Juve and City, the queens of globalized football are naked

Let me flee now, preferably drunk, before the Super League becomes a reality. I read consultancy firm A22’s ten points manifesto for a Super League with sixty to eighty clubs, and I agreed with Kevin Miles, big boss of the Football Supporters’ Association, who called them “the spasms of a dead body”. Saying that football is in crisis is as trivial as saying that beer is carbonated, but as true as saying that I love blondes. From here to transform it into a confused sideshow to save the ass of the big ones in an economic crisis, we’re going through it.

Juventus in Italy and Manchester City here are showing the world that the king of globalized football is naked. Above all, the story of the English club owned by the sheikhs has opened the eyes of all European Pollyannas who are ready to turn a blind eye to fraud and false accounting because the interest of the fans comes first. The Premier League has asked for the relegation of the team coached by Pep Guardiola, if it really happens I’m going to dance naked in Trafalgar Square, and I’m sure no one will try to argue that the Citizens deserved it on the pitch. In the meantime, however, I’m trying to resist the recipes of those who think they know how to save football by changing it. And the more I listen and read the more I fear it will all end up like that buffoonery from the NBA, where the game of a game was interrupted the other day to celebrate LeBron James’ record for points scored in his career: photographers and cameramen on the court, friends and relatives embracing him, the corpse of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar clapping, all while it should have been a real match, not a friendly. In the American basketball championship, the show comes first and then the sport, the day when the same happens in football I will give myself to armed struggle, know that.

In the meantime, someone take the fiasco away from Aurelio De Laurentiis: the president of Napoli, in perpetual excitement for the scudetto at hand, said a few days ago that football is old, having the average age of a guest of the Sanremo Festival, and that it should be improved by changing some rules. As? Abolishing the interval and taking a two-minute break every 10 to allow the coaches to intervene; increasing substitutions; giving 10 minutes of exclusion from the game for each yellow card and 30 in case of a red card; by mounting small cameras on footballers’ heads, shoes or knees. The excuse is always the same: young people are bored, they only watch the highlights, play video games. Ideas like this are the result of a sport in which the positive idea of ​​belonging has been completely lost: to a club, to a tradition, to colours. That’s why he finds the farewell of a Zaniolo or a Skriniar inconceivable, to keep in mind the recent escapes from that league dump that is Serie A. Those who belong – not just supporters – know that love gets boring, gets pissed off, you kick your seat and run away from the stadium into the street ahead of time, you come back, you travel for hours. Let the grand viziers of football think about this, not about transforming the most beautiful sport in the world into a PlayStation of muscles and sweat.