Sometimes, during the work on this book, I have felt like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. I have been forced to watch things that, in the end, have made me sick. I did not think it would be possible but, by the end, I had almost fallen out of love with football. After innumerable chat shows, post-match interviews, clichés, violence, racism, hysterical protests, dives and fake injuries, biased referees and corrupt presidents, I had almost had enough. As a kind of final affront, twenty-six years after Brady, Juventus signed Patrick Vieira, another Arsenal hero. But all this was never quite sufficient to stop me watching altogether. I kept going back, and, occasionally, the whole thing felt worthwhile. When Roberto Baggio scored his two-hundredth goal for example, or Adriano crashed in a left-foot shot, or Lilian Thuram, for the thousandth time in his career, trapped the ball, looked up, and passed it elegantly on to a midfielder. These moments, and many others, once made football the beautiful game. It cannot be described as beautiful any longer, especially in Italy, but all is not lost.
As with this opening chapter, the rest of Calcio will be organized around the themes which have dominated the thoughts of fans, players and football journalists: referees, teams and cities, managers and tactics, scandals, the media, foreigners, fans, violence, politics, the national team and money.
CHAPTER 1 Calcio and Football. Origins and Early History: 1880–1929
The first kicks
In the beginning there were the English. The first games on Italian soil of what we would recognize as football took place in the port towns of Livorno, Genoa, Palermo and Naples. Very little evidence exists of these impromptu games, apart from hearsay. Often they would simply be kickabouts amongst British sailors, perhaps even on the dockside, with some locals roped in to make up the numbers. Italy was on the way to and from India, and many British ships stopped off there. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 led to a boom in English communities on shipping routes. No records of actual football clubs exist until the 1880s and 1890s, and the official birth of Italian football is usually traced back to the employee of a British textile company, one Edoardo Bosio, who formed the first club in Turin in the late 1880s, using footballs he brought back with him from England.
Like everything about Italian football, even these origins are contested, controversial and politicized. This controversy begins with the very name used for football in Italy (and the title of this book). The nascent Italian football authorities gave the game an Italian name – calcio – in 1909. Previously, the organization which ran the game had been known as Federazione Italiana Football. This change was a politically inspired one. Nationalist ideals had already permeated those who ran the game in Italy, and there was hostility to foreign players. Hence the decision not to use an English term as was the norm elsewhere. The Germans had translated football into Fussball, whilst the French left the word as it was. But the choice of calcio was also historical. Calcio Fiorentino was a game, with a ball, and a pitch, which had been played in Florence during the Renaissance. The choice of calcio was an attempt by Italians to claim the game for their own. They had really invented what was now called football many hundreds of years earlier.
Under Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime (1922–1943) this nationalization of football was taken much further. Calcio Fiorentino was not only identified as the precursor of modern football, but was reintroduced in Florence itself, amid much pomp and ceremony. The games were moved from the proletarian Piazza Santa Croce – where some original calcio tournaments had taken place – to the bourgeois Piazza della Signoria, and guidebooks made an explicit link between Calcio Fiorentino and football. Even some experts tended to buy this version of events. The great Italian football journalist, Gianni Brera, wrote in his monumental history of calcio that the English had merely ‘reinvented’ the game.1 Not all went along with this flagrant rewriting of history, however. One journalist refused to use the new term, arguing that he would still write ‘football’, and that the use of calcio offended the traditions linked to the ancient game played in Florence. Over time, despite this small rebellion, calcio did become the official word for Italian football.
There was one small problem here. Calcio Fiorentino bore very little resemblance to modern football. Ball games had been played for centuries in Italy and the church authorities in Pisa, in 1300 or thereabouts, had banned such games on their cathedral steps. In its original form, calcio had been played first by noblemen, and then increasingly by the plebs, in Florentine public squares, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Games tended to take place around important court events. The rules were lax, when they existed at all. In the version of the game that has survived there were two teams (of 27 players each, vaguely set up in a kind of 9–9-9 formation), a measured pitch, and six referees who stood in a small stand on the side of the pitch. Much else was left to the players themselves. The ball was moved by hand or by foot, but could not be thrown, apart from by the three ‘goalkeepers’ at the back, and points were scored by getting the ball across the opponent’s end line, or into a kind of goal. Most forms of violence were permitted.
Pictures of Calcio Fiorentino show two teams massed together in the centre of a field or piazza, with a few spectators looking on. The players are wearing hats, and some lie injured on the ground. Musicians beat drums in the background. Later, re-inventions of the game codified a whole series of elaborate rules, but Calcio Fiorentino itself had been banned because of the increasing violence during and around matches. Ancient signs forbidding ball games can still be seen in some Florentine squares.
A version of Calcio Fiorentino is still played in Florence, with games taking place in the spring and summer and attracting significant numbers of tourists and locals. The tournament is now played in its original setting in Santa Croce. To watch a game is a bit like witnessing a combination of pub brawl, rugby match and medieval re-enactment. ‘Players’ spend much of the time wrestling with an opponent in complete isolation from the ball or the game itself. The 2005 tournament was suspended after the violence became so bad that one team simply walked off. In its 1930s reincarnation, and its current touristy form, calcio has been adapted to appear more like football. Games now last for 50 minutes and have various levels of officialdom. Team captains are given the task of stopping fights and calming down their own players and winning teams are rewarded with a purebred cow. So modern is the Calcio Fiorentino of today that it has its own, highly elaborate, set of anti-doping rules, downloadable from the internet. Calcio Fiorentino players can now be banned for more than two years for taking a series of banned substances, including marijuana.
Calcio Fiorentino, therefore, tells us little or nothing about