Without a word of explanation, the priest then disappeared behind the altar and resumed chanting. One by one, players moved toward the front of the church and performed the Greek Catholic rituals. Edward tried to imitate the Ukrainians: a cross of the chest; a kneel to the ground, a kiss on an icon of Jesus in his death shroud; a wiping away of lip marks with cloth; the cycle repeated.
Edward rose. Following his teammates, he walked to the gold altar. In front of the icons, he went down to his knees. He crossed himself, folded his hands, closed his eyes, and prayed. p
H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s
t h e N e w O l i g a rc h s
I.
Pierluigi Collina’s fame defies all the laws of sporting celebrity. His haunted-house looks include a Kojak pate, tubercular gauntness, and Beetlejuice eyes springing forth from their sockets. He runs like an ostrich. There is, however, something far stranger about his celebrity: He is not a player but a referee.
To be fair, he isn’t just any bureaucratic enforcer of the rulebook. Collina is roundly considered the premier practitioner of his trade. He has presided—with a combination of exceptional hardheadedness and sensitive diplomacy—over World Cup finals and heated rivalries like the Falkland War rematches between England and Argentina. His renown is now such that he appears in Adidas ads alongside David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane, and other virtuosos. GQ fashion spreads, and countless magazine profiles, capture him in his manicured villa, playing lovingly with his pet dogs.
Not just in America, but in any country, this adoration would seem strange. But Italians have endowed their referees with celebrity. Collina’s colleagues have stood for parliament and retired into comfy careers as television commentators. Referees have achieved this notoriety, because Italian media devotes so much careful attention to every yellow card disbursed and every sweeping tackle ignored. Newspapers use star rating systems to judge their work, as with restaurants or movies. They regularly publish statistical analyses—
down to the second decimal point—that try to uncover the true biases of referees. A highly watched television program called Il Processo, the trial, sits a jury of journalists and retired players that vivisects the minutiae of controversial calls. In refereeing the referees, the jurors rely on an array of technological tools. Super slow motion can show a player onside by sixteen centimeters. Like a Cindy Sherman art film, Il Processo endlessly repeats footage of falling players, so that the jury can precisely determine if he faked his plummet.
To understand the importance of refereeing requires a brief word on the paradox of Italian soccer. As everyone knows, Italian men are the most foppish representatives of their sex on the planet. They smear on substantial quantities of hair care products and expend considerable mental energies color-coordinating socks with belts.
Because of their dandyism, the world has Vespa, Prada, and Renzo Piano. With such theological devotion to aesthetic pleasure, it is truly perplexing that their national style of soccer should be so devoid of this quality. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
Starting in the 1960s, the Italians began practicing a highly defensive strategy called catenaccio, the lock-down. This formation adds an extra layer of defense, a sweeper, bringing up the rear of an already robust back line that marks man-to-man. O¤ense doesn’t usually receive many resources in this arrangement. Goals are scored in bursts of counterattack, with the ball quickly sent up the field in flashes. This way, goals come with great rarity, usually only once or twice a game. With so few opportunities to score, and so little margin of error, players must do whatever they can to gain the upper hand. Thus, the greatest cliché of Italian soccer—the impassioned two-handed mamma mia pleading with the referee.
Even as the old catenaccio style has been heavily modified in recent years to provide more o¤ense, the tropes of the system remain. Complaints and games-manship are still meant to provide the decisive advantage in games. Players flop in hopes of deceiving the referee into awarding a penalty. They argue the justice of every decision, calculating that they can plant enough doubt to earn a make-up call later in the game.
After every goal, defenders hold up their arms in protest, as if this gesture might pry up a linesman’s o¤side flag.
Because of the referee’s centrality to the outcome of games, teams do whatever they can to influence him.
Almost every year, there’s a new debate over the proce-dure for assigning referees. Under the current system, a two-person committee winnows down the pool of referees before their names go into a random draw. One member of the committee is known to be backed by the most powerful clubs, Juventus of Turin and AC Milan.
The other represents the rest of the league. The result is that Juve and Milan often can rig the system to assign themselves the most mediocre, provincially minded referees, who are (subconsciously) more deferential toward their prestige clubs. The famed Collina and similarly scrupulous colleagues are rarely ever sent to preside over Juve matches. Other referees who have issued critical penalties against Juve have found themselves working games in the lowly Serie B.
This is only the overt rigging that we know about.
Clearly, much more goes on behind the scenes. The fact that Milan and Juventus have so much power over the selection process is itself damning evidence of funny business, begging a long series of questions about the transactions between club chairmen in smoky rooms. Everyone testifies to these sub rosa shenanigans but they rarely have concrete evidence to prove it. On only a few occasions have some of the sub-merged sordid details come to surface. In
