Calcio: A History of Italian Football. John Foot
of fans against the transfer of a player. An accountant by trade, Rosetta was idolized in Vercelli. As he approached his second championship victory with the club in three years (in 1922–23) rumours began to spread of an offer from Juventus. Rosetta had, it appeared, been tapped up. At that time Luigi Bozino, criminal lawyer and Pro Vercelli’s president, was also president of the FIGC, so the case took on football-wide proportions.
A lot of money was involved. A cheque for at least 50,000 lire went directly to Bozino and Rosetta’s new highly-paid accountancy post in Turin was underwritten by Juventus (and therefore by their owners FIAT). The Rosetta scandal led to the resignation of a number of leading members of the various football federations, and threatened to split the world of calcio wide open. Moreover for the first time the amount of money paid for a footballer led to scandal in itself. It was seen as immoral to spend so much cash on what was essentially just a game. The scandal dragged on. Rosetta moved to Juventus, but after just three games of the 1923–24 season, the federation ruled that the transfer had been irregular. Juventus were docked points for the three games Rosetta had played for them. Without this penalization, Juventus would have won the northern league. The scandal had effectively cost them the championship. Furious at this decision, Juventus’s management threatened to pull their team out altogether. This is a unique scandal in Italian football history – with Juventus as the victims of an injustice. The trend since then has been for the FIAT club to be the benefactors of scandal and favouritism.
The controversial transfer was finally completed the following season, and Rosetta proved to be well worth the money. Pro Vercelli’s fans were still angry at Rosetta’s ‘betrayal’ when he came back in 1929 for a game against their team. He went on to win six championships with Juve as well as the 1934 World Cup. Rosetta’s move also highlighted the increasing power of the big clubs, and the beginning of the long decline of the strong provincial sides who had taken calcio by storm in the early part of the century. Some writers even trace the deep hatred of many Italian fans towards Juventus to the ‘Rosetta case’.
Fascism and Football
Italian fascism had been created in 1919 from a ragbag group of nationalists, ex-socialists and futurist artists. By 1922 the violent anti-socialism of the fascists had destroyed the nation’s powerful socialist and trade union movement through the use of systematic violence, with the support of many ordinary middle-class citizens and the backing of big business. Their next prize was the state itself. In October 1922 fascist leader Benito Mussolini led a ‘March on Rome’. The idea was to frighten the fragile liberal elites, and the King, into submission. It worked. Meekly, in the face of the threat of an illegal armed insurrection, the King made the head of that insurrection prime minister. Mussolini was to remain in power for the next 21 years. By 1926, all vestiges of democracy had been wiped out through repressive laws and brutal violence. A dictatorship was in place. Opposition parties were dissolved, their leaders arrested or forced into exile, or murdered.
Football went on, regardless. Fascism was to see Italy become, officially, the greatest football team in the world, and the national league reach levels of popularity that challenged all other sports and pastimes. Under Mussolini, calcio became Italy’s national sport, new stadiums were built in most Italian cities and the national league became a reality. During the Duce’s reign, Italy won two world cups and an Olympic gold medal. Fascism was good for Italian football, and football was good for fascism. Individual fascists also made their mark on the game, as with the infamous events which closed the 1925 championship.
The first ‘theft’. Bologna, Genoa and the 1925 playoff final
In 1925, as Italy teetered on the brink of absolute dictatorship, fascism made its first, direct intervention into the football world. Leandro Arpinati had been the local leader of the fascist squads who roamed the Bolognese countryside and city in the post-war period. Using batons, guns and castor oil, these gangs wrought havoc as they ‘brought order’ to a socialist region. With the ascent of the fascists to power and the progressive move towards dictatorship the violence was toned down. It was no longer needed. Most people were too scared to protest, or had fled.
The 1924–25 season witnessed a titanic struggle between Bologna – Arpinati’s team – and Genoa. There were no penalty shoot-outs, so drawn games were simply replayed. Five playoffs were needed to decide the fate of the championship. The third game in this series – played in Milan on 7 June 1925 – proved to be the most dramatic and controversial match in the short history of calcio. A massive crowd of some 20,000 fans turned up, including Arpinati himself, and many threatened to spill onto the pitch. Giovanni Mauro, lawyer and ex-player for both Inter and Milan, was the referee. One of the most authoritative figures in the game, he had been an influential member of various committees for over ten years, whilst continuing to officiate in important matches.
William Garbutt’s Genoa were 2–0 up by half-time and the title seemed theirs. Midway through the second half, Bologna were on the attack when a close-range shot came in towards the Genoa goal. The goalkeeper spread himself, and Mauro gave a corner to Bologna. At that point, there was a pitch invasion, led by a group of black-shirted fascists. Arpinati stayed in the stands. The referee was surrounded for at least fifteen minutes. In the end – scared, it is said – he changed his decision and gave a goal. Bologna then ‘equalized’ with eight minutes left, but Genoa refused to accept the draw and play extra-time. Under federation rules, after the pitch invasion the game (and therefore the championship) should have been awarded to Genoa. However, Mauro, under pressure from Arpinati, wrote a bland report which mentioned the pitch invasion, but assigned no blame for it. The federation ordered yet another playoff.
The fourth final was played in Turin on 5 July, and ended in another draw. Genoa and Bologna fans clashed at the city’s Porta Nuova station after the game, and gunshots were fired from the Bologna train. Most reports mention either two or four shots, but some put the number as high as twenty, and the fascist daily paper at the time wrote of ‘quite a few revolver rounds’. At least two Genoa fans were injured, and one was taken to hospital. Bologna received a small fine, but the incidents caused national outrage, a long inquiry by the federation and a debate in Parliament. The federation decided on yet another game in Turin – this time with no crowd. However, the city’s authorities refused to give permission for the match to take place.32 Football had become a public-order problem.
The drama came to an end in August with a game behind closed doors on the outskirts of Milan at 7.30 in the morning. More than a month had passed since the violent events of Turin, and more than two months since the bizarre ‘no-goal’ game in Milan. Most of the Genoa team were called back from their holidays to play. The press was ordered to keep the location of the game secret, or to pretend it was in Turin. In the ‘crowd’ there were a few journalists, some club officials and assorted locals. The whole pitch was surrounded by carabinieri on horseback. Bologna won, 2–0, despite having one man sent off just four minutes into the second half, and another towards the end for ‘insulting his opponents after a goal’.
Bologna’s all-Italian team duly won their first championship, the national playoff with the southern champions being the usual formality, but in Genoa and elsewhere this success would always be known as ‘the great theft’. As film-maker Giuliano Montaldo wrote in the 1990s, ‘It is hard to believe now but before the war this was the main talking point at the Marassi [Genoa’s ground]. The wound has only been healed in the last twenty years. Before that, when we said “Bologna” we meant “the thieves”.’ The sense of injustice was exacerbated by the rest of the club’s history as Genoa were never to win another scudetto. The team was thus denied its tenth championship, an honour that gives clubs the right to sew a special star on their shirts. Inter and Milan currently have one star and Juventus have two.33 Genoa have never got close to their star again and have been stuck on nine championships for eighty years. As is to be expected, Bologna’s version of events is rather different. Fan websites hint at a ‘hole in the goal net’ which would explain the events of that day and leave us