A parade of journalists and novelists and poets followed him to the microphone, each paying tribute to Inter and Zanetti, many taking the same anti-capitalist line as the emcee. Between speakers, the director handed Zanetti oil paintings that had been created in his honor.
There were certain contradictions in this e¤ort to superimpose a left-wing identity on Inter. First of all, it doesn’t make any sense to link the club to the anti-globalization movement. An oil magnate owns Inter.
Although he has center-left sympathies, and has even flirted with a political career, he runs Inter in the unabashed spirit of capitalism. Then, when they try to graft cosmopolitanism onto this club, they fail miser-ably. They can never get past the fact that Inter represents the petite bourgeoisie of northern Italy, a group that resents immigration more than any in the country.
The stands of Inter games contain far more racist chants and banners than they do for Berlusconi’s club.
This is certainly not the first instance of irrational-ism and inconsistency on the Italian left. More than any country in Western Europe, Italians have indulged a romantic politics. Where the show trials of the ’30s, the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and the fall of the Berlin Wall turned o¤ most of humanity to communism, the Italian enthusiasm for Karl Marx’s doctrine never really abated. They kept faith with the Communist Party into the 1990s, even though the party kept mouthing crusty words about revolution and the dictatorship of the HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS
proletariat. This wasn’t a small segment of the electorate. Communists routinely received close to a third of the vote.
And there’s another plague that curses the Italian left, a tendency toward snobbery. They’ve turned Berlusconi and Milan into a bigger villain than Agnelli and Juventus, because Berlusconi couldn’t be more déclassé. As one newspaper columnist told me, “He imports low-brow American TV shows and movies; he tells dirty jokes and commits ridiculous ga¤es.” An important investigation into the genesis of his empire was called The Odor of Money. But his real curse, it sometime seems, is to have the odor of new money.
The left’s apoplectic reaction to Berlusconi undermines its ability to combat him. Instead of satisfying the Italian craving for spectacle, his opponents are gray politicians, usually with academic pedigrees and mild-mannered demeanors. (Berlusconi’s archenemy,
Romano Prodi, for instance, makes a point of touting his own devotion to cycling, a sport that doesn’t have near the mass following of football.) They keep hitting Berlusconi for crimes that have already been exposed and, for better or worse, excused by the electorate. Like the Inter intellectuals, they seem ludicrously disconnected from the reality of their potential supporters.
At dinner, Tommaso and I sat across the table from Zanetti. He couldn’t have been more appreciative or happier to be at the table. “Where are you from?” he asked me in Spanish. As we made pleasant, perfunc-tory chitchat, the table erupted into a voluble debate on the merits of past Inter squads. The intellectuals were especially prone to celebrating the mystical qualities and aesthetic sensibilities of players, in the same manner they had championed Zanetti earlier in the evening. Sitting on the fringe of this conversation, Zanetti listened intently, looking over the shoulder of other participants. At first, he tentatively tried to interject himself into the conversation, providing illustrative first-hand observations about playing for Inter. But these interventions weren’t heard, as far as I could tell, over the din. Debating Inter’s heroes of the past, the table ignored the Inter hero of the present they had just celebrated in such glowing terms. After a few minutes, Zanetti gave up on the conversation and focused on quickly finishing the pizza on his plate. The hero politely excused himself, gathered his paintings, and fled. a
H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s
t h e D i s c re e t C h a r m o f
B o u r g e o i s N a t i o n a l i s m
I.
The motto of FC Barcelona is “mas que un club,” more than a club. For the purposes of full disclosure, I agree.
It’s more than a club; it’s one of God’s greatest gifts to leisure time. I wrote that last sentence while wearing a Barca cap and a frayed replica jersey that I bought ten years ago. Later today, I’ll pretend to write this chapter while constantly refreshing my browser for updates of Barca’s game against Newcastle United in the Champions League. And tonight, I’ll have a dream about a long curving pass from Xavi that will be met by Javier Saviola after the little man unbelievably crosses a large swath of grass. Even if the rules of reality have been suspended, it’s too much of a stretch to imagine myself on the field with Saviola. But I will still picture myself in the scene, in the lower tier of the Camp Nou, Barca’s stadium.
With the rest of the stadium, I will be singing Saviola’s name like a Gregorian chant, exaggerating each syllable for maximum haunting e¤ect. The person sitting next to me will be flying a ten-foot Catalan flag above my head.
Barca became my team in 1994 on a winter trip
through the city. My visit coincided with the annual gratis opening of Barca’s museum. It is the most visited museum in the city, even ahead of a massive collection of Picasso canvases. With no admission fee, lines crawled across the stadium parking lot, filled with eight-year-old boys and their
