A nasty series of coincidences... or is it?

[fpb]

Within a few days, and only a few weeks before the World Cup, two legendary former Italian soccer players have been arrested for serious criminal offences and the leading club has been caught cold manipulating refereeing to its own advantage. First, phone taps proved practically beyond doubt that management of Juventus, Italy's most successful club (owned by the Agnelli family, who also own FIAT) had connived with footballing authorities to fix the assignment of particular referees to particular matches, presumably for the purpose of obtaining the right results. Then, the legendary Welsh-born striker Giorgio Chinaglia, who won Lazio's only national title in 1972-73 and is still beloved by all the white-and-blue half of Rome (Lazio and Roma are Rome's two football teams, and obviously the city is split down the middle about them), was charged with fencing stolen goods (in practice, laundering dirty money) for the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. (I now find that he was already being investigated for market rigging and insider trading on the Italian stock exchange.) And today Michele Padovano, a recent former player who had won several titles with - guess who - Juventus, was arrested along with 32 other people and charged with being a member of a gang smuggling hashish from Morocco. And this was not due to any kind of personal need or distress: as he was arrested, he was employed as director of sport for Alessandria, a respected second-division football club. I said long ago that Italian football was corrupt to the bone and that the best thing might be to let it go bankrupt. Now tell me I am wrong.