‘Spitting, slapping and punching the referee are the eternal reality of football in the provinces,’ wrote La Repubblica in 1993.22 Things came to a head in that year after two events in February. In Naples a mother, Lella Buonaurio – ran onto the field after her son was sent off. She then handbagged the referee. Much further north, in Novara, a group of fathers – again after a sending-off – also attacked the referee. More worryingly, the protagonists of this violence did not appear to be particularly sorry. The Neapolitan mother was unrepentant: ‘I’d do it again…he seemed arrogant, he had sent off two players from our team. I just lost it.’ ‘Intrusive parents syndrome’, which has been identified amongst sports-mad Americans but which seems a perfect diagnosis for Italy, appeared to have become an epidemic. Over the following decade, young players and even some clubs received long bans and big fines were handed out after yet more violence against referees, but very little changed.
Incidents of this type in the professional game have been much rarer, probably because of the very serious consequences for those involved. Nonetheless, referees have sometimes had to run for their lives, even in Italy’s top league, Serie A.
Legnano-Bologna, February 1952
In 1952 Legnano, a team from a small industrial town just outside Milan, were enjoying a rare spell in Serie A. The ‘Lilacs’ were at home to Bologna and desperately needed a win on an icy pitch. The referee was Bruno Tassini, from Verona. It was a dramatic game. Tassini first failed to send off a Bologna player after he had punched an opponent. He then refused to give two ‘clear’ penalties to Legnano before awarding a spot kick to Bologna, in the eighty-seventh minute, with the score at 2–2. The home crowd were incensed. Snowballs and cushions rained down from the terraces, and there was a minor pitch invasion. Tassini’s reaction was to call the game off – according to the press he simply ran off the pitch – making it inevitable that Bologna would be awarded a 2–0 win under federation rules. Newspaper reports blamed Legnano’s ‘defeat’ fairly and squarely on the referee. For the Corriere Lombardo Tassini had not respected the rules of the game and had ‘falsified the result’. The paper hoped that it had been Tassini’s ‘last match’ in charge. La Gazzetta dello Sport led with the headline ‘Tassini defeats Legnano’.
After the game, some fans wanted more. The referee was a marked man. First, he was attacked in a bar in Legnano, where he claimed that his dentures were damaged. He then made his way to Milan for dinner with various officials. As he walked towards the Central Station to catch a train home, two cars drew up and six or seven young men jumped out. They announced that they were Legnano fans and set upon Tassini, who was saved by his linesmen. The referee was hospitalized and ‘lost some teeth’ (although it is unclear what had happened to his earlier broken dentures). The youths were arrested and charged whilst the majority of Legnano’s supporters were still furious about the game itself. They travelled to Milan for a demonstration the next day, holding banners which read ‘Forty years of passionate support betrayed’ and ‘Sport is dead in Legnano’. Many were factory workers in their blue overalls.
These protests were in vain. The league threw the book at Legnano, banning them from playing at home for eleven months (for the rest of 1952). The official report claimed that ‘from the start’ the local fans had been ‘hostile’ to the referee, and that objects had been thrown at, and had hit, Tassini. The referee had also been struck and kicked on his way off the field and in the bar. Finally, there was the attack near the station, at 11.30 p.m. Legnano were held responsible for the whole affair and finished bottom of Serie A, with a mere seventeen points. They came up the next season, and then promptly went down, and have never again played in the top division. Tassini, meanwhile, went on to be a very important figure in the referees’ association in the 1960s.
The Prince of Referees. Concetto Lo Bello
Concetto Lo Bello, ‘The Prince’, was the most famous Italian referee of all time. Authoritarian, controversial, brave, narcissistic, he presided, or ruled, over an unrivalled 328 games in Serie A between 1954 and 1974. Lo Bello was also a physical icon. A tall man, he looked extremely distinguished and was always immaculately turned out, with perfectly ironed white shirt collars and a manicured moustache. Lo Bello managed, over the years, to annoy all the big clubs, which would seem to imply that he was as fair as one could be in the difficult world of Italian football. At one point, Juventus even tried to exclude him from their games. Lo Bello’s reaction was to force a grovelling reply from no less a personality than Umberto Agnelli, who was president of Juventus and, for a time, of the football federation, as well as part of the FIAT dynasty.
Lo Bello was at the centre of a series of memorable public arguments with Milan midfield star Gianni Rivera and manager Nereo Rocco. In 1973, after yet another clash with Lo Bello, who had sent him off, not for the first time, Rocco was interviewed by the press. He analysed Lo Bello’s style: ‘the personality has destroyed the referee’, he argued, ‘he does not referee games, he uses them as a stage on which to show off his show-off behaviour’. Rivera blamed Lo Bello and other referees for Milan’s failure to win three championships in the 1970s (they finished second three times in a row) and they once had this exchange on the field. Rivera: ‘I’m being slaughtered here. I can’t believe you can’t see anything.’ Lo Bello replied with, ‘I give you my word of honour that I can’t see these fouls.’ Rivera came back with, ‘I don’t trust your word of honour.’ He received a four-game ban for his ‘insulting’ riposte.
The most frequent criticism of Lo Bello’s style was that it made him the star, and not the players or the game. He made his decisions crystal-clear by aggressive use of hand signals, so much so that on at least three occasions players were inadvertently knocked down as he thrust his arms up to signal a free-kick or a sending-off. There is no doubt that Lo Bello was a celebrity on and off the pitch, and he was the first referee to enter the world of politics, becoming a Christian Democrat parliamentary deputy in 1972 (when he was still a referee) and briefly Mayor of Syracuse, his Sicilian home-town, in 1986. Lo Bello’s son, Rosario, also became a leading referee, largely thanks to the reputation of his father. Not surprisingly, given his refereeing style, Concetto Lo Bello was at the centre of a number of startling incidents during his long and controversial career.
Duce, Duce! Fiorentina-Cagliari. Serie A. 12 October 1969
Fiorentina were reigning champions, and began the 1969–1970 season in sparkling form, extending their unbeaten run to 29 games. Cagliari, surprisingly, were one of the main challengers for the scudetto that year and the clash before a packed crowd in Florence in October 1969 was between the top two teams in the championship. Cagliari won the game with a controversial penalty, 1–0, after Lo Bello turned down two penalty appeals for Fiorentina, and disallowed an equalizing goal three minutes from the end of the match for a marginal offside. He also sent off Florence star Amarildo and a Cagliari player for fighting. It was his 261st game in charge in Serie A.
The Florence public did not take kindly to these decisions. Towards the end of the game a familiar, rhythmical chant rang around the stadium, directed at the referee. The meaning of the slogan harked back to the fascist era: Du-ce, Du-ce. Lo Bello was a dictator, an authoritarian referee, a fascist. Bottles were thrown onto the field, a fight broke out in the tunnel and Lo Bello was trapped inside the changing rooms for a couple of hours. The referee and linesmen were escorted from the ground in a police van and the Cagliari bus was stoned. The post-match reports had little to do with the game itself. Instead, they concentrated on one man. ‘Lo Bello has “written” the championship table’, screamed the Corriere della Sera. Leading sports journalist Gino Palumbo wrote that the game had been ‘a show, with only one star’. The story of the game was ‘the story of how a referee, when he so desires, can become the master of a match and conduct it as he sees fit, challenging the rules, regulations, the players and the fans’, he continued. ‘This is not a report on Fiorentina-Cagliari, this is a report on the