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
