Richard Williams reflects on a traumatic time for soccer in Italy, where a poor World Cup and financial problems have taken their toll

Five minutes before the season kicked off in San Siro on Saturday a group of fans on the balcony of the Curva Nord unfurled their banner. Forty yards long, its black lettering expressed the bitterness gnawing at the heart of Italian football. "In a world of whores and opportunists," it said, "we chose the most fitting representative. Goodbye, Ronaldo."

A few hundred miles to the west, the Brazilian was preparing to welcome his wife to their new apartment near Real Madrid's training ground. Back in Milan, however, Internazionale's supporters, assembling to greet the delayed start of their league season, were still having a hard time overcoming the humiliation inflicted by his departure.

"I hope that's the last we hear of it," Massimo Moratti, Inter's president, said afterwards, keener to discuss the 1-0 victory over Torino. "It's time to turn the page."

But there are many pages that will need to be turned if Italian football is to recover from the effects of a traumatic few months in which the perceived injustice of the World Cup disaster came on top of financial uncertainty among many prominent clubs, together with a longer-term suspicion that, in strictly football terms, the Italian league no longer looks down on the rest of Europe.

The postponement by a fortnight of the start of the Serie A programme, caused by the failure of several clubs to conclude deals with pay-TV stations, was one symbol. Ronaldo's ugly departure to Madrid was another. After five seasons at Inter, Ronaldo's flight to Spain underlined that Serie A has fallen behind La Liga in terms of beautiful football, and behind the Premiership in terms of raw excitement.

The imperial decline has been accompanied by the sound of the mighty crashing to earth. Fiorentina, the plaything of the movie mogul Vittorio Cecchi Gori, went bust so badly in the spring that they are starting life again under another name in Serie C2B, the equivalent of the Dr Martens League.

Lazio are among the more spectacular victims of speculative investment. After counting the cost of Sergio Cragnotti's £300 million investment over 10 years, funded by the Banco di Roma, they were forced to sell their best players - Hernan Crespo to Inter for £28 million, and Alessandro Nesta to Milan for £23 million.

Two years ago Cragnotti thought he saw the future. "Television rights are exploding," he said, "and we're only at the start." Yet last spring it was discovered that he could not pay his players' inflated salaries, and Lazio's transfer dealings at home and abroad were suspended.

The postponement of the start of the season provided official confirmation of the turmoil within Italian football. The failure of eight smaller Serie A clubs to secure television deals in Italy's every-man-for-himself system created chaos requiring government intervention - and, eventually, the unprecedented agreement of Juventus, Roma, Lazio, Parma and the two Milan clubs to forfeit about £4 million of their own TV income in order to subsidise a collective agreement.

But although there were 66,000 at the San Siro to acclaim Christian Vieri's winning header for Inter against Torino, and 40,000 in the Stadio delle Alpi yesterday to see Alessandro Del Piero's two goals get Juventus's defence of their championship off to a winning start, plenty of problems remain.

This week those two clubs, along with Roma and Milan, return to the Champions League, in which Italy's record has been abysmal by their standards since Juventus's last victory in 1996.

Nor can Italy get over the nature of the national team's departure from the World Cup. Every day the newspapers devote space to the latest news of the career of Byron Moreno, the Chilean referee whose decisions were believed to favour the home team in the fateful match against South Korea. The Italian federation have finally persuaded FIFA to institute an inquiry into his performance in the World Cup, and the news that he has just been suspended for 20 matches by his national federation for letting a league match run more than 10 minutes over time has been greeted with sour amusement.

At least the sun shone on Italian football throughout the weekend. But Inter were lucky to hang on to their points against opponents reduced to 10 men before half-time, needing a poor offside decision to enable them to win, while Juve, two goals up after 35 minutes, concentrated on keeping a clean sheet until Salvatore Fresi drove in a third in the last minute.

"Our football has overcome the destruction of a war, tragedies like the Superga air crash, disappointments like the failure to qualify for the 1958 World Cup and the eliminations of 1962 and 1966, and even the scandals of match-fixing and bribery," Marino Bartoletti, the editor of the magazine Calcio 2000, wrote last week. "Evidently it must be immortal." Immortality, however, belongs to the gods. And, as those fans on the Curva Nord have worked out, there is nothing divine about Italian football.