The best form of offence – a review of John Foot’s "Calcio: A History of Italian Football"

Most football enthusiasts prefer their game the pulse-racing, riveting way. The dazzling centre-forward racking up goals aplenty, agile wingers bursting forth from both flanks in gay abandon, piercing runs that paralyze the defence and culminate in the dejected goalkeeper collecting the ball from the back of the net – these are the stock images that populate the legends and lores of the “beautiful game”. In the eyes of the demanding fan, any approach to the game that does not guarantee ceaseless adrenaline rush is an object of derision and disdain. The exalted status that the Latin American teams enjoy is mainly due to the pace and radiance attributed to their game. However, Italy, one of the most successful of the footballing nations, is perceived to have thrived by embracing an intransigent defensive method, which diverges markedly from the devotees’ lofty expectations. Indeed, votaries of the game view the persistent defensive streak in the Italian game as boring at best and as a cynical ploy to win at any cost at worst. As conventional football wisdom would have it, the Italian teams may be adept at holding on to an early advantage, their domestic league (Serie A) may attract talent from all over the world, but the way they play their game makes totally reasonable men crave for the relative charms of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. And this persistent defensive mentality is not just a blight that afflicts the national team; it seems to seep into the club level as well, generating comparisons that pit the Serie A unfavourably against other European domestic club competitions like the English Premier League and the Spanish La Liga. This much-derided technical orientation of the Italian game is one among the many themes that John Foot explores, in an engrossing work that chronicles the history and development of the Italian football from its early stirrings in the late nineteenth century to the World Cup glory of 2006.

In order to complement the intense personal strain that permeates the work, Foot largely eschews the well-worn chronological narrative style, in favour of chapters organized around various themes. Foot’s love affair with Italian football began on a bitter note, as he was enraged by the Juventus’ 1980 acquisition of his Arsenal hero, Liam Brady. It was cold comfort to him that Brady faithfully lived up to the time-honoured tradition of English players faring miserably in the Italian league. The sense of distaste that emerged in the wake of Turin club’s audacity in depriving his club of the services of his favourite player lingered till he moved to Milan in the late 1980s, ostensibly for an academic purpose – to study the origins of Fascism in Milan. Thereafter, he began to be captivated by the profound, all-consuming fervour that the game of football evoked in the Italian psyche. The shift in his attitude towards the Italian game coincided with the meteoric rise of the city’s premier club, A. C. Milan. Aided in no small measure by the brilliance of  the Dutch trio – Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, and Frank Rijkard – and a spirited attacking style (a much-vaunted break from the usual defensive Italian method) ushered in by the redoubtable coach, Arrigo Sacchi (who went on to manage the Italian national team in their tumultuous campaign at USA 94), Milan reached the pinnacle of footballing success, winning seven Serie A titles and notching up five European championships.

Foot’s personal reflections on the Italian fascination with football that he encountered in Milan set the tone for his journey into the turbulent yet fascinating world of Italian football that ensues. Tracing the origins of the game in Italy back to the “kickabouts” and impromptu games organized by British sailors in the port towns of Livorno, Genoa, Palermo and Naples (Italy was a stopover on their way to India) in the late Nineteenth Century, Foot touches on how even these origins are contested and politicized in the fractious Italian football parlance. The instant and tremendous popularity the game attained in Italy lent itself to appropriation for political means by the emergent nationalist and Fascist parties in the early Twentieth Century. This was reflected in the decision in 1909 by the nationalist Italian football authorities to give the game an Italian name – Calcio, based on the highly dubious premise of identifying Calcio Fierentino, a game in vogue in Florence during the Renaissance, as the precursor of modern football. However, regardless of the high level of legitimacy that the nationalist attempts to claim the game for their own attained in Italy (even some experts were gullible enough to succumb to this version of events. For instance, the legendary Italian football journalist, Gianni Brera, gave credence to the nationalist position by opining that the English had merely “reinvented” the game), the early history of football in Italy retains a distinctly English flavour. The first football club in Italy, Football Club Torinese, was formed in1898 by Edoardo Bosio, an employee of a British textile company, who had picked up the rudiments of the game in England. And it was an English maritime doctor, James Richardson spensley, who organized the first competitive football match in Italy, between Football Club Torinese and a Genoan club formed by British consular officials.

Having set the record straight on the British contribution to the development of the game in Italy, Foot sets out to fashion a panoramic account of the various partakers and characteristics that make up the spectacle that is Italian football: the love-hate relationship between referees and fans; the enduring nexus between football and politics – a grassroots version of which plays itself out in the vehement confrontations that accompany matches involving teams whose core fan bases champion antithetical and diametrically opposite political creeds, such as the perennial tussle between the predominantly right-wing Lazio ultras and the Livorno zealots who proudly brandish their Tuscan leftist lineage with blaring recitals of anti-Fascist anthems like Bella Ciao and Avanti Popolo (the city of Livorno lies at the heart of the "Red Quadrilateral", a stronghold of the erstwhile Italian Communist Party); great derbies that set the sparks of frenzy alight – Derby della Madonnina between the two towering Milan outfits (delightfully named after the statue of Virgin Mary atop the Milan Cathedral), Derby della Capitale between Roma and Lazio, Derby d’Italia between Internazionale and Juventus, etc.; the passion and violence that underlie the fan rivalries. He also provides a revealing glimpse into the extraordinary level of pressure that plague the players and managers week in and week out, the adulation they inspire matched only by the brickbats they receive when falling short of fans’ expectations. But, despite the crushing burden of expectations, numerous mercurial stars have always graced the world of Italian football with their enthralling and consistent performances. The names and exploits are too long to be described in detail, but some do deserve a cursory glance at the least: Gianni Rivera, the Golden Boy who marshalled A.C. Milan and the Italian national team in the 60s and the early part of the 70s; The Mazzola dynasy, who blazed new trails in midfield generalship; Gigi Riva, Paolo Rossi, Roberto Baggio, Del Piero; and foreigners like Michel Platini, Zinedine Zidan, and Andriy Shevchenko.

Foot also vigorously challenges one of the most potent charges the detractors of Italian football often wave against it: its obsession with the defensive mode. Foot berates it for the blatant misrepresentation it is and mounts a strong defence against this frivolous viewpoint: “Italian teams have not been defensive. They have, quite simply, been much better at defending than other European teams. Italian defenders can all trap the ball, dribble and pass. [They] are also, usually, faster and more tactically aware than defenders in other countries”. One would be hard pressed to argue that Foot does not have a strong case here - at least to the extent that Italian defenders are generally more competent and capable than their counterparts, and that there is more to defensive football than a cynical desire to take the steam out of the game and subject the spectators to endless agony. Anyone who has watched Claudio Gentile, the “Butcher of Turin”, effectively neutralize many a steamrolling striker (the way he dealt with Maradona in the World Cup of 1982 was a formidable display of man-marking and hard tackling. He added insult to injury by famously quipping after the game, “Football is not for ballerinas”), or witnessed Franco Baresi and Paolo Maldini straddling the field is bound to agree with Foot’s contention. Nevertheless, Foot’s impassioned arguments in favour of the brilliance of the Italian defensive style only partially address the criticism levelled against the Italian game. He does not quite succeed in arguing away the crux of the critics’ reason behind labelling the Italian game as often lifeless and uninspiring – the paucity of goals that routinely characterize it. A more sophisticated and seasoned estimation of the game may not treat supply of goals in abundance as the absolute benchmark, but the lowest common denominator that provides the game with its raison d'être may contest that perspective. And one glaring statistic appears to bear out the critics’ position: the all-time top scorer for Italy in international games is Gigi Riva, and his tally of 35 goals from 42 games compares disastrously against that of the leading scorers of other major, and even some minor, footballing nations. To cite just two examples: Gerd Mueller of West Germany has scored 68 goals in 62 games; Ferenc Puskas has netted 84 goals for Hungary from 85 appearances.

The starry-eyed way in which John Foot predominantly views Italian football does not lead him to gloss over its darker side. In fact, the book is also peppered with accounts of numerous scandals and misdemeanours, some of which have had devastating impact on the integrity of the game itself. Foot often laments how the very popularity and high stakes the game is associated with in Italy have often led it down the murky and dingy lanes of match-fixing and corruption. He draws special attention to the Moggipoli scandal that came to light immediately before the 2006 World Cup that Italy, incidentally, went on to win. The infamous affair, in which Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi and others were implicated for conspiring with referees in order to win favourable decision for their teams, took much of the shine off Italy’s thoroughly deserved World Cup victory and led to Juventus being relegated from the top flight of Italian football for the 2006-07 season. According to Foot, what was most depressing about the scandal was that it was so typical of the scandal-ridden world of Italian football. In fact, Moggippoli was only the latest in a string of infamies that has come to symbolize the corroded Italian football apparatus. Scintillating and beautiful the game itself may remain, the passion of the fans is still undiminished, but those who have been assigned the responsibility of running the game have often let it down with their greed and hubris. Though almost overpowered by disenchantment and dismay at the state of affairs, Foot winds down with a decision to keep his faith in Italian football. He is too much in awe of the finer aspects of the Italian game to entirely give up on it. He is convinced that the “beautiful game” will ultimately triumph:

“Despite everything, millions of fans kept their faith. Calcio was in deep trouble, but it still had the ability to anger and move people, to make them laugh, to unite and divide, to inspire like no other game”.