Follow the Via Crucis.
Every journalist who writes about Italian football, and there are good ones, is at a disadvantage if he/she hasn’t yet visited the Via Crucis.
The chilling and humiliating defeat to Switzerland gives motivation to explain it, and this is today’s Sunday Column.
The portal to understanding everything.
It would be a book about the adventures and events of the handful of years, from 2007 onwards, where every Sunday morning my family would discover the wider region of our new home in Como, all through the football pitches of its beautiful surrounding towns and villages.
The away games.
Driving around, taking our son to fixtures, observing the deep societal connection of the sport well beyond the actual game, through a kaleidoscope of characters and traditions, all absolutely different and unique. Each village with its own local food and wine, its own dialect, its own church bell tower, its own saints.
Its own football teams.
A Stanley Tucci book/documentary about the land of my mothers, through the lens of il calcio, it would be a foreigner’s journal about the very specific post-war culture of a country called Italy, and what makes it so very special.
El Loco Marcelo Bielsa says it best.
Football isn’t about business. It’s not even about a sporting match or occasion. It is a cultural expression and identity.
Italy isn’t Germany, Holland, or the UK.
Or even France.
This country has twice led us out of darkness, from Rome and Florence, and it is home to maybe 80% of the world’s works of art. So, this isn’t any old nation state. It is custodian to a very large part of the entire history of civilisation, and its role in football is equally significant.
Italy has only very recently been unified under one flag, and in many ways still sits more naturally as a medieval collection of independent towns and cities, full of fiercely proud individuals and families.
People here don’t really do wider groups of society very well. It’s not their thing, and that glorious blue shirt of national team (Gli Azzurri) is a rare moment of commonality and belonging, for one anthem, felt all across the peninsula, from Palermo to Pordenone.
Outside of football, patriotism here isn’t so important, where stoic loyalty to the blood of the family is much more relevant as the base of everything. This sadly tends to exaggeration of course, clear when you read any history of organised crime, fiction or not. Gambino, Corleone, Provenzano, Savastano.
Things change when they line up in blue to sing Mameli.
People may know that Messina in Sicily has really absolutely nothing in common with Bolzano near Austria, but few will realise that the best way to understand all of these differences, the best travel guide, is through experiencing amateur youth football. Only here you can see the real country at its most authentic, letting you observe deep inside what makes Italians tick. This is what Bielsa means.
You learned your trade under a crucifix.
All roads here lead to Rome and even in football most Italian boys will have trapped their first ball near a church. The local pitch was almost always owned by the parish (la parrocchia), and the understood social order of play was usually: Mass, the game itself, and Sunday lunch around a big table.
Friends, family, girlfriends.
It should already be clear that football in Italy is much much more than simply a male laddish activity, the smell of winter liniment, a few pints afterwards, a welcome break from the ladies.
It’s always been more a community gathering, where in the old days the parish priest would likely be the ref.
It is also why women’s football gets so little traction in Italy. It’s just not part of this deep tradition. Girls watched football to see their men compete, in a man’s game, and this won’t change quickly. Sorry.
This culture is a brand.
“Chiesa, calcio, casa”
…Church, football and home/family.
The order is always up for debate, but not the hard-and-fast reality of those three core pillars. They were non-negotiable and have been since the war.
My uncle Lino Cardarelli, now 90, is a man who gave up a very promising footballing career to become one of Italy’s giant captains of industry, leading Montedison in the 80s. He explains all of this DNA better than I can, with this wonderful article, and today’s Column is really for him, whilst there is still time.
These are deep roots that represent the post war reality of a generation of young Italian boys, kicking a ball in a country ravaged by a war fought right on their streets. Boys with their lives in front of them, in a country totally reset to zero by Nazi occupation.
A blank canvas from which to build.
Build they did. It is no co-incidence that the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s was delivered, from nothing, by guys named Ferrari, Armani, Lamborghini, Pininfarina. And a thousand others like them who assembled their empires from the rubble. They all likely played football like uncle Lino.
He was a 4. A damn good 4.
Music, often, explains reality better.
You can taste all of this history in these villages, in Via Crucis, even if it now sadly seems to be dissipating, as that entire generation goes into injury time.
Nothing articulates football in Italy, il pallone, il calcio, like this masterpiece (click here) from the folk singer Francesco De Gregori.
A autobiographical song from 1980 about a young lad playing on the parish dirt pitch in the middle of tenements and factories being rebuilt all around him. It is the Italian Kes, in poetry and music.
We all see ourselves in Nino.
Nino cammina che sembra un uomo
Nino walks like he’s already a man
Con le scarpette di gomma dura
With his rubber-stud boots
Dodici anni e il cuore pieno di paura.
12 years old and a heart full of fears
Ma Nino non aver paura di sbagliare un calcio di rigore
But Nino don’t ever be scared, to miss a penalty kick
Non è mica da questi particolari
Che si giudica un giocatore
It’s not from these things that you judge a player
Un giocatore lo vedi dal coraggio
Dall’altruismo e dalla fantasia.
A player you can see from his courage, selflessness, and artistry.
Nino seems penned for a certain Roberto Baggio, spookily exactly 12 in 1980, foretelling his eventual 1994 destiny, and these 3 minutes describe pretty perfectly the Italian football culture and DNA. The one everyone envies, of beautiful players and shirts, stirring anthems, outrageous talent, and 4 World Cups.
It’s also a helluva melody. La leva calcistica del 68. The Class of 68. Baggio’s Class.
We have seen no such courage, selflessness or artistry in Germany. You can win, you can lose, but a country, and its fans, always need to see their core values on the pitch.
And they didn’t. Exactly like the Three-Lions fans saw nothing of their traditional “English Game” of energy and attack in Southgate.
These things don’t go down well, not in proper football.
What has happened?
Where exactly is the Via Crucis?
It is a street in Albavilla near Como, whose name is taken from the Stations of the Cross, the 14 steps of the Passion of Christ. Specifically, it is a little leafy winding road, easy to miss, which opens up to finally reveal a beautiful manicured lawn beside a classic old villa, right out of a Henry James or Manzoni novel.
This would be the pitch that day. For our boy’s game.
Albavilla (Como), 26/9/2010
Before you can even recover from the stress of finding the damn place, just getting there in time for kick-off, the coach approaches the car, checks the back window to see if the kid is inside, and earnestly asks you…
We’re playing him in the centre today. Did he sleep well?
Luca was 7! But they already knew he had it. At least the artistry bit. A bit short on “selflessness” 🤐.
The seriousness of it all was truly absurd, but by God it sucked you in… huge. These were the Wonder Years.
Our boy and the others were no more than infants, obviously not fully realising their protagonist role as the centrepiece of the family weekend, playing for overly intense coaches, taking all this pressure on Nino’s “narrow shoulders”. But really just learning how to play football.
Italian football.
Each of those parents had their own way of soaking in the experience, living vicariously their youth. Some of them quiet, deliberately watching the game on their own, pacing with hidden clenched fists of anxiety. Others apparently normal, until exploding at a missed chance or a bad foul. The coffee and brioche shared with a false nonchalance, dads in reality second-guessing internally if their boy would start.
We never had that particular problem. His nickname of Modric matched well.
Each of these amateur clubs seemed to have so many people around, often clutching a photocopy of the league table from the local paper, armed with stats and what-ifs. For the bigger games, people would point out the scouts from the two Milan clubs and Atalanta.
Looking back, it was insanity. The crazy-eyed mother screaming tactics in contradiction to the coach, who obviously silently despised her.
No, your son really shouldn’t shoot from the half-way line, signora.
This was nothing more than little league football, in “Smallville“, and they were only Under 8s, but this is the football school of Italy. Well before professional academies and modern coaching drills on ball retention, it was here, in Via Crucis, where you learned to maybe become Totti, and handle what it all meant to the community. A living study of irrational humanity and parenthood, of dreams unfairly projected onto children, fights in the stands, over the wrong comment, made at the wrong time.
You realise that family blood is indeed thicker than water.
In one key game, shamefully, I myself was banished from the pitch after a physical altercation with the father of my son’s teammate, who from the stands accused Luca (correctly) of not putting in a shift. But they were only small and shouldn’t ever be heckled, especially coz my son could really play. His lad, instead, was a headless chicken with two left feet. On reflection, it’s easy to see how it degenerated. In fact, one sighs and laughs at the utter inevitability of it all.
These are the glorious absurdities of the importance of football in Italy. And they jar comically with the slogans of sporting principles hypocritically hung with pride on the dressing room walls, about the values of sport and what is really important in young education.
School is your future, and you don’t play if your academic marks are poor.
Wait till it really matters, to see how long that lasts.
Punish him next week, this is a big game, and we need him today.
Whatever it takes. The end justifies the means. The artist will always be protected.
The dominant ethos of an entire country, where losing so meekly to Switzerland, footballing nobodies, is always going to provoke a very punchy reaction.
Our waiter in Lecce knew the truth.
A local lad, of sweet kind face and easy laugh, casually dropped the definitive verdict. This was a young man likely destined to wait tables his whole life, but who delivered punditry of such lucid simplicity and synthesis as to shame many pros on our screens.
Una squadra senza sangue.
A bloodless team.
Here… that comment is devastating. Blood is central to everything, because it is indeed thicker than water. The red blood of a Ferrari, of a proper tomato ragù, of a good Chianti, even of a Cardinal. A beautiful girl that you see here doesn’t make your heart skip, or give you a spring in your step. She “gives you blood”.
Ti fa sangue.
Graphic, if slightly vulgar, but Italy remains a simple country at heart, which exists principally to reward your eyes, to make blood, with a clear premium on what looks good (bella figura).
A debacle far beyond football.
Our waiter knew that this whole fiasco isn’t limited to sport. It hits more at an entire national identity and its eternal confidence in being very superior in the important matters. Football (along with food, wine, fashion, taste, fast cars, cathedrals, art, beautiful women) is exactly one of those Italian things, and absolutely part of the national passport which every citizen carries around the world with pride.
The capital sin here is in betraying this beauty, and that’s what Switzerland was. A betrayal. Pure and simple.
You don’t screw around with any of this here.
Everyone thinks Italians are fun-loving easy-going cheeky chappies. Lovers, not fighters. True, but red-blooded passion works both ways. If you betray and step over their redlines, they will take you outside, and hang you upside down in Piazzale Loreto. Mussolini found that out.
Spalletti should watch his back, as the noose is now being prepared.
The ugliest Italy of my lifetime.
Ivan Zazzaroni, Editor Corriere Dello Sport.
An unwatchable spectacle.
Fabio Caressa lead TV commentator Sky Italia.
Caressa is the everyman of Italian football. That kid who didn’t really ever grow up, the nation’s voxpop who talks like a walking Panini album, ridiculously optimistic and passionate to the core. This is him in 2006.
We’re going to Berlino Beppe.
No Berlin this year, and if he calls a game UNWATCHABLE, that’s a serious problem with dramatic consequences. Like how an Anglo-Saxon spagbol would be unpresentable on any table in Italy; like how a pizza with pineapple would cause a riot in Naples; like how an evening stroll in Bologna dressed like a CentreParcs guest would be unconscionable. Like walking into the Vatican dressed in flip flops and a bathing suit.
None of that is acceptable here. None of it.
Caressa made that clear. As did others. In fact, everyone did. Even people who don’t normally opine on football demanded answers to a national humiliation.
Here, the players and coaching staff are being invited to go and “work in the fields”. Zappare la terra is the ultimate condemnation. Careers have effectively been ended here in Germany and, for many, there will be no return possible, no redemption, even well beyond their playing careers.
You were one of those in the Switzerland game.
It will haunt them to their death bed. Fuck you Spalletti.
So this Column can’t just be a normal hit piece.
This won’t be what you get in other places: a worthy and intellectual analysis of another Scotland fiasco, or the turnip-head anger that follows the perennial England exits from these things. Or a dry tactical post-mortem on a bad tournament with an under-achieving coach.
This Column, instead, needs to communicate and explain the falling of Achilles, where the shock, humiliation and embarrassment of an entire nation is bleeding out in front of our eyes.
Why are we here? Where do we need to go, to get back to Via Crucis? Does that place even still exist? Where are the endless artist talents of beauty and class?
To do that, we need to ask up front if what we remember so fondly is now yesterday’s poem, and today is actually one of those tragic moments when you finally see the real truth, drop the wishful thinking, and face the demon.
Italy maybe is no longer any good at football?
All things must pass. All empires fall eventually. We just didn’t notice when it started.
Back in those 2007 years, I became friendly with the owner of Sampdoria, Roberto Garrone of ERG. He was a serious and successful Italian energy entrepreneur in Genoa, who apparently wanted to meet me to understand “the concept of a Premier League”. Garrone could already see how Italy was losing its dominance of the 90s, and would soon be at a full competitive disadvantage to new rich English football and their Premier League. He introduced me to those running Serie A, a certain Mattarese and Galliani from AC Milan.
Both old school operators, they politely listened to me explain the playbook of modern football governance at a league.
- A strong empowered central executive, with simple governance.
- A good distributive model for the monies, to minimise polarisation, and make all teams competitive.
- New stadia to encourage a wider family demographic, build match-day revenues, and take the sport out of the intransigent hands of the hooligans/ultras.
- Forced investment in youth academies, as street football was over.
- A proactive intelligent strategy for media rights, both domestic and overseas.
- Centralised sponsorship and a sense of global brand.
It was a damn good presentation.
Galliani looked at me and mumbled, with that oily false grin of his:
We’ve just won the World Cup. We’re good. Thanks for your time.
Garrone resigned from the League in despair, and the rest is history.
Serie A, almost 20 years later, is a relative pauper financially, having to pick up player scraps from teams like Bournemouth. It has an impotent and incompetent executive C-Suite at the FA and League, with shockingly bad presidents and CEOs. Half-empty old stadia, horrendous on TV, populated in the corners by a narrow hardcore ultra demographic, selfish in protecting their own narrow interests.
A hugely polarised league, where some of the small teams are so unappealing as to be a real drag on the product. Their media rights are at the start of a permanent decline, and they have no idea about modern sports marketing or fan engagement. All their big clubs lose biblical amounts of money. They have since been picked up for dimes on the dollar by private equity funds of Americans, who know nothing of Via Crucis. The industry of Italian football is a basket-case disaster. And it’s only going much further south.
The fish always rots from the head down.
One would think that the head of the Italian FA would today be gone after Switzerland. But “he has the support of the schools, refs, amateur football committees” who all vote on these things. He is safe and feels no shame. The waiter in Lecce would do a better job.
The bottom line is that the leadership of Italian football over the last 30 years has been so awful as to absolutely deserve Switzerland, to merit completely non-qualification for the last two World Cups.
The real issue though is the lack of talent development. Young local Italian players scandalously don’t get a chance to play, being crowded out by mediocre foreign ”stars” and old journeymen. Why?
Club versus country misalignment of interests. And corruption.
Show me the incentives…
- The Italian government has had a non-dom tax break to attract overseas wealth-creators into the country. This makes foreigner players cheaper than local talent. So, guess what? Clubs ditch the local lads. Of course they do.
- The recruitment process in Italy is a racket. Unethical directors of football and club owners are often in cahoots with the player agents. The fix is in where a club signs an older player, and the agent shares the commission with the club official. Nothing at all to do with anything resembling a proactive long-term squad strategy. Transactional fees, to be pocketed short-term, dominate.
- Clubs operating results have all been manipulated by false accounting deals, usually around player swaps, to game the salary and financial fair play rules (Ps. this is exactly where English football is now going. Recruitment and selling based on financial reporting needs. Be very careful Richard Masters. Your organisation is falling apart from every direction, and Ratcliffe smells break-up. The new FIFA+ streaming platform fundraising pitch to investors is really just a call option on a new Super League controlled from Zurich.)
Serie A rosters, therefore, are full of players signed for all kinds of reasons other than the real one of finding the next Gianfranco Zola. The incentives are all wrong.
This narrative is everywhere in these days. And it’s all true.
Spalletti will be the fall-guy for all this, the useful idiot, but the reality is that Italian football has been in a secular decline for maybe 30 years, where the full shock, pain and betrayal have been conveniently disguised by a World Cup won in 2006, and the Euros in 2021.
The truth stabs at our eyes every time a video like this shows us the past. The way we were. Come eravamo.
Perhaps the last Euros was, on reflection, nothing more than a cruel deception.
Or more romantically, the last gift of a dying hero called Luca Vialli, who wanted to leave this world gifting us one last emotion in the style to which we have become accustomed. One last memory of Via Crucis.
This right here is what “bella figura” means. Give us our daily bread of that.
Ti fa sangue davvero 🥺!
What has really happened and why?
Is there another deeper reason?
We, as humans, always aspire to exactly what we see in front of us. The last great generation of Azzurri player, the one of the 2006 World Cup, were all residents of some version of Via Crucis. Kids, born in the 70s and 80s, who saw a World Cup won in 1982 in the old way. They learned the game watching those great goalies, those hard defences and man marking, and then seeing the artist players just go and invent, off the cuff. With class.
Totti, Maldini, Vialli, as boys in the 80s, saw Gentile, Scirea, Cabrini, Conti, Rossi, Bettega. They saw this, and none of them wanted to betray the legacy.
Football has now become very organised and athletic, but Italy (and its football) has never ever been either industrial or process-led. That’s not how they are as a nation, and why Bielsa is so correct.
It’s culture.
As they would never tell Leonardo who to paint, a coach didn’t tell Roberto Mancini how to move. Or when Marco Tardelli should make the run.
You just didn’t do that. You trusted their talent, and this perfectly reflects a country which has always celebrated the individual.
Italian football is in reality Robin Williams at the Improv.
Raw unpredictable talent, with the back door made safe by the likes of Chiellini, Nesta, Cannavaro, Buffon.
It was a very simple recipe.
But they threw it away.
It all changed with a man called Arrigo Sacchi, with his dogmatic 4-4-2 and high press, and Italian football was never again the same. It became more artisan than artist, more Dino Baggio than Roberto Baggio.
Perhaps, this is what really led to Switzerland? An entire footballing culture, a clear way to play envied by the world, that was ended basically overnight at the end of the 80s. Coaching changed, tactics changed. Players were told to forget the old school.
Not convinced by this thesis?
Who is the last great talent of Italian football?
Pirlo? Totti? Maldini? Del Piero? Cannavaro?
They all played well into the new millenium and that has tricked us into thinking all was well. But look at their birthdates. All of these players grew up watching the old world of Italian football.
Name one Italian footballer born post-Sacchi who is/was world class.
When you see this question written down, you cannot un-see it. This is the gospel veritas, and it also holds the answer now.
The fertile soil of Italian football was changed at the end of the 80s.
The vineyard no longer produces the sweet wine.
After the defeat to North Korea in 1966, a similar debacle to Switzerland, they banned all overseas players from Italy.
This needs to happen again, maybe with a maximum of 2 foreigners per team. There is no future for Italian football trying to play heavy-metal like Jurgen Klopp.
Because this is the country of the opera!
Double down on that and don’t listen to the naysayers. They will say European labour laws and the EU freedom of movement can’t allow it. To hell with Europe and the EU. It’s a busted flush anyway, and been nothing but bad for Italy. Finding a way to limit non-Italian players would win populists votes for Meloni.
They will also say there isn’t enough quality in the local lads to keep a strong product.
Really? Why don’t we find out?
Italy is European champion at U17 and U18. Runner up World champion at U20. Maybe someone should have a good look at these boys. Let them play, ideally wearing the strip of the old School of Italian football.
Maybe they don’t have it, and are merely decent plain-vanilla exponents of modern football.
But maybe they do have it. A new Gianni Rivera or Gigi Riva.
There is only one way to find out.
Every person, organisation and country should know their strengths, their USP, and play to them. Might as well be like Enzo Bearzot. Throw these kids in, like he did with Rossi and Cabrini; get the foreigners out. Go deliberately against the grain. Back to man-marking, counter-attacking, and wonderful creative ball-players.
The current road leads absolutely nowhere, is a cultural mismatch, and none of us have any interest in losing to Switzerland.
That’s too painful.
Nino is the past, but also the future of Italian football.
Il ragazzo si farà
The boy will come through
Anche se ha le spalle strette
Even if he has narrow shoulders
Quest’altr’anno giocherà
Next year he will play
Con la maglia numero 7
With the strip number 7
Pirlo assist for Baggio; stop with dribble in mid-air. Goal.
Straight from the Via Crucis.
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