How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (21 page)

Sconcerti has a reputation as a rebel in the chummy world of Italian soccer, a man who has just enough ego to speak truthfully about the power of the Agnellis and Berlusconi. Besides, he’s from Florence, and Floren-tines are famously skeptical about the fact that AC

Milan and Juventus have won so many championships, while their home team always seemed to be falling just short. If Sconcerti weren’t so respected, I would have found his view of the Italian game highly conspiratorial and too intricate to be plausible, the expression of his ticks and biases.

By Sconcerti’s estimate, the press can be manipulated to increase a team’s total by as much as six points, the di¤erence between a championship and second place. Once again, the manipulation hinges on pres-sure exerted on referees. He argues that the media can either turn away from or expose the preferential treatment that referees give to Juventus and Milan. If the press launches a crusade against a referee, it makes the referee extremely self-conscious. He will bend over backwards to avoid appearing biased, and may unconsciously bend even further than that.
Watching Italian television, and shows like
Il
Processo,
it is possible to see precisely how the media brings itself to bear on the refs. Sconcerti has done some of this manipulation himself. During the 2000

season, Sconcerti’s paper launched a campaign on behalf of Roma and Lazio. Every day, the
Corriere dello
Sport
would rail against the favoritism shown to Berlusconi’s and Agnelli’s clubs. And at a certain point, Sconcerti and many others believe, they could see that the referees become more generous to Lazio and Roma. In 2000 and 2001 seasons, he humbly points out, the Roman teams won national championships. This is the rare opportunity when somebody has dared quantify the value of press manipulation. With Milan, it’s nearly impossible to pick out the areas where Berlusconi’s spin machine has produced favorable treatment. Sconcerti, however, is convinced that it exists. As we sat in his apartment and drank sparkling water, he listed the referees who have been hired by Berlusconi’s television networks as commentators, and the referees criticized on them.

It is easy to believe the worst about Berlusconi, in both soccer and life. But in part, Berlusconi raises suspicions because he doesn’t fit the classic archetype of the Italian elite. This can be seen from the start of his biography. In Italy nobody works summer jobs between school semesters, especially if they don’t need a salary to stave o¤ starvation. Even though Berlusconi hailed from a middle-class family, he paid his way through college and law school by toiling on his vacations, running a business that booked bands for cruise ships.

When he couldn’t find other acts, he crooned himself,
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

cultivating a Frank Sinatra persona. As an entrepre-neur, he always had a penchant for following an American model. He made his first major fortune building a suburb for yuppies outside Milan. His television empire owed its vast reach to the steady diet of
Dallas
and
Falcon Crest
that Berlusconi fed his audience.

While Berlusconi had been a major media mogul

before becoming a sports mogul, it was the purchase of the soccer club in 1986 that launched him to national prominence. When he entered politics in 1994, running for prime minister, the game undergirded his electoral strategy. In a matter of months, Berlusconi’s advertising firm Publitalia (one of his breathtaking array of holdings) went about the business of building him a political party. For the party’s base, it started with the several million fans of AC Milan. It converted supporters’ clubs into local headquarters for his party. Publitalia filched the party’s name from a soccer chant,

“Forza Italia”—“Go Italy!” In party literature, Publitalia dubbed the Forza Italia rank and file the “Azuri,” the same nickname given to the players on the national team for their blue uniforms.

Berlusconi invoked soccer so relentlessly because his club was in the middle of a spectacular run that included consecutive Champions League titles. He wanted to plant the idea in voters’ minds that he was a winner, at a time when the economy sputtered and all politicians in Italy seemed like corrupt losers. “We will make Italy like Milan,” he tirelessly repeated. There was also a populist brilliance to his use of soccer as a metaphor for society. It gave him a vocabulary that resonated with the lower middle class, the group that he
wanted to cultivate as a political base. Explaining the rationale for his candidacy, he told voters, “I heard that the game was getting dangerous and it was being played in the two penalty areas, with the midfield being left desolately empty.”

Franco, Mussolini, and a high percentage of all modern dictators have made the link between sport and populist politics countless times. To Berlusconi’s left-wing critics, the resemblance to these tyrants is not coincidental. He is their scion. Like the Latin American caudillos, they say, he is thoroughly corrupted. At the same time he has assumed responsibility for governing Italy, he has maintained a vast business empire that profits from the state’s largess and reluctance to regulate. Predictably, when his personal interests conflict with the commonweal, he backs himself. Despite serious allegations about his own corruption, in 2003 he orchestrated the passage of legislation granting himself blanket immunity from prosecution. He has decrimi-nalized the o¤ense of false accounting, which his company is accused of committing.

His soccer dealings have the same taint. He may not be making Agnelli-like behind-the-scenes overtures to referees and politicians, but the system always looks stacked to promote his interests. In soccer, Berlusconi’s deputy at AC Milan, Adriano Galliani, has become the chairman of the Italian league—with a portfolio that includes the meting of discipline and the negotiation of television rights.

In the United States, the case against Berlusconi might be too much for the polity to tolerate. But in Italy, the electorate doesn’t penalize Berlusconi for his
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

conflicts of interest. This brand of corruption is too widespread to be pinned on a single man. The critics who point out his conflicts sound like hypocrites. They don’t want a world with media beholden only to journalistic truth and objectivity. They idealize the days when the Socialists and Christian Democrats each controlled one of the state-run television networks. Nobody, on either side of the spectrum, has any real interest in rationalizing government contracts, the prime vehicle for corruption.

Taking into account this consensus against reform, it’s hard to single out Berlusconi for rage. Compared to the old oligarchy’s back channels, Berlusconi manipulates in the wide-open, as he does with AC Milan’s press operation. In 2003, when he pushed the legislature to pass a law granting him blanket immunity from prosecution, Italians could follow the proceedings in their newspapers and on television. A few activists took to the streets, but only a small sliver of Italy cared.

IV.

One rainy night I met up with Tommaso Pellizzari, a young reporter with the newspaper
Corriere della Sera
and rabid fan of AC Milan’s fierce cross-town rival, Inter. I searched out Tommaso because he is one of the most vociferous critics of Berlusconi’s club. In 2001, he published a polemic called
No Milan,
modeled after Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization tract
No Logo.
The book is a clever, somewhat jokey, mostly rageful attack on all things Milan. It lists the ten all-time Milan play-
ers he hates most—and the ten he likes most, because they aªrm the inferiority of their club.

His charming argument finishes with a counter-

intuitive flourish. In the last chapter, Pellizzari admits gratitude for Berlusconi’s ownership of his enemy. To most Inter fans, this confession would be anathema.

Berlusconi’s essentially bottomless bank accounts have financed an implacable foe. But Pellizzari cares as much about the soul and moral health of his club as he does championships. And thanks to Berlusconi’s association with AC Milan, he argues, Italians can no longer turn a blind eye to the wickedness of Milan. It has become objectively odious. Indeed, Pellizzari sees a

“boomerang e¤ect.” Italians have rallied against AC

Milan, because they see the club as a symbol of the corrupt, conservative regime.

Broadly speaking, there’s not much evidence of the boomerang arcing back toward Milan. In fact, the opposite has happened. Because of Berlusconi’s glamour players and championship trophies, Milan has developed a national following that may soon eclipse Juventus’s broad base. In certain intellectual circles, however, Milan has become just as despised as Tommaso hoped.

To illustrate this point, he took me to a bohemian theater and cultural club called Comuna Baires. Ever since Berlusconi returned to power in 2001, the Comuna Baires has formed an alliance with Inter Milan. It hosts literary evenings with the team. At its readings, foreign Inter players (from Colombia, Turkey, and so on) share the stage with writers from their home countries. After the events, Inter players, coaches, and team oªcials join pro-Inter intellectuals for dinner around a long
HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

table in the theater’s basement. It’s the type of evening that could only happen with Italian leftists, who have been nursed on Antonio Gramsci and his theories of counter-hegemony.

The evening Tommaso and I attended Comuna

Baires, the club held a reading to honor Javier Zanetti, Inter’s Argentine captain. Everyone in the club seemed to know Tommaso. A camera crew from Inter’s cable television network stopped him for a quick interview.

Beautiful women in black stopped to kiss him on both cheeks. We dropped our coats in a cloakroom, away from the crowd. Tommaso whispered to me, “I have to warn you. These people really are communists. I don’t mean that as an exaggeration. They really are communists.” We walked out from the room and he nudged me, nodding toward a framed picture of Che Guevara that stared at us from a wooden beam.

Like any boho theater, the Baires has a ramshackle feel. The main stage is in a stark black room with risers and rickety wooden benches. The reading had been organized in the round and a row of men and women in tiny spectacles surrounded Zanetti. He sat in front of a microphone at a table, draped with cloth the colors of Inter’s jersey. Waiting for the program to begin, he shifted in his seat.

The theater’s director emceed the evening. A middle-aged man in an untucked linen shirt, he warmed up the audience with an impassioned stem-winder about Inter. He praised the club for its “anti-Bush, anti-Berlusconi, anti-American” worldview. To justify this claim, he cited the club’s long record of falling just short of winning championships. In contrast to the
ethic of American capitalism, Inter fans know that there are “things more important in life than winning.”

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.
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