It may no longer be the most beautiful championship in the world but it is certainly among the most complicated for those who have to play it. The ability of most of the coaches who sit on the benches of Serie A makes every game a tactical puzzle. Perhaps at the expense of beauty. But you know, in Italy we prefer to look at the result rather than the beautiful game.
The curtain is about to rise. In mid-August, when in times now long gone, the preparation friendlies were still played. After all, a very crowded calendar of events makes it necessary to start in the middle of summer. Also to the benefit of the TVs that have the urgency to fill their sports schedules.
EVERYONE ON THE HUNT FOR INTER. It is the Italian Champion team, the strongest technically, the most “vertical” in terms of playing philosophy. Inzaghi will find himself facing combative colleagues. Starting with Antonio Conte who, having arrived at Napoli, has the task of bringing the Neapolitans back to the top. He is a winner by temperament and will give battle. Apparently milder, Thiago Motta will bring to Turin, Juventus side, all the good things he managed to achieve in Bologna. A goal that will make the young Brazilian coach’s wrists tremble: to make the Bianconeri win again. Milan does not want to be a supporting actor and for the relaunch has chosen the gentle Portuguese, Paulo Fonseca. He will be gentle again this year. But strong from an unfortunate experience in Italy with Roma, perhaps he will also have thought about how to defend himself. Maybe by attacking.
These four teams are the ones who will be most at stake in the championship. But that doesn’t mean that the top four can only be limited to them. There’s never a shortage of outsiders. They’re part of the unpredictability of football. And in any case, there are teams equipped to do well. For example, De Rossi’s Roma or Gasperini’s Atalanta who performed well against the stratospheric Real Madrid in the European Super Cup final. With one eye on Bologna who, having reached the Champions League last year, will try to confirm themselves with the new coach Vincenzo Italiano.
BUT IN THE END they will be the ones to take the field, the essential protagonists, the actors of the performance that takes place on the pitch: the footballers. The results of their teams will depend largely on the performances they will be able to offer. It is estimated that the best will play up to 85 seasonal games between the championship and the Cups. Quite a tour de force.
Italian football, however, is a wounded football as it faces the new season. The disappointment of the European Championship that ended badly and too quickly, weighs on technical balance sheets and leadership. Federal President Gravina will certainly have to defend himself from the attacks that are gaining strength from the disappointing national team. And politics is not sitting back. In defiance of the principle of the autonomy of sport, the right-wing government seems mostly interested in placing its own trusted manager. Football is too popular not to arouse desires for power.
The hottest technical issue is that of missing talent. The national team has been a disconcerting but predictable proof of this. What happened to the champions? We all rubbed our eyes watching the minor Lamine Yamal dragging Spain to continental victory. And we asked ourselves why Italy hasn’t had a Baggio, a Totti, a Del Piero, a Pirlo for a long time. And above all why we don’t have faith in young people.
A CENTRAL THEME: children’s access to soccer. The world of oratories has disappeared or almost disappeared, today you pay to play, and not all families can afford a soccer school for their children, given the costs. How many talents could have been lost along the way and how many could not have been helped to blossom?
The privatization of football has been underway for some time. Not just to play it, but also just to watch it. TV subscription prices are constantly increasing. Subscribers no longer even receive advance notice. The new rates are listed on the bill and if things don’t go well, they only have the weapon of cancellation, that is, of giving up watching football. It is clear that the most economically fragile groups are gradually being pushed out of the market. In complicated family budgets, it is really difficult for a TV subscription to be considered a priority. The answer to the drop in subscriptions, which exists even if access to industrial data is not easy, is to increase prices.
Strange fate that of the fan. He involuntarily gave birth to the great industry of football, and then became its victim. The increase in fans has transformed the system from a non-profit to a business over time. The instinct of TV and presidents, who wanted more money, did the rest. The nature of this anomalous industry is singular, producing an absolutely immaterial good: passion. Because it is passion that drives the fan to buy, fueling the market. Until the fan is convinced, definitively, that he is now just a sort of ATM, a simple customer and no longer the very reason for the existence of football. Then he will turn his back and leave, perhaps putting the whole system in crisis. Something has been creaking for some time. Marcelo Bielsa, known as el loco – the madman – is not only a great Argentine coach, now coach of Uruguay. He is a sort of visionary in love with the game of football. His statements always cause a stir. “They are stealing football from the people,” he recently stated, identifying unscrupulous economic interests as the sign of its decline: from a great popular expression, from a social phenomenon with which large masses have identified, to a factory of money rather than dreams.
In Italy, the football system is drowning in debt. The deficit amounts to over 5 billion euros, naturally divided differently. It ranges from 800 million for Inter and Juventus to 80 for Fiorentina. There are also more virtuous companies. But it is truly strange that an industrial system in loss does not see its managers open a reflection on how to change things – perhaps by spending better and more carefully – and on the contrary asks for more and more money. Even, in a truly audacious way, from governments. Having entered a money-grinding spiral, Italian football also agrees to go and play the Italian Super Cup finals in Saudi Arabia, in exchange for money, forgetting the human rights trampled in that country and the hundreds of death sentences carried out every year. A clear case of sportswashing.
THE BALL will continue to roll on the fields of Serie A. And it will unleash discussions, controversies, joy and bad moods by playing on the feeling that animates the stadium and TV fan who does not seek a show from that ball: he seeks vibrations of passion. Football will never be entertainment. You don’t joke with feelings.
Instead, let’s get ready to say goodbye to ball boys. Those kids who used to pick up the ball from the field by destination to return it to the player have been abolished. In their place, “cones” are automatic ball dispensers from which players will pick up the ball to kick themselves. Goodbye to the tricks of the fan ball boys who purposely delayed the delivery to the opponent. Goodbye to studied wastes of time. The “cone” technology takes over. The kids will only have to fill it. No direct contact with the players. Maximum efficiency.
We also hope that no one ever forgets that football also needs humanity and a culture of respect, on the pitch and in the stands, to remain what it has been in its 167 years of history: quite simply, a sport.