Agnelli at the FIGC is a pipe dream we don’t deserve

There is a saying, attributed to the famous Irish writer Oscar Wilde, which goes something like this:

Every success makes you an enemy; to be liked, you must be mediocre.

Certainly, the author of The Picture of Dorian Gray did not intend to refer to the world of football, which was just then seeing the first balls rolled onto British pitches, but the statement just quoted seems to fit perfectly with what has happened in this regard in our part of the world over the last twenty years.

The winners, capable of driving the movement in the early 2000s, of taking the lead in Europe in terms of turnover and of battling on equal terms with giants such as Real Madrid, Barcelona or Bayern Munich, were systematically crippled by Calciopoli, for the sole purpose of allowing the ‘likeable’ but mediocre Moratti to win something.

More recently, history has repeated itself with Andrea Agnelli, forcibly ousted from the system despite being the only enlightened Italian executive, capable of understanding, at least a decade in advance, the dangerous downward spiral our football movement had embarked upon.

The former president of Juventus had tried to warn everyone of the risks of the rapid marginalisation to which Serie A was destined in the absence of concrete action, but out of envy and crass parochialism, it was once again preferred, rather than listening to him, to construct a sporting case based on nothing, with the sole aim of removing him from the game.

With the Super League deal, Agnelli had tried to counter the enormous economic dominance of the Premier League clubs, with a mountain of money guaranteed by sponsors that the big clubs, in turn, would have showered upon the entire Italian football movement. However, even on that occasion, the choice was made to adopt a purely ideological opposition, with a system that, rather than go along with the ideas of ‘a Juventus man’, preferred to dig its own grave.

Let’s rewind the tape and try to think: with the three big northern Italian teams (and a fourth on rotation, between Napoli, Roma, Lazio or Atalanta) flush with money from the Super League, would we still be facing scenarios today where our teams are knocked out by Turkish, Norwegian and Greek opponents?

Would Italy’s top talents, like those from the rest of the world, need to seek their fortunes exclusively in the Premier League and with those three or four remaining European giants, or could they find worthy sporting and financial fulfilment in our own league as well?

Would our national team still be at such a low level that it could no longer get the better of rivals of the calibre of North Macedonia or Bosnia? Of course, no one can predict the future or imagine alternative scenarios with certainty, but, on the face of it, sawing off the branch we were sitting on simply to indulge Ceferin’s thirst for revenge and Gravina’s lust for power has not turned out to be a good deal.

Today, some are even putting forward the name of Andrea Agnelli as the next president of the FIGC. This is in all likelihood an impossible scenario, given the current system of malfeasance that governs Italian football, but even if this science-fiction hypothesis were to start turning into something concrete, I hope that Agnelli himself would refuse, without a second thought.

Italian football, which twenty years ago handed itself over to the Morattis and is now almost a private enterprise of the Inter-‘Ndrangheta system, does not, as things stand, deserve such a capable and enlightened leader. Unless, of course, we want to wipe the slate clean, punish those truly responsible and start from scratch.

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