YOU park your expensive car in a dangerous part of town and leave it unlocked, with the keys in the ignition. It gets stolen. Who’s to blame? The thief who took your car or you for having given him the opportunity to steal it? Ethically, of course, the thief is to blame. But try going to the local police station to report your car stolen and tell them you left it unattended in a dodgy neighbourhood with the keys in plain sight. If they’re polite they’ll wait until you’ve left before exploding into a belly laugh. The assumption is that there will always be someone willing to steal your car.
Italians take the “real world” with them on to the football pitch at youth level. And because it’s real, the rewards go to the winners, not the nice guys or those who play by the rules.
It mirrors life. English kids — traditionally — have been spared that little life lesson, that you can get to the top by cheating as long as you don’t get caught. Italians, however, are taught that many succeed by cheating, which is why they have to be careful not to be cheated themselves. When I was growing up, I was not encouraged to take a dive, yet I picked things up in subtle ways. Back then, many did not view such tricks for what they are: cheating. They were seen as clever or, as we say in Italy, “furbo”.
When an opponent won a penalty against us by diving or making a meal of slight contact, the attitude among players and coaches wasn’t to condemn him for cheating but to point the finger at our own defenders for allowing it to happen. “He was clever!” we were told. “He tricked you and he tricked the referee.” We were engaging in footballing realpolitik.
Machiavelli famously argued that “the end justifies the means”, which marked him out as the epitome of cynicism and amorality. He wrote his masterpiece The Prince as a sort of manual on grabbing and maintaining power. He concluded that there were some situations in which killing or imprisoning your opponent was the smartest and safest thing to do.
So how would Machiavelli feel about cheating, diving to win a penalty, or, better yet, Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God”? He would not have a problem with it, provided you weren’t caught. So, Machiavelli’s capsule message on cheating is this: only do it when the reward far outweighs the risk.
“If I were a referee, I am 100 per cent sure that I would much rather work in England than in Italy,” says Sven-Göran Eriksson. “This country is fantastic for referees. Nobody questions their decisions and, most of all, nobody ever questions their honesty.”
He may be exaggerating a little, but we are light years away from Italy. “I’ll give you an example,” says José Mourinho. “We had the same referee twice last season and in two games, with two controversial decisions, he cost us five points. If I were in Portugal I would come out and say, ‘The referee has something against us’, so that the next time he referees us, he is already under pressure. He will want to be careful not to appear anti our team.
“Here in England, I can’t do that, because nobody remembers who he is. Nobody wants to talk about him. In Portugal I can create big problems for a referee. Here I can’t do a thing. There is much more respect for the institutions and, because of that, everybody behaves differently.” It’s refreshing to hear Mourinho candidly admit that he would “create problems” for a referee who had made two mistakes against him.
It’s one of the oldest tricks, which preys upon basic psychology.
The two forces that most shaped the Italian political and social landscape between 1945 and 1990 were the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party, both of which preach helping one another and working towards the “common good”. In football this rears its head in a rather unfortunate way, particularly in Serie B where, late in the season, if a team has nothing left to play for, it will too often throw matches if its opponents need points.
When the fixture list is drawn up in the summer, the coach and general manager will get together, study the last six games and say something like: “Against so-and-so, we’re OK. If they need points, we’ll give them points, and if we need them, they’ll help us out . . .”
This is so common that late in the season many bookmakers won’t accept bets on such matches. It is taken as read that this will occur. In fact, it is seen as rude and churlish not to give your opponent the points if you don’t need them. It’s as if you’re gratuitously condemning them.
In England, things could not be more different. On the last day of the 2004-05 season, none of the relegation issues had been decided and Fulham had nothing to gain by beating Norwich City. Nothing at all. And, in fact, they had something to lose: had they allowed Norwich to win, they would have been owed a favour in future. Now (after beating them 6-0), they had nothing.
“In Italy at youth level you learn to be clever and tactically savvy,” says Marcello Lippi. “You play on Saturday and spend the whole week preparing for that one game. We are obsessed with results. It’s not like that in other countries. Elsewhere, they worry about playing and improving.”
Because we care more about the results than we do about the football, we are good at winning. You only have to look at the results in youth competition. Italy have won five of the last ten European Under-21 Championships. Contrast that with England, who have failed to reach even the semi-finals in the last 20 years.
But as Mourinho points out, the hatred felt for gamesmanship is so strong in England that many foreign players who used to dive change after arriving. “You are pushed to behave differently here, you don’t really have a choice,” says Mourinho. “If you cheat you have no chance of being admired. Even your own supporters will dislike you. So what do you do? Well, the way is not to be stupid, but not to cheat either. If there is a foul, you have to fall. I call it ‘helping the referee to make a decision’. That’s not cheating.
“It’s fantastic [in England]. The objective of the referees is to finish 11 versus 11. In other countries, their objective is to keep control. They don’t care about the quality of the game or the spectacle on the pitch. What they want is to protect themselves and, to do this, they impose discipline by pulling out cards. It doesn’t matter to them if it’s ten versus ten, nine versus nine or even eight versus eight. In England, the referee has much more discretion — he can even go against the rules sometimes.”
“I prefer English referees,” says Arsène Wenger. “I don’t like constant interruptions. In fact, the more a referee uses his whistle, the more he is encouraging diving and cheating. It’s best to let the game flow.”
English fair play and sportsmanship is more than just a cliché. In terms of ethical football culture there is no doubt that Italy has more to learn from England than vice-versa.
- “SOME managers in this country, not just the English ones, don’t do well in Europe because they never change,” Sir Alex Ferguson says. “We [United] do better in Europe than other sides because we change with every game. Tactically, we always adjust to our opponents.”
The English game has been very good at importing foreign ideas, but the last area to fall is tactics, where the English 4-4-2 is the system of choice. Teams here are so used to facing 4-4-2 that when opponents vary things they struggle. An example of this are Arsenal, whose own 4-4-2 is nominal, as Thierry Henry moves out to the left and Dennis Bergkamp drops off.
“If the opposing right back goes forward, Henry goes into the space behind him and [Robert] Pires cuts inside,” Ferguson says. “This works very well, which is why I’m sure Arsenal would be happy if everybody stayed 4-4-2. It’s why some teams are starting to change when they face Arsenal. We always keep the right-back position filled. Henry needs space to play. If you give it to him, he destroys you.”
José Mourinho agrees. “If I have a triangle in midfield, [Claude] Makelele behind and two others just in front, I will always have an advantage against a pure 4-4-2 where the central midfielders are side by side. There is nothing a pure 4-4-2 can do to stop things. That’s why I think the popularity of 4-4-2 will come to an end in England. It has to. It does not work against teams like us.”
