Calcio: A History of Italian Football. John Foot

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СКАЧАТЬ refereeing. Other common insults imply that referees are venduti (sold, corrupt, crooks). Bizarrely, whenever Italian teams are playing in Europe, or the national team is in action, Italian commentators usually claim that their officials ‘are the best in the world’. In comparison with others, Italian referees are praised to the skies. At home, they are always cornuti.

      Rules, Laws and the Italian Referee

      ‘Every game is under the control of a referee, who has all the authority necessary in order to make sure that the Rules of the Game are respected in the game in which he officiates’

       Italian football federation Rule Book, Rule 5

      Referees interpret a set of rules, in a context in which everyone has their own opinion on every single moment of every game. They have to make an instant decision, one way or the other, based purely on what they have seen. As if that was not difficult enough, many of the 22 players on the pitch (as well as managers and fans) often try and pretend that something different has happened, or simply hide reality from the referee’s probing eyes. Players dive, appeal for throw-ins after clearly kicking the ball out, crash to the ground screaming with pain when they have not been touched, try sneaky handballs. They also complain, constantly, about everything. Football games, like prison riots, are ‘essentially contested’.⁶ Agreement is not only hard to come by, it is impossible.

      All of this is much more difficult in Italy, for precise political and historical reasons. As historian Paul Ginsborg has written, ‘the referee’s authority is perforce uncertain, but it is made much more so in Italy by the almost universal climate of suspicion, if not derision, that accompanies his decisions’. In the relationship between the Italian football fan and the referee, Ginsborg continues, ‘it is not difficult to discern…a series of emotions – suspicion, contempt, cynicism, even hatred – that characterize the relationship between Italians and the state’.⁷ This relationship, moreover, is not confined to Italian referees alone – although it is most pervasive with regard to the national championship. Foreign referees are also accused of the same ‘crimes’, and have been blamed for the failures of various Italian teams during various World Cups. Occasionally a simple solution to the ‘referee question’ in Italy has been proposed: import non-Italian officials. An experiment of this type was tried in the second half of the 1950s – with little success – and was unearthed again as a possible solution in the twenty-first century, for key championship games.

      Football rules have to be interpreted. Although the written rules remain the same, the application of those rules differs across football cultures, and the official representatives of these cultures are the referees. Thus, many tackles that are fouls in Italy are not fouls in the British game. In Italy there is a special phrase for our more liberal style of officiating: ‘refereeing, English style’ (un arbitraggio all’inglese). Moreover, the Italians are very clear that a straight-legged tackle – what they call gamba tesa – is always a foul, even if you get the ball. In England we sometimes call this ‘foot up’, but it is by no means always a foul, especially if the tackler wins the ball. In Italy the idea is that this kind of tackle is dangerous, per se, and therefore a foul. Once again, the written rules are the same, their application is not, although the globalization of football has led to more consistency across different championships.

      Corruption, Suspicion, Legitimation

      ‘The referee’s decisions on the field are not subject to appeal. A referee can change his mind only if he believes that he has made a mistake or, as he wishes, after a signal from the referee’s assistant, as long as play has not been re-started’

       Italian football federation Rule Book, 2002, Rule 5

      After Juventus lost the 1997 Champions League final to Borussia Dortmund, Roberto Bettega, former player and by then high up in the Italian club’s management hierarchy, claimed that his team had been ‘beaten by a stronger federation than ours’. In 2002, in the wake of Italy’s dramatic defeat at the hands of South Korea at the World Cup, the Italian press was full of phrases like these: ‘we do not have enough power at international level’ and ‘Italy does not count in the football federation’. When the team returned after a disastrous campaign (one victory in four games) most of the blame was aimed not at the players, nor even at the manager, but at Franco Carraro – a career football bureaucrat with a charisma bypass and Italy’s man at the International Football Federation (FIFA). Carraro, the press claimed, had not fought hard enough to ensure fair treatment and ‘good’ referees for the Italian team. In a similar vein were the words muttered to me by a disgruntled Inter fan in 2003. ‘Next year, I think they will let us win.’⁸

      What does all this mean, for Italian football and for Italy in general? Quite simply, for the Italian football fan, the referee is always corrupt, unless proven otherwise. What remains to be discovered is how he is or has been corrupt, in favour of whom, and why. It is this thesis that dominates most discussions of Italian football. Conspiracy theories abound – are hegemonic, in fact. Who will be allowed to win next year, next week, tomorrow, and why? In Italy, there is the strong conviction that the state, its rules and regulations are flexible entities, besmirched with corruption and therefore ready to be flouted and challenged. This conviction has a strong historical basis. In Italy, as the writer and football critic Giovanni Arpino put it, ‘those who hold power, even for ninety minutes, are never looked upon in a good light’.⁹ Italian referees seemed imprisoned within the phrase made famous by Giovanni Giolitti, a powerful nineteenth- and twentieth-century politician: ‘for your enemies you apply the law, for your friends you interpret it’.

      It is sometimes said in Italy that only an idiot adheres to the law.¹⁰ This is also true on the football pitch. All institutions require considerable levels of legitimation if they are not to govern mainly through the use of or threat of force. A political system ‘requires an input of mass loyalty that is as diffuse as possible’.¹¹ Citizens must have certain levels of faith in the right of the state to govern, collect taxes, enforce law and order, fight wars and educate their children in order for these institutions to work with any efficiency. The Italian state has found legitimation extremely difficult to obtain since the country was unified in 1861. In fact the Italian state has been in the throes of a legitimation crisis ever since its inception. The basic ‘rules of the game’ have never been accepted by most Italians. They have been partly replaced by unwritten ‘rules’ that have institutionalized inefficiency and privileged informal forms of behaviour and exchange. All of this can also be applied to the relationship between fans, footballers and pundits and the representatives of legality in the world of football, the referees. Referees are invested with enormous power to determine matches, championships and World Cups. They are, according to Italians, both eminently manoeuvrable and highly effective in their cheating. As with the state, Italians have both contempt and great respect for referees. This respect is for the authority they wield and the institutional position they hold. As individuals they are despised.

      Most Italians who know anything about football history (and many know an awfully large amount) will claim that at least five or six World Cups have been decided by refereeing decisions. Thus, it is common knowledge in Italy that English referee Ken Aston kicked Italy out of the 1962 World Cup with his ‘biased’ display in the infamous Italy-Chile match, which soon became known as the ‘Battle of Santiago’. Moreover, all Italians believe that England fixed the 1966 World Cup. Finally the embarrassing exit of Italy in the 2002 tournament was СКАЧАТЬ