What does all this mean, for Italian football and for Italy in general? Quite simply, for the Italian football fan, the referee is always corrupt, unless proven otherwise. What remains to be discovered is how he is or has been corrupt, in favour of whom, and why. It is this thesis that dominates most discussions of Italian football. Conspiracy theories abound – are hegemonic, in fact. Who will be allowed to win next year, next week, tomorrow, and why? In Italy, there is the strong conviction that the state, its rules and regulations are flexible entities, besmirched with corruption and therefore ready to be flouted and challenged. This conviction has a strong historical basis. In Italy, as the writer and football critic Giovanni Arpino put it, ‘those who hold power, even for ninety minutes, are never looked upon in a good light’.9 Italian referees seemed imprisoned within the phrase made famous by Giovanni Giolitti, a powerful nineteenth- and twentieth-century politician: ‘for your enemies you apply the law, for your friends you interpret it’.
It is sometimes said in Italy that only an idiot adheres to the law.10 This is also true on the football pitch. All institutions require considerable levels of legitimation if they are not to govern mainly through the use of or threat of force. A political system ‘requires an input of mass loyalty that is as diffuse as possible’.11 Citizens must have certain levels of faith in the right of the state to govern, collect taxes, enforce law and order, fight wars and educate their children in order for these institutions to work with any efficiency. The Italian state has found legitimation extremely difficult to obtain since the country was unified in 1861. In fact the Italian state has been in the throes of a legitimation crisis ever since its inception. The basic ‘rules of the game’ have never been accepted by most Italians. They have been partly replaced by unwritten ‘rules’ that have institutionalized inefficiency and privileged informal forms of behaviour and exchange. All of this can also be applied to the relationship between fans, footballers and pundits and the representatives of legality in the world of football, the referees. Referees are invested with enormous power to determine matches, championships and World Cups. They are, according to Italians, both eminently manoeuvrable and highly effective in their cheating. As with the state, Italians have both contempt and great respect for referees. This respect is for the authority they wield and the institutional position they hold. As individuals they are despised.
Most Italians who know anything about football history (and many know an awfully large amount) will claim that at least five or six World Cups have been decided by refereeing decisions. Thus, it is common knowledge in Italy that English referee Ken Aston kicked Italy out of the 1962 World Cup with his ‘biased’ display in the infamous Italy-Chile match, which soon became known as the ‘Battle of Santiago’. Moreover, all Italians believe that England fixed the 1966 World Cup. Finally the embarrassing exit of Italy in the 2002 tournament was blamed squarely on an eccentric Ecuadorian referee, Byron Moreno. Whole websites are dedicated to ridiculing Moreno.12 Even in earlier rounds, when Italy had three goals wrongly disallowed, the rising hysteria over the officials began to dominate all other ways of understanding Italy’s weak performance on the pitch.
However, there is a contradiction here. If all referees are corrupt, then why should anyone be blamed for being corrupt? Somewhere there must be the possibility of a referee not being corrupt. Corrupt referees are often criticized for being weak-willed in the face of pressure, which implies that a strong official might resist. In any case, in order to win, you need the referee on your side or the say-so of the authorities. Some external guarantee of ‘fairness’ is required. Italians believe that this guarantee was missing in 1962 (for them) and in 2002. It was certainly there when they won the cup in 1982, when the chair of the international referees’ panel was an Italian – Artemio Franchi. Italy were even awarded a rather dubious penalty in the first half of that year’s World Cup final, which they managed to miss. What remains strange is the moral revolt. If winning football matches, or tournaments, is simply a matter of getting the right referee in the right place at the right time, then morality has no place in the argument. The real game is played out elsewhere, not on the pitch. The Moggiopoli scandal of 2006 seemed to confirm this analysis. A single, powerful man was able to decide championship victories and relegations without ever taking to the football field.
‘Psychological slavery’. Big and small clubs
One referee-related adage has been constant, in Italian domestic football. Rich clubs are always privileged over poorer clubs. They win more penalties, have fewer people booked, have more goals against them disallowed. On one level this is not very surprising. Rich teams are usually better than poor teams, and thus tend to attack more, leading to more fouls against them in the opposition penalty area, more shots on goal and more corners. Yet, this technical explanation is not enough to explain such a long-term trend in bias. In Italy, the big clubs have also enjoyed ‘favours’ because they are run by powerful and influential people. FIAT was Italy’s most important company throughout the twentieth century. The Agnelli family who founded and managed the huge Turin-based car business were also the owners of Juventus. Money and status are not necessary to oil the workings of favouritism, but they help.
Croneyism, however, has largely been a state of mind. A key phrase here is ‘psychological slavery’. It was referee administrator13 Giorgio Bertotto, a Venetian optician in his other life, who first argued – after a 1967 game between Venezia and Inter – that ‘psychological slavery towards the big teams’ was rife amongst Italian referees. It is this ‘institutional bias’ which leads to a widespread cynicism over the outcomes of championships. Hence phrases of the type ‘next year they may let us win’. However, this scepticism does not prevent moral outrage at the ways in which referees favour the big clubs. Often fans will taunt Juventus with the chant sapete solo rubare – ‘you only know how to rob’.
Obviously, one factor enslaving officials is ambition mixed with self-preservation. A referee is unlikely to have a long and glorious career if he gives a series of penalties against Juventus. Journalists will often write, after a particularly cringe-making performance by a referee in favour of a bigger club, that an official will fare carriera – ‘he will have a good career’. Tradition is also important. This is how things have always been done. Minor clubs have always argued that referees tend to ‘liquidate’ them – especially in matches against the richer teams. In the 2002–3 season the president of tiny Como spent the whole season making this very point – even claiming that he would withdraw his team in protest. In 2003–4 the mantle of the persecuted was taken up by Perugia, whose president threatened first to go to court, and then to withdraw his team from the last four matches of the season in order to make his case.
‘Favouritism’ has shifted in interesting ways over time. When big teams play other big teams, things become more complicated. Rich teams have also become poor. Genoa was a big team for a long time – they are now a relatively minor club. The same can be said of Torino, Fiorentina, Napoli and Bologna. Smaller teams have also developed into more powerful concerns after heavy investment, as with Parma in the 1990s. Three clubs have always been big in recent times – Juventus, Inter and Milan.