How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer [reading eggs books txt] 📗

1999, the daily sports paper Gazzetta dello Sport exposed that the club AS Roma had given each of Italy’s top referees a $13,500 Rolex—an event dubbed “Night of the

Watches.” Not one of the referees, the report revealed, had voluntarily returned the gift.

Undeniably, the benefits of friendly refereeing accrue to Juventus and Milan more than any other clubs in Italy. And in a way, that’s not shocking. Big, historically dominant teams universally seem to get the benefit of the doubt. But Italian manipulation of referees is a far more deliberate a¤air. Juventus and Milan take two very di¤erent paths to winning generous treat-HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

ment, and these two di¤erent modes don’t just reveal contrasting organizations. They reveal critical di¤erences between their owners—the most powerful forces in postwar Italy and representatives of two very di¤erent styles of oligarchy.

Juve is a toy of the Agnelli family, owners of Fiat and of a substantial percentage of the Milan stock exchange. As much as anyone in Europe, the Agnellis represent the preglobalization style of ruling class that dominated much of the Latin world for the twentieth century. Even though the Agnellis are industrialists, at the height of their powers they behaved like the landowning families that ruled Central America. They did little to advertise their influence, preferring to hide behind the curtains, while they quietly controlled the politicians who regulated their business empires. Their shyness contributed to a longstanding problem in Italian politics: Nobody could locate the true centers of power, a condition that exacerbated the longstanding Italian penchant for worrying about conspiracies.

Despite the system’s obtuseness, it has become clear that it worked like this: a coalition of northern industrialists, corrupt Christian Democratic politicians, and the southern Mafia ran the country. Politicians lived o¤

bribes from industrialists, and the industrialists survived on the state contracts they received in return. Only with the “clean hands” anti-corruption investigations of the early nineties, and the indictment of hundreds of politicians, did this system topple.

For most of the postwar era, Juventus has had the same sort of dominance as the Agnellis, broken only for a short spell in the sixties. It became a kind of national squad for Italians, with more followers scattered across the peninsula than any other team. But in the eighties, Juve found its stranglehold seriously challenged by AC Milan. The arrivistes owed their new success almost entirely to their flamboyant owner, Silvio Berlusconi. Within the course of two decades, he built his own massive empire, starting with real estate, extending to television, newspapers, advertising, and insurance. Eight years after buying the club in 1986, he rode its success to the pinnacle of power, the Italian premier-ship, an oªce he now occupies for the second time.

According to Berlusconi’s critics on the left, his tangle of interests represents a danger to democracy, the harbinger of the new dictator: the Citizen Kane media mogul who can manipulate and control public discourse to ensure such profits and power that he will never be e¤ectively challenged. And in the globalized economy, they argue, the media has so much more power. No longer do these moguls really have to compete with state-owned television networks, or fight for market share against state companies, which have been enfeebled by privatization and deregulation. Now that moguls like Silvio Berlusconi can operate on a global stage, they can develop economies of scale that make them even more oligarchic and politically untouchable.

But there are key di¤erences that separate the new oligarchs from their forerunners. Because they trade shares of their companies on stock markets and cut deals with multinational corporations, the current breed of mogul has a harder time obscuring wealth and influence. And even if they could, such humility would HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE NEW OLIGARCHS

play counter to type. Like Berlusconi, they are new money inclined to flaunt their riches. Consequently, everyone knows and understands their conflicts of interest. Of course, this doesn’t excuse the sins of the new moguls—and it certainly doesn’t excuse Berlusconi’s bribes, manipulation of government to promote his own interests, and other alleged criminalities—but it makes them more transparent, and in an odd way a democratic advance over the old regimes.

II.

When Berlusconi bought Milan, it was a team with a glorious past that had stumbled onto hard times. He made it great again, by infusing it with flash, foreign players, and his nose for spectacle. Juventus has an entirely di¤erent style. They have always been great and exuded the understatement of old money. Its owners, the Agnellis, are often referred to as the “unoªcial Italian monarchy.” Where Berlusconi tries to cast a populist persona, the Agnellis prefer a patrician one. The cravat-wearing, late paterfamilias Gianni Agnelli was the dashing European playboy par excellence. He cavorted with Jackie Kennedy and Rita Hayworth. He spent years tuning out Italy’s postwar devastation, lounging on the Riviera.

Because the Agnellis didn’t advertise their wealth and power, it is easy to underestimate them. By one count, in the early nineties, the Agnellis influenced or controlled banking, insurance, chemicals, textiles, armaments, financial services, cement, and publishing businesses with a total market worth of about $60 billion. That’s roughly a third of the entire capitalization of the Milan stock exchange. Fiat controlled a substantial share of the Rizzoli publishing empire and important papers, including the Corriere della Sera, the New York Times of Italy. It would be odd if this much money and influence didn’t buy enormous power. According to an old joke, the role of the Italian prime minister is to polish the Agnellis’ doorknob. They considered it their right to exert influence on policy. “Industrialists are ministerial by definition,” Gianni Agnelli’s grandfather once proclaimed.

Juventus have the nickname Old Lady, an unlikely appellation for a club run by so stylish an owner as Gianni Agnelli. Despite flashy foreign stars and occasional periods of entertaining play, their style has often been an extension of their drab black-and-white uniforms. Their defensiveness and tactical obsessions leave little margin for error and much in