Calcio: A History of Italian Football. John Foot

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СКАЧАТЬ and Juventus are referred to in this way because, according to Fiorentina fans, they have been extremely lucky over the years. Thus, Juventus followers and the team itself are gobbi. When Florence has signed Juventus players, they have sometimes been symbolically ‘de-hunchbacked’ by their own fans in a strange ceremony. But Florence and, to a lesser extent, Rome are exceptions in Italy’s footballing map, as relatively Juve-free zones. Very few parts of the peninsula have been ‘de-hunchbacked’ and Juventini (Juve fans) are everywhere in Italy. These contrasting passions have created many other nicknames for the club, beyond that of i gobbi. Journalists often call the club the old lady – la vecchia signora – as a sign of respect. Other nicknames are less complimentary – the thieves being another favourite.

      As you travel across southern Italy, it is entirely normal to see entire teams of young players decked out in Juve shirts in kickabouts, hundreds of miles from Turin. Juventus have far more fans outside Turin than in their home-town. When they play in Sicily, or Calabria, or Milan, or Sardinia, they attract – and have always attracted – sell-out crowds. For the industrialist and long-time owner of the club, Gianni Agnelli, ‘in the south people dreamed of going to see Juventus’. The reasons for this extraordinary fan-base are both simple, and complicated. Success breeds support: Juve have won the Serie A championship 28 times, nearly twice as often as their closest rivals Milan and Inter. Moreover, Juventus were extremely successful as calcio became a national sport. In the early 1930s, coinciding with the 1934 World Cup victory at home, they won five successive championships.² This was also a time when radio and the sports press began to ‘nationalize’ Italian sport coverage. In the early 1960s, a spectacular new Juventus team fused perfectly with a new generation of post-war fans.

      Between 1951 and 1967, Turin’s population rose from 719,300 to 1,124,714. Many of these terroni immigrants – a racist term used by northerners towards southerners – were already, or soon came to be, Juventus fans. Goffredo Fofi, who wrote the best study of southern immigration to Turin in the 1960s, noted that ‘during a Juventus-Palermo match, there were many enthusiastic immigrant Sicilian fans whose sons, by now, like every respectable FIAT worker, backed the home team’.³ When the immigrants returned home, for holidays, weddings or funerals, they took their footballing ‘faith’ with them. Turin was New York for these emigrants, and its myths (wealth, success, modernity) were transferred – including la Juve – to those aspirant migrants still at home. As one immigrant has since said: ‘all of us became Juventini’.⁴ Darwin Pastorin, one of Italy’s most brilliant football writers, has described the Juventus of the 1970s as ‘proletarian’.⁵ Southern migrants were particularly proud of the southern players in their team – defender Antonio Cuccureddu from Sardinia, winger Franco Causio from Apulia and above all Sicilian striker Pietro Anastasi – who was known as the ‘white Pelé’ but also as u turcu: ‘the dark one’.⁶ Marxist writers have interpreted the fandom of FIAT’s southern workers more negatively, as a collective safety valve for the frustration and anger produced on the production line. As Gerhard Vinnai – student of Adorno and Marcuse – wrote in the 1970s, ‘the goals on a football field are the own-goals of the dominated’.⁷

      In the 1970s and 1980s yet another generation of Juventini were born – the children of these immigrants – who identified with the glamour and the style of the team’s victories. Juventus’s achievement also coincided with Italian success. The 1982 World Cup winning team contained seven Juve players. The Juventus name also helped. For Gianni Agnelli ‘not having the name of a city has brought us great popularity. It makes us national.’ Juve never went through a slump long enough to lose them fans. Only three times have they seemed about to lose their primacy: in the second half of the 1940s, to Torino, in the first half of the 1960s, to Inter, and in the first half of the 1990s, to Milan. Each time, they have come back, stronger than ever, to reaffirm their pre-eminence and power.

      Juventus stamped their authority on Italian football in the 1930s, winning five consecutive championships with a team made up of South American stars with Italian citizenship and many local players. Juve used their money and influence to buy in the best players and coaches, becoming the national team. After suffering the humiliation of Torino dominance in the 1940s, Juventus struggled to rebuild in the 1950s. It was only with the arrival of another two foreign stars – Omar Sivori and John Charles – in the latter part of the decade that Juve began to dictate things again. After a period when Milan was the capital of world football – throughout the 1960s – Juventus built another ‘cycle’ of dominance in the 1970s and 1980s. Under Giovanni Trapattoni – a pragmatic Milanese coach and brilliant man-manager – Juve dominated for more than a decade. An impregnable defence with Dino Zoff in goal and Gentile, Scirea and Cabrini – was complemented by superb ball-winners such as Beppe Furino (who won a record eight titles between 1972 and 1984) and Marco Tardelli in midfield. Up front, these teams were blessed with skilful ball players and deadly strikers, from Paolo Rossi to ‘the baron’, Franco Causio. Juve also bought the best foreigners – Liam Brady, Zibi Boniek and above all Michel Platini. They rarely went wrong in the transfer market, or in their choice of manager.

      A final ‘cycle’ of victories was built up by Paul Newman lookalike Marcello Lippi, who added another column to the Juve pantheon, again with a combination of stern defence, ball-winners and skill in midfield, including Zinedine Zidane at his peak, and free-scorers up front, from Roberto Baggio and Fabrizio Ravanelli to Gianluca Vialli and Alessandro Del Piero. Lippi took control of the team in two separate spells, winning five titles in seven years, as well as the Intercontinental Cup, dramatically snatched by fan idol Del Piero in 1996.

      Only one trophy consistently eluded Juventus, so much so that it has come to be seen as cursed by fans and players at the club. For a team with 28 championships, more than half of them since the setting-up of the European Cup, Juventus’s record of just two victories is a desperately poor showing. In seven finals, Juventus have lost five times. In 1973, they were outclassed by Johan Cruyff’s Ajax. Ten years later, after going through the whole tournament unbeaten, they fell to an outrageous long-shot from Hamburg midfielder Felix Magath. Anti-Juve fans partied into the night and Grazie Magath! graffiti appeared everywhere. In 1985 the Heysel disaster took place before the final won by Juventus. Many people do not recognize the trophy awarded that year. Juve were back in the final in 1996, and this time they won – at last – beating Ajax on penalties. Lippi’s team reached the final twice more in the next two years, losing to Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid respectively. More graffiti appeared: Grazie Real! Grazie Borussia! In 2003 Lippi and Juventus were back for more, losing again, on penalties, to Milan. Seven finals, one victory; a terrible record that has divided Italy.

      Well-timed (and continual) success was not the only explanation for Juventus’s huge fan-base. FIAT were – and are – Italy’s biggest company, producing millions of cars and providing millions of jobs. FIAT, for 100 years, was Italian capitalism, and FIAT signified power, influence, a way of life. Many claimed that Italy was really controlled by FIAT – FIATALY. Southern immigrants yearned for a job in Mirafiori – the huge factory constructed on the edge of Turin in 1939. When it was opened the plant covered six per cent of the entire area of Turin and the workers’ café could hold 10,000 people. Production lines ran for 40 km. Hundreds of thousands of peasants took the ‘train of the sun’ – especially in the 1950s and 1960s – to cold, foggy Turin to pursue the dream of a job with FIAT. In the north, they faced racism and hardship, but many also found a steady job and the ability to create a future for their families. Umberto Agnelli – of the Agnelli family who have always controlled FIAT – even claimed that ‘one of the reasons which led migrants to choose Turin during the great migrations of the 1950s and 1960s was the possibility of going to see Juventus play’.

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