LUCIANO MOGGI, the former general manager of Juventus helping the police with their inquiries in the Italian match-fixing scandal, deserves some sort of prize for his continued, selfless work in upholding the image of his countrymen abroad.

Here he is, allegedly speaking about a rival manager who had dared to question Moggi’s influence over Serie A: “We need to deal with him, we need to beat him up. We need to make him haemorrhage, that’s what we need to do. We’ll invent something, we’ll mess with some of his players.”

Now, come on, that’s magnificent, no? Just when his government is destroying centuries of stereotyping by at last locking up the Sicilian mafia, along comes the bald, weasel-faced Moggi in his dark sunglasses and bracelets to reinvoke the eternal spirit of Don Corleone.

The sheer scale of the Italian scandal is astonishing. Aside from Moggi, who resigned his post last weekend, there are charges against 40 other Serie A officials and a bunch of referees. The grand old lady of Turin may well find herself stripped of her past two league titles and possibly relegated amid accusations of bribery, intimidation and kidnapping. The whole business has not made much of a splash over here, perhaps because, cynically, the public assumes that every strata of Italian public life is wholly corrupt and that football is hardly likely to be any different. Further, Serie A is not what it was even a decade ago; crowds are down and the top international players shun it for La Liga and the Premiership.

But none of this should stop us from enjoying Moggi’s moment of glory. Here he is again, talking to Paolo Bergamo, one of Serie A’s two referee selectors and complaining with great verve and spirit about referees, and in particular Pierluigi Collina and Roberto Rosetti, being too “objective”, as he put it: “If you don’t punish Rosetti and Collina, all the other refs will feel entitled to do as they please. We don’t need them breaking our balls.”

Quite aside from procuring friendly refs and “punishing” decent ones, Moggi’s club has been accused of getting key opposition players booked the week before they were due to play Juventus. In the 2004-05 season, 25 players picked up their bans in the week before they faced Juventus. Here’s journalist Tony Damascelli allegedly caught in conversation with Moggi after two Bologna defenders received bookings that banned them from facing Juventus the following week:

“Great job! You took out half of their back four!” There has even been the frankly hilarious allegation that the highlights of games shown on the Italian equivalent of Match of the Day were apparently doctored to portray the Juventus performances in a better light.

What is not so clear to me is whether or not Signor Moggi’s tactics have also been employed when Juventus played in European competitions. It may well be harder to nobble foreign referees who are not actually part of your private fiefdom, but Juventus may have thought it worth a try, the financial rewards being so enormous. So should Juventus be allowed to play in the Champions League while these allegations are being investigated? Or, indeed, any other Italian club? The chairmen of Lazio and Fiorentina have been implicated, to a lesser degree, in the same scandal. Last year, Genoa, the Serie B champions, were demoted to Serie C1 after fixing their final match against Venezia. A player’s agent was caught leaving the offices of Genoa’s president with about £170,000 in a suitcase.

All of this stuff has allowed Milan, owned by the honest, decent and incorruptible Silvio Berlusconi, to appear whiter than white. The Internazionale coach Roberto Mancini, meanwhile, insisted that Italian matches had been routinely fixed for “years” and added, as though it were necessary: “This is the most serious matter ever heard of in world football.”

So, what will be the response of Fifa and Uefa? Strong-willed, decisive and punitive, do you suppose? Previous international investigations (involving Inter in the 1960s and Juventus in the 1970s) resulted in the Italian clubs happily being cleared of any wrongdoing.

OUR OWN referees, meanwhile — and those from elsewhere on the Continent — seem to be merely incompetent, rather than corrupt. Which is, I suppose, marginally preferable. This will be of scant consolation, though, to Thierry Henry and Arsène Wenger this weekend. For conspiracy theorists, though, there does seem to be a certain geographical pattern emerging, vis-à-vis the referees, when English clubs — or indeed the national team — lose controversially on foreign territory. I had always assumed that the Norwegians, Finns, Swedes and so on were about the last people in Europe to hold any sort of affection for the English — but you would not think so, watching Arsenal’s defeat by Barcelona last week or Chelsea’s capitulation to the same team in the Champions League at the Nou Camp last season. But in both of these cases it was surely a simple case of incompetence, which may provoke Luciano Moggi to rewrite the famous verse of Humbert Wolfe:

One cannot bribe, on bended knee
The Scandinavian referee.
But seeing what the clown will do
Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

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