AND THE winner is . . . Internazionale. While Juventus, Fiorentina and Lazio are cast into the outer darkness of Serie B, and Milan, although allowed to remain in Serie A, will do so only with a heavy points deduction and exclusion from the Champions League, Inter are untouched.

As things stand, the club that has failed for so long to win the scudetto seems to have been given a free run, and indeed will claim themselves rightful champions of Italy for the past two seasons.

Theirs has been a story of unachievement. Inter have not won the title since 1988-89, though in the ensuing years they have three times been runners-up. Their transfer policy has been erratic, with a succession of excellent players failing to impress in their colours, although the club’s owner and president Massimo Moratti has good cause to feel aggrieved at the ungrateful way in which Brazil’s Ronaldo responded to his generosity. His knee injury prevented him playing more than seven league games in 1999-2000. The next season he did not play at all. After a protracted rebellion he left for Real Madrid.

Another relative failure at Inter, where he was never properly used, was Dennis Bergkamp, who eventually decamped to Arsenal. The Brazilian striker Adriano was signed in 2001, before he was shuffled off on loan to Fiorentina after just eight games and a single goal. Yet in 2004 Inter bought him back from Parma.

On the plus side, Argentina’s Juan Sebastian Veron has been rehabilitated at the club, while the Italy international Christian Vieri did well enough in attack.

Nobody, surely, could be happier with their sudden promotion to the status of title favourites, after so long being the target of fans, than Moratti. No longer can he be seen as figlio di papa, daddy’s boy, the disparaging term for the spoilt son of a powerful father. It is a tribute to Moratti that not a hint of blame for the current imbroglio attaches to the club he inherited, eventually, from Angelo, his father.

Under Angelo, Inter flourished in the 1960s, winning Italian championships and European Cups. But under his leadership, as an exhaustive Sunday Times investigation carried out by the American Keith Botsford and myself disclosed, Inter made a habit in the 1960s of bribing, or trying to bribe, referees. Notably those involved with European Cup semi-final second legs at the San Siro, in 1964, 1965 and 1966.

Our investigation began not with Inter but with Juventus. An honest referee, Francisco Marques Lobo, reported that Juventus in 1973 had sent the Hungarian fixer Dezso Solti, henchman of Juventus’s general manager, Italo Allodi, to offer him a bribe to fix the coming European Cup semi-final second leg against Derby County at the Baseball Ground. Lobo refused, reported it to his referees’ association, and was summoned by Uefa’s disciplinary sub-committee to Zurich. Once there, he was not even confronted with Solti.

Uefa subsequently sent Juventus a letter thanking them for their evidence and clearing them. Juve’s only “punishment” was a brief suspension for Solti.

The case, however, was the tip of the iceberg. For it was at Inter that Allodi had been secretary, and it was there that the worst corruption occurred. When Borussia Dortmund came to the San Siro in 1964, Inter’s Luis Suarez viciously kicked the German right-half on the knee, forcing him to leave the field. Inter went on to win the game and the final.

In 1965, it was Liverpool who suffered. After winning the first leg 3-1 at Anfield, they lost 3-0 in Milan. Two of the goals were preposterous. One came directly from an indirect free kick, the other when Peiro kicked the ball out of the hands of Liverpool goalkeeper Tommy Lawrence.

But in 1966 there was at last an honest referee who refused to be bought. Hungary’s Gyorgy Vadas was given the usual pre-match treatment, taken by Solti to visit Moratti and offered huge bribes but he refused.

At half-time an infuriated Solti verbally abused Vadas. Real went on to win the European Cup. Vadas never reported what had happened and, like Lobo, never refereed another international game. It must, then, surely be a tribute to Massimo Moratti that his club has not been cited in the current scandals. He has run his club, however poor its results, in a decent, straightforward manner.

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