Calcio: A History of Italian Football. John Foot

       CHAPTER 3 Teams and Cities: Turin

      The Old Lady. Juventus

      ‘The team has followed the evolution of the nation’

      UMBERTO AGNELLI

      ‘Juventus is a team which unites everyone: from intellectuals to workers…it is a universal team, a footballing Esperanto…and then there are the fans, the real fans, from Sicily to the Aosta Valley. There are eleven million of us. Eleven million’

      DARWIN PASTORIN¹

      In Florence you can buy stickers which read: zona anti-gobbizzata – ‘hunchback-free zone’. Many shops and even houses carry these stickers, which state that their properties have been ‘de-hunchbacked’. For many of the millions of tourists who pass through the city every year, these stickers must be difficult to interpret. Do the Florentines hate hunchbacks? Have hunchbacks been banned from the historic capital of the Renaissance? The answer to these questions is no, the stickers in question are linked to one of the great modern footballing rivalries. Hunchbacks are seen as lucky in Italy, and Juventus are referred to in this way because, according to Fiorentina fans, they have been extremely lucky over the years. Thus, Juventus followers and the team itself are gobbi. When Florence has signed Juventus players, they have sometimes been symbolically ‘de-hunchbacked’ by their own fans in a strange ceremony. But Florence and, to a lesser extent, Rome are exceptions in Italy’s footballing map, as relatively Juve-free zones. Very few parts of the peninsula have been ‘de-hunchbacked’ and Juventini (Juve fans) are everywhere in Italy. These contrasting passions have created many other nicknames for the club, beyond that of i gobbi. Journalists often call the club the old lady – la vecchia signora – as a sign of respect. Other nicknames are less complimentary – the thieves being another favourite.

      As you travel across southern Italy, it is entirely normal to see entire teams of young players decked out in Juve shirts in kickabouts, hundreds of miles from Turin. Juventus have far more fans outside Turin than in their home-town. When they play in Sicily, or Calabria, or Milan, or Sardinia, they attract – and have always attracted – sell-out crowds. For the industrialist and long-time owner of the club, Gianni Agnelli, ‘in the south people dreamed of going to see Juventus’. The reasons for this extraordinary fan-base are both simple, and complicated. Success breeds support: Juve have won the Serie A championship 28 times, nearly twice as often as their closest rivals Milan and Inter. Moreover, Juventus were extremely successful as calcio became a national sport. In the early 1930s, coinciding with the 1934 World Cup victory at home, they won five successive championships.² This was also a time when radio and the sports press began to ‘nationalize’ Italian sport coverage. In the early 1960s, a spectacular new Juventus team fused perfectly with a new generation of post-war fans.

      Between 1951 and 1967, Turin’s population rose from 719,300 to 1,124,714. Many of these terroni immigrants – a racist term used by northerners towards southerners – were already, or soon came to be, Juventus fans. Goffredo Fofi, who wrote the best study of southern immigration to Turin in the 1960s, noted that ‘during a Juventus-Palermo match, there were many enthusiastic immigrant Sicilian fans whose sons, by now, like every respectable FIAT worker, backed the home team’.³ When the immigrants returned home, for holidays, weddings or funerals, they took their footballing ‘faith’ with them. Turin was New York for these emigrants, and its myths (wealth, success, modernity) were transferred – including la Juve – to those aspirant migrants still at home. As one immigrant has since said: ‘all of us became Juventini’.⁴ Darwin Pastorin, one of Italy’s most brilliant football writers, has described the Juventus of the 1970s as ‘proletarian’.⁵ Southern migrants were particularly proud of the southern players in their team – defender Antonio Cuccureddu from Sardinia, winger Franco Causio from Apulia and above all Sicilian striker Pietro Anastasi – who was known as the ‘white Pelé’ but also as u turcu: ‘the dark one’.⁶ Marxist writers have interpreted the fandom of FIAT’s southern workers more negatively, as a collective safety valve for the frustration and anger produced on the production line. As Gerhard Vinnai – student of Adorno and Marcuse – wrote in the 1970s, ‘the goals on a football field are the own-goals of the dominated’.⁷

      In the 1970s and 1980s yet another generation of Juventini were born – the children of these immigrants – who identified with the glamour and the style of the team’s victories. Juventus’s achievement also coincided with Italian success. The 1982 World Cup winning team contained seven Juve players. The Juventus name also helped. For Gianni Agnelli ‘not having the name of a city has brought us great popularity. It makes us national.’ Juve never went through a slump long enough to lose them fans. Only three times have they seemed about to lose their primacy: in the second half of the 1940s, to Torino, in the first half of the 1960s, to Inter, and in the first half of the 1990s, to Milan. Each time, they have come back, stronger than ever, to reaffirm their pre-eminence and power.

      Juventus stamped their authority on Italian football in the 1930s, winning five consecutive championships with a team made up of South American stars with Italian citizenship and many local players. Juve used their money and influence to buy in the best players and coaches, becoming the national team. After suffering the humiliation of Torino dominance in the 1940s, Juventus struggled to rebuild in the 1950s. It was only with the arrival of another two foreign stars – Omar Sivori and John Charles – in the latter part of the decade that Juve began to dictate things again. After a period when Milan was the capital of world football – throughout the 1960s – Juventus built another ‘cycle’ of dominance in the 1970s and 1980s. Under Giovanni Trapattoni – a pragmatic Milanese coach and brilliant man-manager – Juve dominated for more than a decade. An impregnable defence with Dino Zoff in goal and Gentile, Scirea and Cabrini – was complemented by superb ball-winners such as Beppe Furino (who won a record eight titles between 1972 and 1984) and Marco Tardelli in midfield. Up front, these teams were blessed with skilful ball players and deadly strikers, from Paolo Rossi to ‘the baron’, Franco Causio. Juve also bought the best foreigners – Liam Brady, Zibi Boniek and above all Michel Platini. They rarely went wrong in the transfer market, or in their choice of manager.

      A final ‘cycle’ of victories was built up by Paul Newman lookalike Marcello Lippi, who added another column to the Juve pantheon, again with a combination of stern defence, ball-winners and skill in midfield, including Zinedine Zidane at his peak, and free-scorers up front, from Roberto Baggio and Fabrizio Ravanelli to Gianluca Vialli and Alessandro Del Piero. Lippi took control of the team in two separate spells, winning five titles in seven years, as well as the Intercontinental Cup, dramatically snatched by fan idol Del Piero in 1996.

      Only one trophy consistently eluded Juventus, so much so that it has come to be seen as cursed by fans and players at the club. For a team with 28 championships, more than half of them since the setting-up of the European Cup, Juventus’s record of just two victories is a desperately poor showing. In seven finals, Juventus have lost five times. In 1973, they were outclassed by Johan Cruyff’s Ajax. Ten years later, after going through the whole tournament unbeaten, they fell to an outrageous long-shot from Hamburg midfielder Felix Magath. Anti-Juve