Calciopoli revisited; Inter Milan left off the hook?

 

The Calciopoli scandal has raged on since 2006. It has seen Italy’s biggest club stripped of trophies and punished so harshly that it is only just recovering, while another team has been effectively given a huge advantage, when it in fact should have been punished, just like its opponents. We have witnessed history written and rewritten, and watched a new conflict between Juventus and Inter usurp even the Inter-Milan and Roma-Lazio rivalries as the most bitter in the country. This is the story of the scandal that changed Italian football forever.

The Story

As Juventus defeated Palermo 2-1 to mathematically confirm them as winners of their 29th Scudetto on the 7th May 2006, a storm was rumbling around Italy. The Italian Football Association (FIGC) had confirmed that they had possession of transcripts of several suspicious conversations between Juventus director general Luciano Moggi and refereeing designator Pierluigi Pairetto. Movers and shakers at other Serie A clubs had also been shown to have had such conversations.

Bianconeri fans watched with worry as their side beat Reggina comfortably on the last game of the season, fearing that their Scudetto might be revoked. But they could not have foreseen how the decisions of the coming months would cripple Juventus for seasons after.

The sheer corruption of the affair was plain to see. In one of the several conversations between Moggi and Pairetto, the potential referee for the Old Lady’s next match was discussed:

Pairetto: I know that you’ve forgotten about me, but I haven’t forgotten about you.

Moggi: Go on…

Pairetto: I’ve put a great referee for the game in Amsterdam.

Moggi: Great!

Pairetto: You see that I still think about you, even though you don’t any more…

Moggi: Don’t start. Now you’ll see, when I’m back, that I didn’t forget you.

On July the 9th, the Italian national team won their fourth World Cup. A week later, calcio was brought crashing down to earth again. The FIGC demoted Juventus to Serie B, where they would play outside of the top flight for the first time in their history. They were to start the campaign on -30 points (reduced to -9 on appeal) and their titles from 04-05 and 05-06 were revoked. Fiorentina and Lazio, who had also made contact with refereeing designators, stayed in Serie A due to the appeal but were also docked points, along with Milan and Reggina.

Needless to say, the punishment was disastrous for Juventus, and many argue that it is still being felt. Fabio Cannavaro, at that point the best player in the world, left Turin for Real Madrid, and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Gianluca Zambrotta and other key players also moved on. But Gianluigi Buffon, Alessandro Del Piero, David Trezeguet, Pavel Nedved, Jonathan Zebina and Mauro Camoranesi stayed at the club, and Juve were promoted as champions at the first time of asking.

However, the three men that had run the club so successfully – the triade of Moggi, Antonio Giraudo and Roberto Bettega – had been forced out. In their place arrived president Jean-Claude Blanc and Alessio Secco, who attempted to fill Moggi’s shoes. But ‘Lucky Luciano’ had achieved legendary status for his intelligent transfer activity, and in comparison Secco looked lacklustre. Juventus signed numerous players who simply weren’t up to the task of getting the outfit back to its status as Italy’s best team, with Tiago Mendes, Sergio Almiron and Christian Poulsen springing to mind. Only now, with Secco and Blanc departed and Beppe Marotta/Andrea Agnelli replacing them, are Juventus acquiring players that can take them further.

The Conflict

The Calciopoli scandal started five seasons ago, yet it still rages on. This is because of the growing calls for action to be taken against Inter, the biggest side not to have been punished. Inter had, for 17 years, lived in the shadow of Juventus and Milan. After Calciopoli, they were awarded the 05-06 Scudetto (on the field they had only managed third place). They then proceeded to win the next four titles, the Coppa Italia and the Champions League. Nerazzurri president Massimo Moratti seemed to take every opportunity to point out his team’s cleanliness and Juve’s base actions.

Yet it has now been found that Moratti and the late former Inter president Giacinto Facchetti also contacted Pierluigi Pairetto and fellow designator Paolo Bergamo, with the two parties talking about which officials would referee Inter’s matches. And the fact that these calls were not leaked to the press – when other clubs’ calls were – makes the case that there was a conspiracy to put Inter on the summit of Italian football (and cripple Juventus in the process) all the more believable.

Many of you reading this now may think of such theories as deluded and biased. Weren’t Juventini simply protesting out of denial? But all of the factors do point towards at least some leniency towards the Nerazzurri.

When FIGC president Franco Carraro resigned after the phone calls came to light, Guido Rossi stepped in to lead the investigations. Rossi was the vice-president of Inter. And not long after he delivered the damning verdict against Juventus, he resigned from his position to become president of TIM, a brand of Telecom Italia – the country’s largest communications company. Telecom Italia were the ones who wiretapped Moggi and Pairetto’s phone calls.

But the calls between Moratti, Facchetti, Bergamo and Pairetto weren’t made public until 2010, and by Moggi’s lawyers, not Telecom Italia. Rossi and Moratti were close. Rossi must almost definitely have known what was going on. So, considering Massimo Moratti was also on the board of TIM, and his former vice-president Rossi was about to be appointed as head of TIM, it would be in Telecom Italia’s interest to keep the illegal phone calls involving Moratti and Facchetti under wraps.

And then there are the allegations made by Christian Vieri in 2010. A prolific striker for Inter as well as a difficult character who also played for Juventus and Milan, Vieri claimed that Inter tapped his phone to spy on him and made the squad sign a contract promising not to mention Inter’s plans to bring down Juventus, Milan and co.

“I am ready to show everyone the document, everyone knew what was happening. I was spied upon because I cannot keep these things locked up”, firenzeviola.it reported Vieri as saying. “70% of the contract was to be paid by inter and the other 30% by Telecom (Italia)”. A former player for the Serpenti saying this about his ex-owner added a great deal of credibility to the conspiracy theories.

Vieri’s words don’t seem to be unfounded. A few months after some of Moggi’s incriminating phone calls took place, but a few months before they came to light, Moggi commented on the then-Inter manager, Roberto Mancini. According to soccerlens.com, Mancini replied:

“I won’t answer Moggi. But he knows that he will have to answer when the time comes.”

This strongly implies that Mancini knew about the imminent scandal – because Inter had planned it out.

Justice?

When the evidence of Inter talking to refereeing designators was recently weighed up, FIGC chief investigator Stefano Palazzi came to the conclusion that “Inter violated the article relative to sporting fraud with regards to the possibility of taking advantage in the standings,” as he told Ansa in July this year. However, a couple of weeks later the FIGC also announced that the 05/06 Scudetto would not be revoked from Inter. In response, current Juventus president Andrea Agnelli has taken his appeal to the next level – international body CAS (the Court of Arbitration for Sport). CAS will announce on December the 13th whether Inter’s title should be revoked (and whether it should be given back to Juventus).

The initial and final punishments handed out to the people involved are worth looking at. Pierluigi Pairetto was banned for two and a half years, quickly increased to three and a half. Milan vice-president Adriano Galliani’s final ban was for five months. Pasquale Foti, president of Reggina, had to serve a 2.5 year ban. Brothers Andrea and Diego Della Valle, who owned Fiorentina until 2009, served 13 and 8 months respectively, and Lazio’s Claudio Lotito was banned for only four months. Moggi, however, was banned for five years, and this has recently been extended to a life ban.

Are the punishments too inconsistent, seeing as all of these people committed the same sort of crime? It’s hard to say, because Stefano Palazzi’s investigation concluded that Juventus were the team most at fault, even more so than Inter. Gabriele Marcotti explained the situation in his column for Calcio Italia:

“In that sense, Palazzi says, Inter were like Fiorentina, a club which, having suffered at the hands of the alleged system, decided to become a part of it. Anybody who recalls the wiretap between Innocenzo Mazzini, the FA’s vice president, and Andrea Della Valle, in which Fiorentina are invited to ‘come on board’ and ‘stop fighting the system’ will know exactly what I mean.”

Palazzi’s investigation showed that it was Juventus who had played the main part in influencing refereeing designators, while other clubs simply reacted to that.

So it is fair to say that, leaving aside the claims of an Inter conspiracy against Juventus, which could easily be true, the Bianconeri should still have been punished more than any other club. The main problem is that Inter were not punished at all. They were not punished then, and cannot be punished now, as the five-year statute of limitations has passed, meaning that Moratti cannot be put on trial.

So if the complicated affair can be summarised, the official stance (the FIGC stance) and the general belief of neutral fans used to be that Juventus (and Lazio, Fiorentina, Milan etc) were guilty of corruption. Now it is that Inter were also guilty and should have received at least some punishment, although the convincing claims of a Nerazzurri conspiracy involving Moratti, Guido Rossi and Telecom Italia have not been proven.

I have not touched on other aspects of the ongoing scandal, but hopefully I have given a clearer picture than what you may have had before, with all the important pieces of information.

In conclusion, what has Calciopoli told us? Have any positives come out of it?

We know that Italian football is rotten to the core – nothing new. We also know that some corrupt individuals have been punished properly, but not others. And we now know that Giacinto Facchetti, a man whose previously untainted image was of a strapping, attacking full-back who captained Helenio Herrera’s Grande Inter side of the 1960s, was implicated. Reading the transcripts, Facchetti certainly does not come off very well, but a number of fans have reacted badly to posthumous criticism of him. He died a few months after the scandal in 2006, and they have been keen not to sour his name, especially as he isn’t around to defend himself.

I, however, think that the truth should come out regardless of whether someone is dead or not. And if that is one thing we can take from five years of uncovering scandals, it is the truth.

Oh, except for that bit about it all being a conspiracy led by Inter. We’re still not too sure about that.