Task force set to probe fixing scandal
Yet there’s a certain irony that tonight’s match in Liege should feature so many characters from Juventus. At least four current players, plus one who’s about to join them, as well as three managers. Cesare Prandelli and Marco Tardelli both played for the club, while Trap guided Juve to seven titles and four European trophies.
The irony is that at the very moment when Italian football was finally hoping to wrap up its last match-fixing scandal, in which Juventus were the main culprits, a new one should be breaking out.
This time Juventus haven’t been implicated, nor indeed any top-flight clubs. Not as yet anyway. The investigations so far are almost entirely into betting on lower-league games, most of them involving very small clubs. The 16 people under arrest are almost entirely unknown to the general public, apart from Beppe Signori, three time Italian top goal scorer and once amongst the country’s most popular players.
Until recently Signori was doing the coaching course at Coverciano, Italy’s national football centre. Now he’s under house arrest and accused of being a go-between in a betting scam that could lead two of last season’s promoted sides, Atalanta and Siena, being heavily penalised and even relegated.
Signori claims he’s a fall guy, just like Atalanta captain Cristiano Doni, a veteran on the brink of retirement, who made seven appearances for Italy back in 2002. Doni is so far only “under investigation” — along with 27 others – and both his club and the Atalanta fans, never the most peaceful, have responded angrily to the allegations.
Under the rules a club implicated in any illicit acts can have between 4 and 7 points deducted for each offence. Atalanta and Siena finished 8 points and 6 points ahead of third-placed Novara, who are due to contest the play-off final against Padova over two legs on Thursday and Sunday.
The worry for Atalanta is that three of their games are under investigation, including one against Padova, where the suggestion is that Doni placed a €10,000 bet via a “trusted friend”, but more seriously that the two clubs agreed beforehand that the match should be drawn.
Suspicions were aroused because Padova missed two easy scoring opportunities towards the end of the game, and taped telephone calls apparently reveal that there was collusion.
In that case there would be serious implications for the club and its president Antonio Percassi, whose son Luca was once on Chelsea’s books and is now also on the board. Percassi, a former player who has made his fortune in the building industry, only took over the club last summer after they were relegated and an immediate return to Serie A is a financial necessity.
For the football authorities the stakes could be rather higher.
Italian football has been under a cloud ever since the 2006 match-fixing scandal, and with good reason. The evidence suggested that the game had been systematically corrupted at the highest level. But the penalties imposed were subsequently reduced and next month the Italian Football Federation has to decide whether to allow the central figure in that scandal, former Juventus director Luciano Moggi, back into the game after his five-year ban.
The worry this time is that the corruption may extend well beyond football. Collusion between clubs has existed for years, and players have made money from it, but the telephone taps indicate a conspiracy that may have been continuing for years and involve serious organised crime. The government is appointing a taskforce to investigate, but for most fans it seems like one more nail in calcio’s coffin.
