Italy PM Monti urges halt to football
Reuters - Tuesday 29 May 2012, 18:48
Italian professional football should
be halted for two or three years to get over the match-fixing
scandal which has spattered its image, Prime Minister Mario
Monti said on Tuesday.
The football federation and several clubs rejected the idea,
which is Monti's personal opinion and is not binding.
The widening scandal has seen a number of top players
arrested, the coach of this season's title-winning club placed
under investigation and the national team training headquarters
raided by police.
"It's particularly sad when a world which should be an
expression of the highest values - sport, youth, competition,
fairness - turns out to be a mass of foul play, falsehood and
demagoguery," Monti said at a news conference with visiting
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
"This isn't a government proposal, but I wonder if it
wouldn't be a good idea to suspend the game for two or three
years."
The idea is unlikely to gain much traction in Italy, a
country which is both obsessed by soccer and inured to an
apparently endless series of financial, political and sexual
scandals in recent years.
"I understand and share the bitterness of Prime Minister
Monti," Italian soccer federation president Giancarlo Abete said
in a statement.
"But to stop the championship would mean humiliating all of
football, penalising the majority who work honestly and it would
also mean the loss of thousands of jobs. It is not the
solution."
Monti's suggestion underscores the growing disgust over an
affair which has shone a harsh light on the pervasive corruption
at many levels of Italian society.
"It's so easy for the great majority of citizens to see the
origin of all Italy's problems in politics," Monti said. "It's a
big mistake."
In the latest phase of an operation which began last year,
police placed Antonio Conte, coach of championship-winning
Juventus, under investigation on Monday over allegations
relating to a 2011 match between previous club Siena and Novara.
They also arrested Stefano Mauri, captain of Lazio - one of
the two big clubs in Rome, and raided the Italian national
team's training base at Coverciano after placing Italy defender
Domenico Criscito under investigation.
Criscito was then dropped from the squad for the upcoming
European Championships.
"TALKING RUBBISH"
The scandal echoes earlier match-fixing affairs in 1980 and
2006, further tarnishing the image of Italian football which has
long lost the pre-eminent position in the European game it
enjoyed during the 1990s.
With less than two weeks before the start of Euro 2012 in
Poland and Ukraine, Italian fans may draw comfort from the fact
that previous scandals preceded Italy's victories in the 1982
and 2006 World Cups.
Prosecutors believe an international gambling ring paid
players to throw matches deliberately. Dozens of current and
former players in teams ranging from the Serie A top division
down to the lower leagues may have been involved.
However, reaction from clubs has been largely defensive and
the head of one Serie A club said Monti was "talking rubbish".
"Before saying we need to stop playing football he should
think about his own problems and everything he is destroying and
closing down with his laws," said Maurizio Zamparini, president
of Palermo.
"Monti is showing his ignorance because professional
football clubs pay 800 million euros to the state
every year."
The scandal comes at a time when Italian clubs, like many
others in Europe, are struggling to make ends meet while paying
astronomical salaries to their top players.
According to a report in business daily Il Sole 24 Ore on
Tuesday, losses at Italian clubs totalled 428 million euros
during the 2010/11 season.