Has Juve – and the whole Italian game – fallen victim to the nation’s problems itself? Andrea Agnelli, the latest scion of his family to run the legendary football club, offers an answer
This is the context in which Agnelli leads Juve. The beautiful Italian game of old is disappearing. I wrote in my first book, Football Against the Enemy, 20 years ago: “When the football fan dies, he goes to Italy, where he finds the best players in the world, matches shown in full on public TV, and numerous daily sports newspapers. Nice weather, too.” For me as for many fans then, Italian football was hopelessly mixed up with memories of frothy cappuccinos, copies of the pink Gazzetta dello Sport studied at café tables, and sun-kissed stadiums as safe as family restaurants at a time when hooligans ravaged English football.
But Italian football isn’t beautiful any more. As with many things in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi must take some blame. When he was prime minister, Italy became a country where Berlusconi voters and Berlusconi haters watched Berlusconi’s team Milan thump teams subsidised by Berlusconi’s government on Berlusconi’s pay channels, in a league run by Berlusconi’s right-hand man Adriano Galliani, and then watched the highlights on Berlusconi’s free channel. The only thing Berlusconi didn’t do was carry out his government’s laws for making stadiums safer.
