty, another
Parma goal disallowed. We felt convinced something whiffed but were
repeatedly told by TV hosts (who, it now emerges, also colluded with
Lucky Luciano) that we were paranoid.
Markets as well as matches were allegedly fixed. The world was so
small that Moggi twice employed Marcello Lippi (now national manager)
as "technical commissariat" (manager) at Juventus. Moggi's son works
with Lippi's son at Gea. Gea is the sports agency that represents
almost 300 footballers. It controls more than 17 per cent of the
estimated transfer market. Moggi even had Giuseppe Pisanu, then the
Minister of the Interior, pleading on the phone for help to save a
team in his constituency. Moggi, of course, did the trick.
This political and financial involvement in football means that the
actual game defies gravity. Only in Italietta is it possible to win
three promotions in two seasons (Fiorentina). It's never clear at the
end of each 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 in Santo Domingo (Gaucci), in prison (Cragnotti), on trial
(Tanzi) or caught red-handed giving a suitcase of cash to a fixer
(Preziosi).
This time, though, the scandal seems bigger. The Juventus share price
has plummeted by 40 per cent in less than a month and investors are
scratching their heads at quite how tawdry the club's bar code
black-and-white stripes are. Italy goes into the World Cup having been
forced to withdraw its refereeing representative; Franco Carraro, the
president of their FA, has resigned. The national coach, captain and
goalkeeper are under investigation. Even by Italietta standards, this
is quite a crisis.
What happened next is interesting. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the head of
the Catholic Church in Italy, tried to sdrammatizzare (make a molehill
out of a mountain): "I wouldn't want there to be a change of
register," he said this week, warning us away from outright
revolution. "Dissension grows with the grain", whatever that means.
Others step forward to calm things down, not least because the
investigation is now under the command of Francesco Saverio Borrelli,
a man who spearheaded the Tangentopoli political corruption clean-up .
. . and that means Berlusconi is both happy and nervous: his AC Milan
might enjoy Juventus being stripped of their two most recent
championships and dropping to Serie B, but the return of an empowered
magistrature makes him understandably a little twitchy.
There's so much momentum to the story that every hour new accusations,
transcripts and confessions emerge: Moggi was apparently able to
bounce players into the national team and thereby increase his market
assets. He could get fixtures altered. He could even soften up the
opposition because some of them were bound to be Juve boys on loan
anyway.
But if you didn't return his calls you would be frozen out: Fabrizio
Miccoli and Enzo Maresca, two of the brightest young talents in Italy,
were publicly humiliated by Moggi and now play in Portugal and Spain
respectively. There are others: Zidane, Henry, Di Vaio and Davids.
World-class players were rudely shunted if they didn't adhere to
Moggismo.
Most Italians won't consider Moggi an evil man: he's accused of being
a bad sport, a jolly rotter, but he's not at the time of writing
accused of any crime. But what really riles about Moggi is that he
knew nothing about the sport. Playing football in Italy has always
been a pleasure because of its innocence and aspiration. You play at
dusk on small pitches overlooked by the parish priest. If you can't
afford the pitch you play on the cobbles, dribbling past Vespas. Now
that all seems romantic drivel. In Moggi's world sport is a stitch-up
played with calculator and cash till.
HAPUS BAGIAN EMAIL YG TIDAK PERLU SEBELUM ME-REPLY.
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