Search: ' Massimo Moratti'

A change of attitudes in Italy could provide some useful lessons for football's oldest tournament. Matthew Barker explains

Much has been made in the press recently about falling attendances in the FA Cup, with concerned reports warning that the grand old competition is on the wane, its status increasingly devalued as an unloved irritant for clubs who prize the Premier League above all else. The temptation is to draw a parallel with its continental counterparts, the Coppa Italia and Copa del Rey.

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A phone-tapping scandal has reached into most aspects of Italian society and football in particular. Matthew Barker listens in

Christian Vieri announced his retirement from football last month in typically gruff and to-the-point fashion. “I’ve had enough. I don’t want to do it any more,” he told journalists at the Milan Palace of Justice. Vieri was in court to give evidence against Inter, one of his 11 former clubs who he’s suing for €21 million (£18.7m) along with Telecom Italia (€9m from the former, €12m from the latter) after they apparently authorised the tapping of his private phone calls during a two-year period from 2002-04.

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Amid the gloom, some hope that the staging of the 2012 European Championship could be Italy’s Euro 96. Matthew Barker reports on the hopes invested in a bid and the new stadiums that may result

In the weeks leading up to the death of Filippo Raciti, the Italian sporting press was quietly optimistic of a successful bid to host the 2012 European Championship. Ahead of the announcement on April 18, so too were the clubs, with some, notably Juventus and Lazio, unveiling plans for new or rebuilt homes, set to benefit from generous tax concessions and credit deals from a government keen to be seen to back the bid, if reluctant actually to bankroll it.

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The rising tide of scandal engulfing Serie A in general and Juventus in particular has shoacked a nation. But amid the ruins there is hope, as Paul Virgo reports

You know things are bad when you have to take morality lessons from Sepp Blatter. But former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi seems to have taken soccer skulduggery to a new frontier – as Paddy Agnew of the Irish Times noted, it’s not a question of match-fixing any more, it’s “season-fixing”. Blatter described the affair as the worst scandal in the game’s history, adding that he would have expected it from an African nation, but not Italy. Franz Beckenbauer predicted Italy will pay the consequences at the World Cup. The international press have had fun getting sanctimonious about sleazy Serie A, too. 

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In our third piece on anti-poverty initiatives in football, Paul Virgo reports on the unlikley circumstances that have brought together the corporate giants of Internazionale and the anti-capitalist rebels of the Zapistas in southern Mexico

Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and Internazionale owner Massimo Moratti make an odd couple. The first spends his time fighting for the rights of indigenous people in the Chiapas region of Mexico, while the other spends his oil bucks on expensive footballers who don’t win many trophies.

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