NB: It is the review of John Foot's Winning at All Costs: A Scandalous History of Italian Soccer. For those who have not read this or the other version known as Calcio: A History of Italian Football, skip this entry.
It was the Euro 2008 quarter-final between Spain and Italy. When Spain’s Cesc Fabregas slotted home in what was the eventual winning penalty in the penalty shootout against Italy, I swore my father heaved a sigh of relief that it was finally all over. The both of us did watch the match with him asleep half the time during normal time of the match...until the penalty shootout happened. Looking back, with Spain eventually winning it in the final against Germany, the quarter-final seemed to represent almost everything what my father does not like about Italian football (even if I was secretly impressed at how Italy defended).
Defensive, boring. If Italian football is known infamously for that in his eyes, then why for a period of time even way before I was born, it was known as the richest and toughest football league in the world? That was also the case during my childhood in the 90s as well. As someone who grew up with English football, I know there must be something about the Italian school of football coaching which now even currently sees an Italian managing the England national team which I do support even way before that became a reality. There have been Italian influences of various kinds in English football before but, not as prominent as what is going on with the England national team currently.
It is known widely among English-speaking Italian football fans as Calcio: A History of Italian Football written by historian and Italy expert John Foot. But there is also another version to the book which is written for the American audiences also by the Englishman himself as Winning at All Costs: A Scandalous History of Italian Soccer. Now one may wonder given my interest in the Italian game came rather late, why do I bother reading the latter which I finished recently? It is precisely because of that and the fact on who is managing the national team I support made me vowing to myself that I have to read about what makes Italian football the way it is and for a period of time gaining television coverage in Britain in the 90s (it has made a revival after ESPN brought the rights to UK audiences for this season). There used to be regular coverage as far as I remember in my childhood on pay-TV here in my country before it somehow stopped in the aftermath of calciopoli before the previous season it was revived again, on another pay-TV network over here though.
Even the very name to define what is called football in Italian is a source of controversy itself. Calcio is the word but, it has medieval origins in Florence and the game played is not close to what is known to the normal football fan of today. Like how football took off in many parts of continental Europe, it began with the English at port towns of Livorno, Genoa, Palermo and Naples where English sailors en route to other destinations have kickabouts. Ever wondered why there are Italian football clubs which have English-sounding names like Genoa, AC Milan? Genoa as according to the book I read is widely acknowledged as where Italian football was officially born, apart from an Englishman’s major contributions to the club in the form of James Richardson Spensley who eventually alongside with the likes of William Garbutt are widely acknowledged in Italy for their early contributions to the Italian game. Such respect that both Englishmen have in Italy especially considering for Garbutt where he was widely forgotten back in his native England that the term for the English contributions to the Italian game was born in the form of Il Mister.
Then there is also Herbert Kilpin in Milan (nicknamed Il Lord), and the club which eventually came to be known to the rest of the world as AC Milan (it was originally known as the Milan Cricket and Football Club, until a split happened nine years after its founding in 1908 where a certain club by what is now known as Inter came into being). Legend has it that the Nottingham native who was among the club’s founders founded the club colours which are present now in the club crest and its jersey.
Even to the uninitiated (that is people like me until I realised that there are more to Italian football than Juventus), Juventus has won the most number of league titles in Italian football and is the biggest football club in Italy. But while it is known to the football world by its nickname of the ‘Old Lady’, that was not the case in the club’s early beginnings. The club name which was settled by a group of students who studied in Turin was based on the Latin name which means ‘youth’. Even how the club came to settle for the now-famous black-and-white jersey has two versions. But while Juventus is among the first clubs I came to know in Italian football in my childhood, there is also Juventus’s eventual city rivals Torino which was founded by ‘twenty or so Swiss men with bowler hats and a lot of goodwill’.
As according to author John Foot on Torino – ‘Many of calcio’s greatest, most controversial and most tragic moments were to be associated with the extraordinary history of Torino.’ The most significant moment of them all came at a time where the football team itself which was already termed Il Grande Torino (where the team which was dominant in the 1940s set various unprecedented records on the domestic level and their contributions to the national team which till now in both cases still not managed to be eclipsed), died in a plane crash. It was 4 May 1949 when it happened and since then, Torino’s history has never been the same.
Just like how the Nazis used to exploit football in Germany, it was the arrival of a certain fascist leader Benito Mussolini who changed the Italian game when he was in power. The Italian national team won two consecutive World Cups when he was in power, but the coach who oversaw those triumphs in the Turin-born Vittorio Pozzo...the Anglophile’s (Pozzo when he was studying in England, had picked up information about modern techniques which were used during training sessions at Arsenal) legacy has been debated. While people know that Italy is one of the major football nations these days, it has not been easy for the Azzurri all the time. The horror that is called the ‘Battle of Santiago’ in the 1962 World Cup against Chile, the ‘disaster’ of the 1966 World Cup (which they famously lost to North Korea in the group stages and the Italians actually believed host nation England fixed the tournament), the fiasco of the 1974 World Cup where star player Giorgio Chinaglia’s (who actually had a hand in Italy’s first win at the Wembley against England the year before) gestures to the bench after being substituted in the first group match against Haiti became the most prominent image of Italy’s eventual disastrous World Cup campaign in then-West Germany (it was 1966 all over again after how the nation reacted to the national team bowing out in the group stages, apart from the Italian community in West Germany not amused, to say the least).
But like all great football teams, they did have their special moments as well. The 1970 World Cup semi-final against West Germany which has been dubbed as ‘The Greatest Match of All Time’, Marco Tradelli’s scream after he scored in the 1982 World Cup final against West Germany (they were to beat the now-unified Germany again...24 years later in another World Cup), after finally beating the English on June 1973 in Turin, Italy had finally beaten England at their own backyard at the Wembley on November 1973 five months on in another friendly (or as they say in Italian regarding finally conquering the home of English football in the Wembley – espugnato, or conquered) where ahead of the match, the British journalists made jokes about the ‘20,000 Italian waiters’ who were to descend to the Wembley. I typed earlier in this review that Giorgio Chinaglia had a hand in that win at the Wembley. But guess who actually had the honour of scoring the eventual only goal in what was also seen as England coach Sir Alf Ramsey’s penultimate match in charge?
That man would eventually become more prominent for his achievements as a coach – Fabio Capello. There were prominent coaches in the Italian game (like Helenio Herrera, Capello’s predecessor at AC Milan in Arrigo Saachi, the ‘God’ of catenaccio in Nero Rocco, one of Rocco’s former protégés in Giovanni Trapattoni, the Paul Newman lookalike in Marcello Lippi) before his time arrived especially in the early 90s and to survive in the madcap world of Italian football is no mean feat. It is even tougher being at one of the major clubs. The world of football knows where Capello is now but at the time when the book was being written, he had left Juventus for Real Madrid. Among the coaches who left/leave their mark in the Italian game, while Herrera is a cult of personality himself when he created Grande Inter during his time there, Rocco who worked with a series of provincial clubs including his hometown club Triestina before really hitting the big time with AC Milan, Trapattoni who especially had success with Juventus is more known in Germany during his time as Bayern Munich coach for an infamous outburst after a match (it is still an Internet hit), Lippi who actually coached a number of clubs before it was at Juventus where he really did well, it was how Capello is being described which stood out for some reason for me. The book quoted journalist Gian Paolo Ormezzeano describing the Friuliano (Capello comes from the Friuli region in north-east Italy, just like former goalkeeper Dino Zoff and former Italy coach Enzo Bearzot) played like a ‘policeman directing the traffic’ during his time at AS Roma and Juventus and after he ended his playing career at AC Milan, he was seemed destined ‘for a desk job in the Berlusconian empire’ (though it is worthwhile to note that Capello had been at the club way before Silvio Berlusconi took over). Which it did happened, and the rest is history. The 58-match unbeaten run, that 4-0 thrashing of Barcelona in the 1994 Champions League final.
But without the players, will there be coaches around? The book also looked at players who had left their mark for various reasons in the Italian game, from the home-grown to the foreigners who played in Italy. The defenders of various kinds, from the libero, to the man-markers. The midfielders who are the ‘directors’ of their teams, the wingers or skilful midfielders who are more known as the fantasisti, the ‘water-carriers’ who are always in the shadows of their illustrious colleagues. Then there are the strikers, from ‘big British-style target men to skilful, wily and clinical players’. The foreigners like ‘Gentle Giant’ John Charles whose performance on and off the pitch would come to set a benchmark for future foreigners coming into the Italian game, British or otherwise.
There are many things which I like about the book and I wish I can still list them all. But it is best summed up by author John Foot’s words in ‘Preface’ – ‘As with this opening chapter, the rest of Winning at All Costs will be organized around the themes which have dominated the thoughts of fans, players and football journalists: the referees, teams and cities, managers and tactics, scandals, the media, foreigners, fans, violence, politics, the national team and money.’ Very eye-opening for me in some areas which I have never imagined. Magical moments which left me fascinated, controversies and scandals of various kinds which really blew me away, how despite the unpleasant elements in the Italian game with people still managed to stand tall for what they believe in, the clubs which has rise and fall over the years in the Italian game, how the Italian media landscape view football through the years in Italian society, how politics is intertwined into the Italian game in more ways than one, how Italians think the rest of the football world view them and how they view the outside football world in return.
It might had ended in a rather sombre note with the calciopoli still being investigated at the time of John Foot’s writing but I will recommend one go back to ‘Preface’ with these words from the author himself – ‘I have been forced to watch things that, in 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. But all this was never quite enough to stop me watching altogether. I kept going back, and, occasionally, the whole thing felt worthwhile....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.’ For me there are times where I felt like how the author himself had written in ‘Preface’. I first went from being fascinated with how football took root in Italy to reading about the various personalities in the Italian game, to there are times I felt disillusioned about it has developed with me asking myself is this the reason why the Italian game is often viewed negatively especially in the English eyes.
But in the end, it was a real eye-opener indeed because as I read, slowly each aspects of the Italian game presented itself to me. Recommended if you like Italian football even before calciopoli happened, highly-recommended if your view of the Italian game is mainly based on the television and the newspapers. I suppose I fall in between, because my Italian until this book came along is mainly on the non-football side of things.
