On June 6, Juventus will play Barcelona in the UEFA Champions League final, essentially the Super Bowl of European club soccer. This is being seen as moment of redemption for Juventus, a club known as the Old Lady of Italian soccer, a club that not long ago was a fallen angel.
In 2006, Juventus was relegated from Serie A, where it had just claimed its 29th championship, to Serie B for its role in a conspiracy to influence matches by influencing referees. In Italy, cheating is standard procedure. The striker Paolo Rossi was banned for two years for his role in a match-fixing scandal known as Totonero 1980. Upon reinstatement, Rossi scored six goals and helped Italy win the 1982 World Cup.
Italians are so accustomed to conspiracy that they smell a rat and shrug. In October, years after the Old Lady was restored to Serie A, the Roma striker Francesco Totti told Sky Italia: “Juventus ought to have their own league, as by hook or by crook they always win.”
We’ve just been reminded that it’s not only Italians who take the low road. In the world’s favorite sport, the usage of hands isn’t allowed unless one hand is washing the other. Pele famously dubbed soccer “the beautiful game,” which is true, but not the whole truth: It’s a beautiful game but, as The Economist averred last year, a dirty business.
FIFA, which oversees world soccer, was just rocked by the indictments of 14 soccer officials and marketing executives on charges ranging from bribery to fraud to money-laundering. One is Jack Warner of Trinidad and Tobago; until 2011, he was president of CONCACAF, the soccer federation of North and Central America and the Caribbean. Another is Jeffrey Webb of the Cayman Islands, the current CONCACAF president. Since the U.S. is part of CONCACAF — and since Webb has, according to the Guardian, “at least one residence in Georgia” — this brings things close to home.
This brings it closer: Also indicted was Aaron Davidson, an Emory graduate — he was featured in the summer 2011 alumni magazine — who’s president of Traffic Sports USA, which used to own the NASL’s Atlanta Silverbacks. Traffic Sports is involved with the staging of the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the semifinals of which will be held at the Georgia Dome on July 22. Davidson has been suspended from his post as chairman of the NASL’s board of governors.
Warner is accused of accepting $10 million for his vote to grant the 2010 World Cup to South Africa. (Morocco allegedly offered only $1 million.) The indictments by the U.S. Department of Justice didn’t address the awarding of the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 installment to Qatar, but Swiss authorities — FIFA is based in Zurich — have just launched an investigation.
It’s widely believed those votes were swayed by wads of money. How else to explain the world’s biggest sporting event falling to a nation with a smaller population than metro Atlanta and where it can be 120 degrees in the summer? (The 2022 World Cup has been shifted from June/July to November/December and will end a week before Christmas. Anything for Qatar!)
Against a backdrop that saw delegates carted from their Zurich hotel under arrest, FIFA convened to choose a president. You’d think no right-thinking body could possibly re-elect the steward on whose watch such corruption has been allowed to fester, but soccer is different: Its runs on winks and nods and cash under the table. On Friday, the odious Sepp Blatter was handed a fifth term, prompting him to declare, “I am now the president of everybody.” Ye gods.
In his 1999 book “The Miracle of Castel di Sangro,” the American journalist Joe McGinniss spends a season with a smallish team that had gained a stunning promotion to Serie B. McGinniss tracks Castel di Sangro as it staves off relegation, but his account doesn’t end in triumph. According to McGinniss, the team throws its final game so that Bari can be promoted to Serie A. “In Italy it is called ‘il sestema’ (the system),” a player tells him, “and for someone who has not grown up with it, I am sure it seems very complex.”
Says McGinniss: “It doesn’t seem complex. It just seems crooked.”
That’s soccer. We Americans might grow to love the game, but we can never understand the sport.
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