When the first round of Serie A matches kick off on Sunday, the fans will cheer, wave banners and throw firecrackers. Everything will look just as it did four months ago at the end of last season.
But if you listen carefully you might hear, under the roar of the crowds, an unfamiliar sound: a collective sigh of relief that — finally — the new season is under way.
Italy’s fans had barely 24 hours to enjoy their side’s victory over France in the World Cup final in Berlin on July 9 before they began the anxious wait for the first set of judgements in the Serie A match-fixing scandal.
The ensuing legal battles pushed the start of the championship back two weeks to September 9 and it could have been worse.
With just over a week to go, Juventus were threatening to take their case to the civil courts, raising the prospect of yet more delays.
Serie A’s summer of woe began in early May with the publication of intercepted phone calls between the general manager of Juventus, Luciano Moggi, and senior officials at the Italian Football Federation (FIGC), discussing refereeing appointments during the 2004/05 season.
Within days, FIGC president Franco Carraro and the entire Juventus board had resigned.
Officials at AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio were also dragged in, but the gravity of the situation only became clear with the arrival on the scene of figures from outside the closed world of football.
The former head of Italy’s stock market regulator, Guido Rossi, was appointed emergency administator of the FIGC. Francesco Borrelli — the magistrate who conducted Italy’s ”Clean Hands” probe into political corruption in the early Nineties — was named its chief investigator.
But Serie A’s desire to ‘fare piazza pulita’ — to rid itself of corruption — was tempered when the sports courts delivered their sentences: Juventus in the second-division Serie B on minus 17 points. Milan, Lazio and Fiorentina stayed in Serie A, but with points penalties and, in the case of the latter two, exclusion from this season’s European competitions.
Bitter complaints
Juventus fans complained bitterly that their team had been made a scapegoat.
The club’s aggressive legal bid to be reinstated in Serie A was in stark contrast to its contrite hearing during the first trial, when its lawyer said an acceptable punishment would be relegation to Serie B with penalty points.
The brave new world envisaged by many Italian fans in the early days of the scandal has not arrived.
The landscape that has risen from the rubble, however, is almost unrecognisable.
Inter are champions for the first time since 1989, though their crown sits rather uneasily; Fiorentina and Lazio are out of Europe; Roma are back in the Champions League; and for the first time in their history, Juventus are out of Serie A — a huge blow to the prestige and public image of the league as well as a financial disaster for the club.
On the wall of the Italian national team’s training base outside Florence, someone has scrawled: ”Mercenaries or champions?”
The graffiti dates back to late May, a period in which the Azzurri trained in an atmosphere of suspicion, half of them perceived as unwitting accomplices in one of the greatest frauds in Italian sports history.
Other messages attack the ”donkey” Guido Rossi, ”enemy of Florence”.
It should have been a summer in which Italy basked in the glory of its World Cup triumph. Instead it was one they would rather forget. – Reuters