How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (20 page)

Juventus have the nickname Old Lady, an unlikely appellation for a club run by so stylish an owner as Gianni Agnelli. Despite flashy foreign stars and occasional periods of entertaining play, their style has often been an extension of their drab black-and-white uniforms. Their defensiveness and tactical obsessions leave little margin for error and much in the hands of referees. Nevertheless, Juventus sit as the unoªcial monarchy of Italian soccer. Since 1930, when the professional game began, Juventus have won twenty-five championships and finished second fourteen times.

What’s shocking about this record, aside from the sheer dominance it represents, is how often Juventus have won the championship at the end of the season on a piece of dubious refereeing. Footage of these oªciating travesties can be viewed on the Web site www.anti-Juve.com. It is worth seeing with one’s own eyes the phantom penalties that have deprived Juve’s opponents of vital goals. You’ll see clips of the ball crossing Juve’s goal line, yet inexplicably not counted against them.
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

A recent example from this history of infamy perfectly illustrates the critics’ case. In 1998, Juve won the so-called “season of poison.” They triumphed because referees denied Juve’s opponents clear goals and failed to properly punish Juve’s sins. Even though Juve committed more fouls than any club in the league, they received the least red cards, a statistical inconsistency that defies logical reckoning. The season came to be summarized by a match against their closest rivals, Inter Milan. After a Juve player blatantly body-checked Inter’s Brazilian striker Ronaldo, the referee declined to award Inter a penalty. A bit later, on the other side of the field, he granted Juve a dubious penalty for a transparent piece of thespianism, where the cause of a player’s flop to the ground could not be explained by any known law of physics. The whole game was so pathetically adjudicated that even an Angelli-owned paper,
La Stampa,
condemned the handing of the championship trophy to Juventus. “One cannot remain indi¤erent when confronted with certain coincidences that are so singular, and, let’s say ‘nutritious.’. . .”

After that season, Juventus’s strength became, once again, the subject of intense public debate. In a parliamentary session, a postfascist politician called Domenico Gramazio railed against the pro-Juve travesties. “A lot of Italian referees drive Fiats,” he exclaimed loudly in the well of the Italian legislature. His accusations deeply wounded one of his colleagues, a former Juventus player named Massimo Mauro. In response to the attacks on his club’s honor, Mauro began chanting

“Clown, clown.” It took gold-braided ushers to prevent Gramazio from punching Mauro. To prevent further
escalation and further humiliation, the deputy prime minister abruptly closed the session.

Gramazio went a step further than the evidence.

Aside from isolated cases in the distant past, there’s no direct evidence linking Juventus to enormous bribes.

Nevertheless, the Juventus record looks too suspicious to be chalked up to mere serendipity and stray referee error. Besides, we know too much about the style of Agnelli, Fiat, and Italy’s postwar oligarchy. There’s no doubt that Agnelli built Fiat into an industrial giant by dint of superb, charismatic management. And there’s no doubt that his management tactics included bribing politicians. He has admitted as much. In the early nineties, Agnelli confessed that Fiat had paid $35 million worth of bribes over the course of the previous ten years. Although Fiat had more power than most corporations, it was hardly alone in slipping stu¤ed envelopes beneath the table. Under the monopolistic rule of the Christian Democratic Party—an organization that formed the bedrock of every postwar Italian government until the 1990s—bribery was a regular-ized feature of Italian business. Politicians would sign government contracts with the corporations and install high tari¤s to protect them. In return, the corporations helped consolidate the Christian Democrats’ control and slipped the politicians a big tip for their help. Carlo De Benedetti, the magnate who ran the industrial giant Olivetti, described postwar Italy as “closer to the Arab souk than to Brussels.”

But after the “clean hands” investigations of the early nineties, this system broke down. Agnelli’s right-hand man found himself indicted on all sorts of corrup-
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

tion charges. Deprived of political patrons and forced to compete in a liberalized European market, Fiat was pummeled by foreign competitors and began wallow-ing in debt. It began shedding its non-automobile businesses, focusing its energies on salvaging its core from fatal decay.

Here the analogy between politics and sport breaks down. The events of the 1990s had no parallel in soccer. Juventus’s prestige and dominance have hardly su¤ered. But now they have a formidable competitor for dominance in the new oligarch Silvio Berlusconi’s AC Milan.

III.

The Italian intelligentsia paints an ominous portrait of Silvio Berlusconi. To launch his early real estate projects, they assert, he indentured himself to the Mafia for seed money. Berlusconi only ran for political oªce, they allege, after his political patron fled to Tunisia to evade jail, leaving his corrupt businesses exposed.

When the journalists he employs challenge him, he often squashes their careers.

With this damning image in mind, it wasn’t a

promising development when AC Milan kidnapped

me. The event transpired two days after the club won its sixth Champions League title—a pedestal that only Real Madrid had ever reached. That morning in my hotel room, I called Milan’s communications director, a jovial fellow called Vittorio. Like almost everyone in the organization, he is a Berlusconi man. He goes back
years with Fininvest, the holding company that contains the whole of the Berlusconi empire, starting as a reporter for an entertainment digest, then winding his way through the AC Milan bureaucracy.

“Take a taxi and be here in fifteen minutes, okay?”

He gave me an address on one of Milan’s fanciest streets. I had other appointments scheduled that day, but couldn’t refuse his help.

When I arrived, a bearded man in a leather jacket shook my hand firmly. “Frank? Excuse me. One

moment, please.” He picked up his cell phone, turned his back to me, and began talking quickly but softly. A German car pulled up beside us. “Let’s go,” he said, prying the bottom of the phone from his face. I had anticipated that we would have a co¤ee or sit down in his oªce. Now in a car racing through Milan with typical Italian velocity, I was unsure of our destination. On the phone, he hadn’t mentioned anything about any trips, certainly not any involving the many kilometers of autostrada we were now crossing.

Finally, Vittorio returned the phone to his pocket.

Because I was too embarrassed by my ignorance of our destination, I didn’t ask the obvious, clarifying questions. But soon, Vittorio had told me enough that I realized we were going to Milan’s training grounds, a facility that goes by the name Milanello.

“When will we be going back to the city? I have appointments this afternoon,” I asked.

“Who knows?” He turned around in the front seat and smiled broadly. “Don’t worry. The AC Milan press oªce will take very good care of you.” Vittorio slapped my knee.
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

AC Milan likes to cultivate an image of glamour.

Milanello, even in its lush-sounding name, exudes it in spades. With the low-slung buildings surrounded by trellised terraces, a rose garden, and beautifully landscaped groves, it wouldn’t have surprised me if Milanello had belonged to a viscount with a sizeable trust fund.

“You will take a stroll around,” Vittorio announced, placing a hand on my back. “But first lunch.” After ordering me an espresso at the team bar, he guided me into an executive dining room where teenage players were taking leisurely lunches in high-backed modern chairs.

The entire building had been impeccably decorated.

Doors are painted a lacquered red with black trim, the team’s colors. White couches glow in their minimalist surroundings like the ones at an Ian Schrager hotel.

After lunch Vittorio sat me in a room with French doors opening up on the Milanello campus. “Wait here,” he told me. Two days earlier, in Manchester, Milan had won their sixth European Champions

League title, sealed in penalty kicks after 120 minutes of scoreless soccer. As I waited for Vittorio, Milan’s tri-umphant coach Carlo Ancelotti entered, carrying the team’s massive, newly acquired trophy. He was followed by a horde of applauding maids and other Milanello employees. While he took photos with them, the team began trickling into the room. I had opened up a book and made a pretense of reading. But in truth Vittorio had stage-managed a scene that most Italian men would have killed to watch. A parade of the world’s greatest players—Manuel Rui Costa, Paolo Maldini,
Alessandro Nesta—walked up to me and shook my

hand. They took turns hugging Ancelotti and lifting the cup. They were in an exuberant mood, and, after my brief interactions with these gods of football, so was I.

I went to find Vittorio, who was sitting at the team’s bar drinking another co¤ee.

“One favor. Can I go to tomorrow night’s game?

Can you help me get a credential or ticket?” I desperately wanted to see Milan play in their futuristic home stadium, the San Siro. And the next evening they played Roma in the finals of the Coppa Italia, a year-long tournament that yields the second most important title in the country.

“Come on!” he told me, shrugging his shoulders.

“The AC Milan press oªce can get you whatever you want.”

While nobody can be sure how Juventus gets such nice treatment from referees, soccer pundits have a good sense of how Milan does it: It manipulates the press. The club is famous for the sort of openness that they gave me. Where Juventus only reluctantly lets its players speak to reporters, and sometimes not even that, Milan releases its team to schmooze for hours.

Even Berlusconi, famously distant from political reporters, will always field questions about his beloved Milan. Standing with Israeli president Ariel Sharon, fresh from a discussion about Mid-East peace, Berlusconi once began talking about his lack of interest in buying David Beckham from Manchester United.

I’ve traveled with the White House and American presidential campaigns, but not even Karl Rove and Karen Hughes play the media with the skill of Milan.
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

When I went to the Coppa Italia finals, a press oªcer greeted me at a gate with a ticket. She kissed me on both cheeks and promised to keep tabs on me. The Milan press box, midfield in open air, truly gives the scribblers the best seats in the house. Pretty women in blazers with the Milan insignia—there were about as many of them as reporters—continually pass through the box, like stewardesses on an airliner, asking after your comfort.

As a television man, Berlusconi has always been obsessed with surface appearance and seduction of the audience. This is why he labors so assiduously to maintain a year-round suntan, and why he wears double-breasted suits perfectly tailored to obscure his Napoleonic stature. At the Milanello training ground, the head of the facility spoke to me at great length about Berlusconi’s interest in the minute details of landscaping. He had insisted on the rose garden and ordered the terraces. When he comes to visit, the landscaping crew removes the cars from the front lot so that Berlusconi can more fully enjoy the beauty of the grounds.

But this aestheticism is merely one feature of Berlusconi’s knack for producing great spectacle—a hallmark of the new oligarchs. This talent can be witnessed in AC Milan, his greatest spectacle of all.

Although the team still isn’t as o¤ensive-minded as the specimens that can be found in Latin America or Spain, Milan represents a major break with the long Italian history of defensive-minded
catenaccio.
When Berlusconi bought the club in the mid-eighties, he imported Dutchmen like Marco Van Basten and the
dreadlocked Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard, players with an irrepressible instinct to move forward in attack.

The whole team was built to entertain and play a brand of soccer more beautiful than anything Juventus could deliver. And in the end, it delivered Champions League titles and Scudettos, the Italian championship trophy.

Sitting in the San Siro, watching the finals of the Coppa Italia, I had a glimpse of how powerful and touching this spectacle can be. After the match, when the team had already racked up its second major trophy of the week, the lights in the stadium went dim. The darkness highlighted the flares that
ultras
—the highly organized, highly enthusiastic members of fan clubs—

lofted above their heads, spewing red smoke. Lasers focused a twirling image of the team’s cursive name and the European Cup hardware on the field. As classic rock anthems blared, with fans singing along, each player trotted onto the field through an inflatable tun-nel. The crowd would break from their singing to shout their names as they emerged. All around me, grown men grew teary. I’m told that this moment, as moving as I found it, couldn’t touch the truly epic spectacles that Berlusconi has produced over the years. Most famously, there was the episode dubbed “Apocalypse Now.” After Berlusconi bought the club, he introduced it by flying his players into the stadium on helicopters, with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” blaring in the background.

At nearly every juncture in my dealings with Milan, I felt the organization’s manipulative touch. But why spend so much time trying to shape the opinions of the press? In Rome, I met a man called Mario Sconcerti
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

who explained the importance of winning over the media. Sconcerti has come at the issue from both sides.

He had edited the
Corriere dello Sport,
one of two daily national papers devoted largely to the coverage of soccer.

In 2001, he went on to run the day-to-day operations of the club Fiorentina, one of the more storied outfits in Italy. In his elegant, airy Roman apartment, inter-spersed among his floor-to-ceiling collection of modern art, he has a framed photo of angry Fiorentina fans holding up a banner filled with expletives directed at him.