THERE ARE 58 million people living in Italy but it’s a small world. Italians call it Italietta, a pejorative term implying that the control of the country is in the hands of a select gang of unscrupulous people. For almost a month now, Italians have been learning, with bitterness, just how small their country is. Football is at the centre of the scandal and the lead role is played brilliantly by Luciano Moggi.

Moggi is comic-book bad. His put-downs are awesome, especially because of his trademark droopy eyelids. When he smiles, his whole face sparkles, but he does “angry” with whispers and shouts. This is a former station master nicknamed Paletta (“lollipop man”), a small-time fixer who reached the summit of power: he was until two weeks ago director-general of Juventus, the Rolls-Royce of Italian football teams.

You know the story by now: he was a phone-slinger from down south. He won games from the stands, kicking ass instead of leather. Juventus were systematically favoured by hand-picked referees (“see also what’s not there sometimes” was one instruction relayed to a referee). It was favoured by a mathematical usage of yellow and red cards against their future opponents. Surprise, surprise: Serie A was more bent than the Charlton attack.

It’s hard not to scream through embittered lips that “we told you so”. For years it has been a running joke in Italy. We whingers who stood in the stands for Parma-Juventus matches had felt hard done by for years: Parma reduced to nine men, another Del Piero penalty, another Parma goal disallowed. We felt convinced something whiffed but were repeatedly told by TV hosts (who, it now emerges, also colluded with Lucky Luciano) that we were paranoid.

Markets as well as matches were allegedly fixed. The world was so small that Moggi twice employed Marcello Lippi (now national manager) as “technical commissariat” (manager) at Juventus. Moggi’s son works with Lippi’s son at Gea. Gea is the sports agency that represents almost 300 footballers. It controls more than 17 per cent of the estimated transfer market. Moggi even had Giuseppe Pisanu, then the Minister of the Interior, pleading on the phone for help to save a team in his constituency. Moggi, of course, did the trick.

This political and financial involvement in football means that the actual game defies gravity. Only in Italietta is it possible to win three promotions in two seasons (Fiorentina). It’s never clear at the end of each season which division your team will play in next time round because no one’s quite sure where the chairman has gone: he could be in Santo Domingo (Gaucci), in prison (Cragnotti), on trial (Tanzi) or caught red-handed giving a suitcase of cash to a fixer (Preziosi).

This time, though, the scandal seems bigger. The Juventus share price has plummeted by 40 per cent in less than a month and investors are scratching their heads at quite how tawdry the club’s bar code black-and-white stripes are. Italy goes into the World Cup having been forced to withdraw its refereeing representative; Franco Carraro, the president of their FA, has resigned. The national coach, captain and goalkeeper are under investigation. Even by Italietta standards, this is quite a crisis.

What happened next is interesting. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the head of the Catholic Church in Italy, tried to sdrammatizzare (make a molehill out of a mountain): “I wouldn’t want there to be a change of register,” he said this week, warning us away from outright revolution. “Dissension grows with the grain”, whatever that means. Others step forward to calm things down, not least because the investigation is now under the command of Francesco Saverio Borrelli, a man who spearheaded the Tangentopoli political corruption clean-up . . . and that means Berlusconi is both happy and nervous: his AC Milan might enjoy Juventus being stripped of their two most recent championships and dropping to Serie B, but the return of an empowered magistrature makes him understandably a little twitchy.

There’s so much momentum to the story that every hour new accusations, transcripts and confessions emerge: Moggi was apparently able to bounce players into the national team and thereby increase his market assets. He could get fixtures altered. He could even soften up the opposition because some of them were bound to be Juve boys on loan anyway.

But if you didn’t return his calls you would be frozen out: Fabrizio Miccoli and Enzo Maresca, two of the brightest young talents in Italy, were publicly humiliated by Moggi and now play in Portugal and Spain respectively. There are others: Zidane, Henry, Di Vaio and Davids. World-class players were rudely shunted if they didn’t adhere to Moggismo.

Most Italians won’t consider Moggi an evil man: he’s accused of being a bad sport, a jolly rotter, but he’s not at the time of writing accused of any crime. But what really riles about Moggi is that he knew nothing about the sport. Playing football in Italy has always been a pleasure because of its innocence and aspiration. You play at dusk on small pitches overlooked by the parish priest. If you can’t afford the pitch you play on the cobbles, dribbling past Vespas. Now that all seems romantic drivel. In Moggi’s world sport is a stitch-up played with calculator and cash till.

Tobias Jones is the author of The Dark Heart of Italy

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