Indebted and corrupt Italian football returns to the top of Europe. A film already seen

The football movement in Italy works as action and reaction. If we remain embarrassing in many respects, our strength is precisely knowing how to achieve a result after having hit rock bottom: we rejoice, but don’t say Renaissance

Three Italian teams in the three finals of the European cups. It hadn’t happened since 1994 and also in that case there was Inter, who won the UEFA against Salzburg. Five in the semifinals with five Italian coaches present. Numbers that sanction the rebirth of Italian football? No. This remains in debt, with a sports justice system that has not updated and is inadequate for a sport that has become industrialized, with governance, at all levels, embarrassing both from a financial and human point of view, with stadiums light years away from those we admire every time we go away, with a movement that struggles to raise young players and a national team that has failed to qualify for the last two World Cups. Yet Italian football has always been like this, focused on results, obtained when others least expected it, after hitting rock bottom. It happened in 1982 with the World Cup after the Totonero scandal two years earlier. He succeeded again in 2006 in full Calciopoli. As well as in 2021, in the post-Covid period, managing to win at the home of the English masters as underdogs. More than a football system, also made up of many good things on the field, the Italian one seemed to be a movement built on action and reaction, which brought out the best by coming out of the mud, and we’re not talking about that of the fields.