Newsgroup: it.sport.calcio.estero
Titolo: Paradiso to inferno (parte uno)

Within a week of Italy winning the World Cup, the clubs that had provided 13
players of the triumphant squad were punished in devastating fashion. One
man used his influence through media, politics and football. This is how
Luciano Moggi brought down one of Europe's greatest clubs - and shamed a
nation
Jason Burke
Sunday July 30, 2006
Observer Sport Monthly
This weekend Luciano Moggi, a 69-year-old man with the aquiline nose, bald
head and the taste for fine cigars and tailoring that you would expect of a
senior Italian football official, agent and, it has now become clear, crook,
will be thinking about his future. He may be admiring the view over the
Mediterranean from his villa in the Posillipo hills above Naples or relaxing
at his town house in the northern city of Turin. Or he might stop by for a
drink at a favourite private club on the Mediterranean island of Capri, from
where he may go out on his yacht. After all, having just been banned from
football for five years and witnessing his life's work collapse around him,
he has time on his hands.
Moggi will have much to think about. Last month the luck of 'Lucky Luciano'
finally ran out and he was forced to resign from his post as general manager
of Juventus, the best supported and most successful club in Italian
football, the present champions. On 14 July, a specially appointed tribunal
found that, as a result of Moggi's activities, Juventus had, over a period
of years, won games that they otherwise might not have done. The richest
team in Italy were as punishment relegated to the second division, Serie B,
docked enough points to ensure that they will remain there for at least two
seasons and stripped of the championships they had won in the past two
years. AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio were also punished - all docked points
and all but the first being relegated. Italy, even with its history of
sporting and political scandals, had never seen anything like it. And all
this in the month when the national team had returned from Germany with the
country's fourth World Cup.
Moggi's 'system', known as 'Moggiopoli', has been picked over by scores of
magistrates, detectives and special legal investigators appointed by the
Italian Football Federation (FIGC). Hundreds of pages of recorded
conversations between key figures have been made publicly available. Less
available but circulating none the less are thousands of pages of further
documents. Together they show that, in addition to four of the most powerful
clubs in the world, the scandal touches the top ranks of most of the major
Italian football administrative bodies, dozens of referees, several of the
best known Italian sports commentators, even a former government minister
and, at least indirectly, several of the World Cup squad.
The question is a simple one. How did one man buy - or at least gain control
over - what is one of the richest European leagues, a league that has just
produced a World-Cup winning squad (all of the 23-man squad played for
Italian clubs)? Finding out is not easy. First, there is a problem of
sources. The documents produced by the various inquiries are voluminous but
inconclusive. Second, few want to talk about the scandal. A third reason is
the very nature of Moggi's activity.
Earlier this year, for an article published in our January issue, I
investigated match-fixing networks in northern Europe, predominantly in
Belgium and Germany, though there were connections to Greece, Turkey, parts
of Scandinavia and, possibly though it was difficult to prove, France,
Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland. Here the modus operandi of the
criminals, who were often from eastern Europe, was quite simple. They
corrupted referees and, if possible, offered cash and girls. A referee and
two players would be enough to ensure a result. The money was not huge -
German players agreed to throw games for a thousand or so euros - but the
profits were substantial. By betting on games or sequences of results on the
internet, the fixers could earn millions with little difficulty and little
risk. This was relatively traditional sporting crime, I wrote in January.
But what Moggi was doing was very different. A revealing fact is that no one
involved in the scandal in Italy has been found guilty in a criminal court.
So far there is no sign of meetings in hotel rooms where large sums of cash
are handed over. There are not even any matches which, definitively, were
known to have been rigged. There are no players or referees who have been
shown to have accepted brown envelopes. Yet no one doubts that Moggi was
able to have a huge, nefarious influence on Italian football which
profoundly helped Juventus (and possibly several others) to win. Moggi was
somehow able to select referees for games, influence the selection of other
teams, have games postponed or cancelled and influence the media coverage of
football in a country in which football is a kind of secular worship. So how
did he do it? To understand, you have to understand Luciano Moggi, what his
rise says about Italian football and what his eventual fall says about
Italy.
Luciano Moggi was born at Monticiano, a small provincial town near Siena,
among the rolling hills and vineyards and walled towns of Tuscany. This part
of the world may be loved by the British middle class and indeed
middle-class British Prime Ministers but it was less than romantic for the
young Moggi. He left school at 13 and started working on the railways,
rising during his twenties to the heights of deputy head of a ticket office.
As a youth, Moggi was taken by a baker, a part-time scout for local sides,
to football games all over Tuscany. He was hooked and, though a lack of
talent restricted him to a stint with a fourth-division club, by the end of
his twenties he had shown that he had a very good eye for young talent,
working as a freelance scout for a number of clubs including Juventus. His
approach was novel. It was personal - almost 'rustic' according to Marco
Travaglio, Moggi's biographer.
'He was not just interested in the ability of a player but in his family
situation, in his personality,' said Travaglio. 'He was not just a manager
but became a second father [to the players], an older brother and was very
successful as a result.' In addition, he was a magnificent salesman. In a
move that says much about how he worked, Moggi hired as an assistant the
baker who had once taken him to games. What goes round, comes round. Scratch
my back and I'll scratch yours. Once a friend, always a friend. The basic
principle of the Moggi system.
Moggi was noticed by Italo Allodi - the Italian 'supermanager' who had run
the business side of Internazionale when Helenio Herrera coached the club to
two consecutive European Cup victories in the Sixties. These victories were
tainted by allegations that Allodi had bribed the referees in semi-finals
against Dortmund and Liverpool. Brian Glanville, the respected British
sports writer, investigated Allodi in the early Seventies, particularly an
unsuccessful attempt to bribe the referee in Juve's 1973 European Cup
semi-final against Derby County. 'Allodi was the dirtiest trickster of them
all, he was a filthy liar, a master criminal,' Glanville says.
Allodi gave Moggi a job in the administration of Juventus's network of
scouts with special responsibility for young players. Long before the rest
of Europe, Italian football was moving into a different age with superstar
players, high-profile managers and a whole new professionalism. In 1975,
Moggi moved to Roma, where he refined his personal and effective way of
doing things. He had already developed a warm demeanour that appealed to
players, built a network of scouts across the entire country and worked out
how to endear himself to the powerful actors in the Italian football
hierarchy. But in the capital he broadened and deepened his networks of
contacts, moving outside football, the better to control what was happening
inside the sport. These years were key. Moggi was tireless, networking
assiduously with politicians, magistrates, diplomats, military officers,
celebrities and especially journalists. 'He understood the value of
advertising and media very early on,' said Travaglio. 'They were going to be
the winners in football, the soul of the business.' What Moggi understood,
too, was that he needed to stay in the shadows while manipulating something
that was continually in the public eye.
There was nothing obviously malign about him. He was charming, witty, good
company, always ready to help or to do someone a favour, a little shady
perhaps but well connected and an operator. He was by now a little smoother
as well - having ditched rustic habits such as wiping his mouth on his tie
after eating. Above all, Moggi was a good man to know, a good man to have
'on-side', a good man to have as a friend. The first part of 'the Moggi
system' was firmly in place.
One afternoon in Rome I had lunch with Gianni Bondini, a columnist at the
Gazzetta dello Sport and Italian sports journalism's elder statesman. The
Moggi scandal, I ask, why now? Why here? 'It's a very Italian story,' he
says. It was broken by his own newspaper back in April. There had been two
separate judicial investigations into football corruption. One was being run
by magistrates in Turin investigating allegations that Juventus players had
been doped. Another, run from Rome, had started after a mafia supergrass
told magistrates of illegal betting on football and of corrupt referees.
Though the allegations proved to be ungrounded, the investigating
magistrates' wiretaps turned up what appeared to be evidence of something
much bigger: the Moggi system. In the spring of this year, the Turin
magistrates approached the nation's football authorities but swiftly
realised that the governing bodies themselves were implicated. At that
stage, the Prime Minister was still Silvio Berlusconi who, as the president
and owner of AC Milan, one of the four big clubs in the line of fire, was
not in favour of a public investigation. So, says Bondini, very quickly the
magistrates turned to the press. The story, naturally, was front-page news.
The scandal has its root in the commercialisation of Italian football,
explains Bondini, a mild and gracious elderly man. Moggi started making good
money as Serie A became the richest and most glamorous league in the world
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 'The Italians pioneered the modern
internationalism of football,' Bondini says. 'Remember Maradona coming to
Naples in 1984? When money comes in the window, sport goes out of the door.
We now have a degenerated football system. We have "rich football". And it's
a real mess.'
But Italy are world champions?
'You can't connect the scandal and winning the cup - apart from the fact
that the players tried harder because they wanted to redeem their
reputations and add to their market value if they were going to be sold,'
Bondini says, a little cynically.
'We produce great players because of various things. We have a very
competitive league with a very high standard. Italian players are very
efficient and very clever. And then there is the Italian nature. It's the
fault of our grandmothers. They slept with everybody. So we have lots of
different races mixed up in our genes and that makes for great footballers.'
Thinking of the hurled banana, the monkey chants, the vilification of black
players as well as the fascist salutes and flags that Italian crowds are
known for, I point out that there is a slightly less tolerant attitude to
racial integration today.
'That's not true,' says Bondini. '[Immigrant populations] are a part of
Italy. If you look at the guys selling stuff in the street, they are all
blacks. All the towns in the north east of the country have developing
industries thanks to illegal immigrants. Rome's Esquilino district is all
Chinese.'
Surely there is a link between the World Cup victory and the scandal? The
high standard of Serie A depends in part on all the foreign players and they
are here partly at least for the money.
'Yes,' agrees Bondini. 'For the money and for the huge interest in soccer in
this country. In most civilised countries you get comment about a match the
day afterwards, not all week. And I can tell you what we will remember of
this summer. Our sales tell you. We sell 600,000 usually; we sold 900,000
with the Moggi scandal on the front page; we sold 2.5 million when we won
the World Cup.'
Ah yes, the World Cup. Italy's tournament was coloured rather than stained
by the scandal unfolding back home. For Bondini, the outflow of sporting
sewage in Italy merely made the hard-fought triumph of the Azzurri all the
more remarkable, throwing it into relief like a diamond set amid manure. It
was certainly unprecedented. Never before have players from a side flown
home during a tournament to appear before investigators who, effectively,
were accusing them of being corrupt.
One of the first to be heard was Marcello Lippi, the Italy coach. On 19 May,
three weeks before the World Cup started in earnest in Germany, Lippi
appeared in front of magistrates to answer charges that his selection of
players for the Italian national team had been influenced by Moggi. Concerns
had been raised by investigations into GEA World, Moggi's sports agency
which employs Lippi's son, Davide. The allegation was that Moggi had put
pressure on Lippi to select fewer Juventus players for the national team to
minimise injuries and fatigue. In the event, Lippi did select five Juventus
players for the World Cup (in all 13 out of the squad of 23 play for clubs
that have been found guilty in the scandal) and has been cleared of any
wrongdoing. It still appears likely however that Moggi attempted to
influence the coach - in itself a good example of how his system could work.
Yet it was not just the coach who was touched by the scandal. Just days
before the start of the tournament, Fabio Cannavaro, the Italy captain and
then Juventus defender, as well as his French team-mate at Juventus, David
Trezeguet, travelled to Rome to be interviewed as witnesses by the
magistrates investigating allegations of 'illegal competition with use of
threats and violence' at GEA. Cannavaro eventually lifted the cup; Trezeguet
missed a crucial penalty as France lost the final after extra time.
Goalkeeper Gigi Buffon, one of the stars of the tournament, is more
seriously threatened. He is alleged to have become involved in illegal
betting on domestic games and has yet to be cleared.
There was too the story of Gianluca Pessotto who, after 11 years playing for
Juventus and the national side, retired and took a job as the club's
sporting director in May. Efficient, honest, reliable if slightly
uninspiring - for every Zidane, Lippi has said, there needs to be a
Pessotto - he threw himself from a window on 27 June with a string of rosary
beads in one hand. He hit two cars, very seriously injuring himself.
According to his wife, Pessotto, who had no involvement with any wrongdoing
at Juventus at all, was suffering from chronic depression.
A friend to almost everyone in the Italian team, Pessotto's apparent suicide
attempt deeply affected the players in Germany. 'I'm finding it difficult at
the moment, almost impossible, to talk about football or matches and all the
emotions that you're supposed to feel at a World Cup,' Buffon said before
the quarter-final against Ukraine.
Alessandro Del Piero and Gianluca Zambrotta, team-mates at Juventus, both
left Italy's training camp and flew back to visit Pessotto in hospital,
returning to Germany the same night to rejoin the squad. Doctors denied a
recovering Pessotto the pleasure of watching the final - the excitement was
thought likely to be too much for the patient - but the day after the game
he received three rather exceptional visitors: Cannavaro, Zambrotta and the
World Cup itself.
The 1980s were turbulent times for Moggi. He spent an unhappy year at Lazio
from 1980-81. The club was embroiled in a huge corruption scandal, the
famous match-fixing affair that involved Paolo Rossi, who returned from a
two-year ban to inspire Italy to World Cup victory in Spain in 1982. Unlike
the most recent scandal, it involved large amounts of cash and the simple
rigging of games. But like 'Moggi-gate', it had also taken place just before
a World Cup triumph.
Lucky Luciano then spent the rest of the Eighties moving between teams in
Rome, Turin and Naples. The last named saw the drama - or rather farcical
tragedy - of what Travaglio, Moggi's biographer, calls 'the Maradona-Moggi
show'. Although Moggi had not brought the Argentinian star to Napoli, the
two were close. But, as Maradona's off-the-pitch behaviour became
increasingly erratic, their relationship deteriorated rapidly. Even Moggi's
grip on the local press could not hide the star forward's cocaine
consumption, nightclubbing and chronic unreliability. When two mafia
supergrasses started talking about Maradona to judges, the scandal became
too big to contain. For Moggi, Maradona had committed the cardinal sin,
betraying his friendship and confidence. When the player failed a doping
test, Moggi cut all links, left Naples and headed back north, fetching up,
after a short and successful spell at Torino, as general manager across the
city at Juventus.
Through the second half of the 1990s, the second part of the Moggi system
was put in place. Lucky Luciano was cutting things fine - narrowly missing
prosecution for allegedly providing referees with prostitutes and for false
accounting - but his power continued to grow. Moggi became someone who was
not just a good man to be friends with but someone whom you did not want to
have as an enemy. Personally, acquaintances say, Moggi was less and less the
garrulous diplomatic bon viveur and more and more the arrogant don. This was
the flip side of the 'I'll help you out' Moggi. This was the 'I'm going to
make you an offer you cannot refuse' Moggi. Again, though, Moggi relied on
nothing so unsubtle as straight violence.
--
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 This is how Luciano Moggi brought down one of Europe's greatest clubs
Ah... MA ROTFL !!!!
Marco
-- 
"Alex non si discute, si ama"
HT - Asola Roineks (546678) VI.765


ovviamente tu hai la tua verita' e da quella non ti muovi....e' naturale.
Sei palloso.

 Sei palloso.
eddai, dire che manovrava il calcio attraverso i media è ridicolo, questo 
chiedeva favori al moviolista di BISCARDI quando sky e mediaset sappiamo 
tutti a chi fanno propaganda, e non solo alla moviola
dai, ok gli arbitri, ma per i media lasciatelo perdere
byebk 

 eddai, dire che manovrava il calcio attraverso i media è ridicolo,
certo e' ridicolo... in fin dei conti non e' sconcerti.