Paddy Agnew on the allegations involving Juventus official Luciano Moggi and others rocking Italian football
Soccer Phone transcripts scandal: They are calling it "Football Gate". In a country where corruption is endemic and where football has never been exempt from such corruption, the sheer barefaced effrontery of it all has managed to shock even the scandal-weary Italian public.
Turn on the prime-time news bulletin and it is likely to be the main item and one that will run and run for 15 minutes. Open your daily paper and it dominates the first seven or eight pages and this, too, at a moment when the country has just elected a new president in Giorgio Napolitano and when former European Commission president Romano Prodi has just formed a new centre-left government.
What is the big fuss all about?
Simply this - over the last two weeks, via a series of phone tap transcripts published in all the major dailies, there has emerged the picture of a deeply cynical, fundamentally corrupt Italian football world where everything from controversial refereeing decisions to TV pundit analysis is "fixed".
We are not talking about match-fixing. We are talking "season-fixing", probably several seasons at that and nearly always in favour of Juventus, the country's most famous and successful club.
At the centre of a scandal that is currently engaging the energies of the public prosecutor's office in Rome, Naples, Turin and Parma, as well as those of the Italian Football Federation's Investigations Office, is an alleged "cupola" or gang of six - Luciano Moggi, ex-director general of Juventus; Antonio Giraudo, the CEO of Juventus; federation deputy president Innocenzo Mazzini; referee "nominators" Paolo Bergamo and Pierluigi Pairetto; referee Massimo De Santis.
So far, the fallout has been dramatic. Football Federation president Franco Carraro and his deputy Mazzini have both resigned while the federation itself has been put under the control of a commissioner, Guido Rossi, appointed by CONI, the overall authority in Italian sport. The entire board of Juventus has resigned.
The Italian Federation have withdrawn De Santis from this summer's World Cup finals in Germany. Uefa have reprimanded Pairetto and removed him from a referees' commission.
Aldo Biscardi, presenter of a landmark, much watched football show, Il Processo del Lunedi (The Monday Trial) has also been forced to resign.
By the time this scandal and its related investigations have run their course, however, the above "fallout" may seem negligible. Four of Serie A's most famous clubs - Juventus, AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio - are involved in the investigations and, if found guilty, could find themselves playing football in Serie B, Division 2, or lower down, next season.
In the short term, even Italy's preparations for next month's World Cup finals in Germany could be jeopardised. Italian national team coach Marcello Lippi, for eight seasons coach to Juventus (1994-99, 2001-2004), is also involved in the enquiry with Rome magistrates claiming that Moggi "managed to have a major say in the call-up of players for the national team".
In the long term, the state judicial investigations could have serious penal consequences for those involved. At the moment, the Rome investigation is focused on the charge of "Transfer Market Distortion Through The Use of Violence and Threatening Behaviour", while the Naples investigation is looking into "Criminal Conspiracy With a View to Sports Fraud" (specifically in relation to the 2004-2005 season).
Both these charges could lead to a jail sentence. It has to be stressed, though, that at this point, investigations are ongoing and no formal charges have been levelled.
The key figure in the "cupola" is Moggi, a man much given to the mobile phone. For a start, he has six of them. For a second, investigators logged him recording an astonishing 100,000 calls between November 2004 and June 2005, an average of 416 calls per day.
The transcripts, at least those published so far, reveal that via his network of influence, Moggi was able to pick and choose referees (favourable ones) not only for Juventus but also for their rivals (unfavourable ones). There are many calls between Moggi and the two referee nominators (the men who appoint the referees) Bergamo and Pairetto in which Moggi not only "picks" the referees but also bitterly criticises those who prove less malleable.
The 45-year-old ex-referee Danilo Nucini seemingly knows all about what happens when you proved yourself "unreliable". Nucini made the mistake of awarding a penalty against Juventus in a Serie A game versus Bologna in January 2001. He was immediately suspended for four weekends. In the longer term, his top flight career more or less ended there and then: "Any referee can make a mistake, but it was as if I had done the worst thing in the world," said Nucini. "Pairetto asked me to explain why I had given the penalty and I explained why. Then I was suspended. For the record, it was a clear penalty.
"Iuliano (Juventus defender) handled the ball and he even admitted it in a TV interview afterwards but, somehow, that interview was never broadcast", Nucini explained to La Repubblica last week.
Moggi's influence appears to have gone far beyond merely seeking "favourable" refereeing for Juventus. He is also accused of having systematically organised the refereeing of Juve's forthcoming opponents. In other words, he would take a big interest in who was handling a team that, on the following weekend, would then face Juventus.
The allegation is that his instructions to the referee were to give a yellow card to any player on his third yellow - that player would then be suspended and not available to play against Juventus.
As someone who has done more that 1,600 live Serie A commentaries for state TV RAI over the last 15 years, I have often noticed how "lucky" Juventus seemed to be when it came to playing against the smaller teams. Not just because the refereeing often seemed favourable to them but, arguably more importantly, the smaller side so often seemed to be without a key player, ruled out through suspension.
Perhaps now we know why.
Moggi's influence did not stop with Juventus and referees. Via the sports agency GEA, run by his son Alessandro (along with Davide Lippi, son of Italy coach Marcello Lippi) he had access to players and coaches in other teams.
This is why Moggi is accused of taking a big interest in Serie A side Siena, a club with several players and their coach Gigi Di Canio on the GEA books.
With Siena struggling to avoid relegation, they may well have received some help on the fourth last day of last season, May 8th 2005, when they travelled to Livorno. Just 17 minutes into the game, Livorno defender Fabio Galante was controversially sent off. Siena went on to win 6-3. Who was the referee? De Santis, the man withdrawn from the World Cup finals last week.
In a phone conversation with federation deputy president Mazzini after the match, De Santis boasted: "Did you see it? Off and away we go and I had one of them already off."
The Moggi transcripts reveal much else besides. One referee's wife receives a phone call telling her to remind her husband to keep his mobile on during half-time. At another point, Pairetto tells referee Paolo Dondarini to keep "50 eyes wide open" ready to "see even that which is not there" (a non-existent penalty perhaps?).
Moggi even boasts of how he had balled out international referee Gianluca Paparesta, "guilty" of not having awarded a penalty to Juventus during one of their rare defeats, 2-1 to Reggina: "I went into the (referee's) dressingroom and I blew them all out of it. Then I locked the lot of them into the dressingroom and then I wanted to take the key away, but they stopped me."
Some of Moggi's transfer tactics are also revealed on the transcripts. For example, when Juve's bid for Ajax Amsterdam's Swedish star Zlatan Ibrahimovic was stalled, he advised the player to create a major fuss.
Promptly done, with Ibrahimovic getting himself into a major row with Ajax team-mates, winning the approval of Moggi and encouraging Ajax to let him go. (Ibrahimovic did indeed join Juventus at the beginning of the 2004-2005 season).
Perhaps these were the tactics that Bayern Munich director and former German international Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was referring to when he denounced Moggi's "mafioso methods" last winter in relation to Juve's attempt to buy Bayern captain Michael Ballack.
The Moggi "tapes", like the investigations, are sure to run and run. Yet, this whole huge affair, arguably European football's biggest scandal of the post-war era, prompts some big questions. For a start, so widespread is the apparent corruption and match-fixing that no federation official, no coach, no club director and indeed no serious reporter can now hold up his hand and claim he did not know. The reality is we all knew, we just did not envisage the extent of the phenomenon.
In a book recently published by your correspondent, Forza Italia - A Journey In Search of Italy and Its Football, I cast a less than flattering eye over Moggi and his alleged methods. In particular, I quoted the former president of one time Serie A side Ancona, Ermanno Pieroni, in a February 2005 interview: "Through his network, Luciano (Moggi) manages to control eight Serie A teams. He has placed sports directors and other directors in lots of clubs, even in ones that are historically enemies of Juventus.
"Via GEA, he controls 200 players and many coaches and that way he determines results. I've been in football for 40 years and the things that I'm saying are well known to people in football."
So, where and how did the whole Moggi network of influence start and how come he ended up running Italy's most famous club? For the answer to this, we have to go back to 1994 when he, Antonio Giraudo and Roberto Bettega took over the running of Juventus, enlisting a new coach in Marcello Lippi.
At the time, Moggi had the reputation of someone capable of building and "protecting" a good team. In particular, he had established an important reputation for himself as the team director of Napoli, during the controversial, but winning Maradona years (1984-1991).
When the new trio arrived at Juventus, the "Old Lady" had gone eight seasons without a title. The club was hungry for success. That hunger led Judge Giuseppe Casalbore, the man who presided over the first Juventus dope trial resulting in a 22-month-suspended jail sentence for club doctor Ricardo Agricola, to speculate that the "trio" might have resorted to systematic doping practices because of the pressure they were under to win. (The speculation is contained in the judge's motivazioni or explanation).
The original November 2004 sentence was overturned one year later when Dr Agricola was acquitted by a Turin appeals court. The case does not end there, however, with the prosecution deciding to appeal that acquittal in the High Court, with the case due probably sometime next autumn. The phone taps which have prompted the most recent scandal originated within the ambit of investigations related to that dope trial.
Did the club's owning family, the Agnellis, take their eye off the Juventus ball, leaving matters to Messers Giraudo and Moggi, happy with their results? In 12 years with Moggi and Giraudo at the helm, Juventus have won seven Italian titles, one Champions League trophy and made three other Champions League finals.
Whatever the Agnellis may once have felt about Moggi and Giraudo in the past, the family's decision last week to call for the resignation of the entire Juventus board certainly marked a spectacular distance taking.
Where does Italian football go from here? As for the investigations, the state judiciary's progress in Rome, Naples and Turin will inevitably be slow. In contrast, however, the Football Federation will have to move quickly.
However, with so many people (more than 50, including club directors, federation officials, police officers, journalists and others) involved, even the federation may take all summer to complete an investigation. Not for nothing, it is already being speculated that next season's Serie A championship will start in October.
In a sense, this scandal is only the expression of a widespread malaise within the Italian game. Attendances are in decline, racism and violence from fans are on the increase, many clubs are close to financial meltdown and even the stadia and the pitches are a shameful, outdated mess.
Curiously, some good could yet come from the whole business if the football authorities seize the opportunity to clean out the broom cupboard and reorganise the way the game is run in Italy, redistributing wealth (especially TV rights) and protecting the smaller clubs. Such a development, however, remains an aspiration. After all, along with Juventus, Italian football is currently dominated by AC Milan, owned by former prime minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, a man not known for a devotion to the redistribution of wealth.
Curiously, too, Messers Moggi and Berlusconi know one another. Only last autumn, Moggi visited the then prime minister in Rome to thank him for the loan of AC Milan goalkeeper Cristian Abbiati.
Whatever way this scandal develops, it is hard to believe that Moggi will ever again be welcome at Government House.
By the way, we almost forgot. Last Sunday, Juventus beat Reggina 2-0 to win their 29th Italian league title.
All fair and above board, of course.
'The Gang of Six'
Luciano Moggi
Director General at Juventus
Allegedly the key figure in the scandal. A former railway worker who first hit national prominence when building up the successful Napoli-Maradona side of the 1980s. In 1994, when he was with Torino, he was acquitted of "favouring prostitution and sports fraud" after Turin magistrates alleged he had provided prostitutes for referees handling Torino's European cup games.
Such is the network of influence he has built up over the last 20 years people have long said he "controls everything" in Italian football, from transfers to refereeing decisions to TV analysis.
Antonio Giraudo
CEO at Juventus
The financial wizard behind the Juventus success story, responsible for launching the club on the stock exchange and for overseeing the club's plans to lease and then reconstruct the Stadio Delle Alpi in Turin. Worked in Fiat prior to taking over at Juventus along with Moggi in 1994.
Alleged to have exerted pressure on referees, football federation officials and others in collaboration with Moggi.
Innocenzo Mazzini
Football Federation vice-president
Florentine doctor Mazzini is alleged to have been the federation mole (or one of them) who co-operated all too willingly with Moggi and Giraudo.
Massimo De Santis
Referee
International referee De Santis is alleged to have "whistled to orders" from Moggi, Giraudo et al.
His involvement in the scandal prompted the Italian Football Federation to withdraw him from the World Cup finals in Germany next month.
Most improbable that he is the only referee to have (allegedly) come within the Moggi sphere of influence.
Paolo Bergamo & Pierluigi Pairetto
Referee "nominators"
Until this season, these two men had the job of appointing referees for Serie A games. Both of them appear in numerous phone conversations where they appear all too willing to carry out Moggi's orders.
