Loquor, the column by Carmelo Pennisi is back: in the spotlight the arrest of Massimo Ferrero and the incursion of the Guardia di Finanza into the Juventus headquarters
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“It made a difference”.
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The arrest of Massimo Ferrero and the incursion of the Guardia di Finanza into the Juventus headquarters once again pose serious questions in which direction our country is going, frequently brought to its knees even in the events of its most loved sport. Excluding the folkloristic and rhetorical bales in which one often indulges (the GDP at 6.2% expected for 2021 is the logical rebound of those who have fallen very deep in the course of the pandemic events and not because suddenly a magician has fallen at Palazzo Chigi), all the knots still unresolved during the last thirty years of continuous transformations undergone by Europe in economic, political and institutional matters remain evident. Transformations undergone, and still in progress, also by the world of football, which starting from the birth of the Premier League in 1992 and ending with the entry of the Qatarians in 2011 on the bridge of the Paris Saint Germain has decidedly veered towards a neo-liberal vision the continental events of the most followed game in the world. In Italy, this vision of a new gold road immediately took on the connotation of a tragic drift, where the much trumpeted market road, prefigured as a salvific for the restructuring of our country, has entrusted the fate of football to all the worst that can be imagine, and beyond.
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The Federcalcio, and all its control bodies, by consulting a Wikipedia page would have easily learned the judicial pedigree of Massimo Ferrero and how inappropriate it would have been to entrust him with the destinies of an important club like Sampdoria. Instead, we chose to close our eyes (a friend also suggested my ears) in order not to publicly admit yet another painful truth about Italian football: apart from a dubious character like Ferrero, no one wanted to buy the Sampdoria club. And not even Ferrero in the end bought it, having acquired the club for free from the Garrone family, who obviously couldn’t wait to run away. No serious entrepreneur today would throw himself into the Serie A adventure to do regular business, and if the two clubs (Juventus and Napoli) that have excelled in the events of our championship in the last ten years are currently under the magnifying glass of Covisoc ( Supervisory Commission on Professional Football Clubs) relating to the issues of the famous capital gains, and even one (Juventus) is undergoing judicial proceedings by the Turin Public Prosecutor’s Office, then it is easy to understand how the deterioration is now doing it by master. Today an Italian club can be bought either to do business on the debts written in the balance sheet (let’s call it for what it is: earning on the debt through financial games) or to enrich oneself through a network of relationships (ranging from sports directors, to players, to prosecutors , presidents, controllers who do not control, etc.) with a single objective agreed between the parties: capital gains.
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This explains why some clubs have been acquired by investment funds of no primary importance (it would be impossible to see individuals like Goldman Sachs or Merryll Lynch acting in the context of asphyxiated Serie A chicken coop), certainly not attracted by the umpteenth promise of reform of the market and the state impossible to verify for anyone with a minimum of economic, sociological and historical / cultural knowledge. Sergio Marchionne, of whom one can say everything and the opposite of everything but not that he was not a great businessman, immediately understood, when he took upon himself the impossible challenge of restoring FIAT, as the center of the question was to increase the productivity of labor, an atavistic Italian problem, and above all to return to making quality cars. Simple to say, a damn difficult undertaking to do, also because everyone would like the best things only in intentions and never in practice. The late Italian-Canadian manager will later be convinced, and very bitterly, as “Italy in the end has no interest in embracing change, that it prefers to maintain the status quo and that very few are willing to go against the system, including a large part of the ruling class “. The failure to search for product quality is the real problem of Italian football, the son of a reality that for several decades has used it exclusively as a show to be carried out to obtain everything possible, at any cost, by any means and in the face of any result. staged. The comparison with the clubs of the La Liga, the Bundesliga and the Premier League is merciless, and it would be enough at least once to visit the “places” of the teams of these three leagues to understand the sidereal distance, in the quality of the structural investments, with nothing present in the our top league, where new stadiums are continually planned and in the end we always end up talking and brawling over the amount of money to be shared coming from TV.
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Being in the hands of career climbers looking to make money for their pockets reduces the attention and commitment to certain sporting results, relegating the Europa League to an issue that is too poor in revenues to be taken seriously. Italian football, the promoter of a market of several billion euros, if we also consider the related activities, is in the hands of a management so inadequate and disheveled that it has handed itself hands and feet to the powerful caste of prosecutors, always ready to raise to their advantage the costs of football and to indulge the malpractice of fake capital gains. From what has been learned in recent weeks, the Cristiano Ronaldo operation was carried out in such a hasty and amateurish manner as to cast doubt on the capabilities of the leading entrepreneurial family of the Italian economic / industrial system, that of the Agnellis. The seriousness of the Juventus situation is such that John Elkann, undisputed head of the parent company “Exor” (family safe), demanded, as a condition of adhering to the latest capital increase of the Juventus club, a signed declaration contemplating the possible exercise of the right of withdrawal by the Guarantors in the event of problems related to business continuity. It is difficult to say whether or not it is the end of Andrea Agnelli’s reign at Juve, but the capital gains affair and the opacities surrounding the Cristiano Ronaldo operation are only the latest storms that have occurred under his presidency. We are far, really far, from German football, with Bayern Munich closing its 29th budget in consecutive profit, able to resist chasing the crazy Arabs spent and the excessive economic / commercial power of the Premier League, and still obtaining full stadiums in every order of places and budgets in profit that would be the envy of any SpA. German politics, through adequate reforms, has succeeded in bringing together the world of fans and that of reference clubs, making the world of football attractive to the German entrepreneurship, supported by them through unprecedented economic sponsorship. When it is said to make a system, and it is no coincidence that the only absence from the crazy SuperLeague project is precisely the German one. Italian football lacks a project favored and directed by politics, something that brings a content of truth to fill a space currently occupied by adventurous and hungry presidents (with some due and rare exceptions) who are not attentive to the good of the game and its fans.
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We are the country of gossip and storytelling (Anglophone semantic version of gossip), and while the solution of the Salernitana tragicomedy is expected in recent weeks, it remains only to hope for Italian football in a miracle that is difficult to hope and even to hypothesize. In the safe of Massimo Ferrero the Guardia di Finanza, in its judicial search, seems to have found fifteen thousand euros in cash and a gun. It seems an apt and brilliant literary synthesis on the events of our football and beyond. In the book of “Wisdom” it is written that “we were born by chance and afterwards we will be as if we had not been”, almost implying that we do not give much importance to our works. But do not be deceived about the work carried out by Sacred Scripture to defend us from vanity, because some works, however, despite our name, will remain traces over time. We came to change, not to give up. So help football to recover its memory.
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Writer, screenwriter and director. A very grenade fan and already co-author with the late Anthony Weatherill of the “Loquor” column on Toro News that he continues to curate in his honor and memory. Among his numerous works and screenplays, he includes that of the film “Ora e per semper”, in memory of the Grande Torino.
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Through its columns, thanks to the work of qualified commentators, Toro News offers its readers insights and independent insights into Turin and beyond.
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December 9, 2021 (change December 9, 2021 | 22:26)
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