I am ashamed of my country

[fpb]

Anyone who saw what just happened in Milan will know why, right now, I feel like crawling under a rock and hiding. I am beginning to think that soccer really is a major factor of national corruption; that the way in which it is organized, played, and followed, makes for continuous occasions of downright evil. Fans are allowed, almost one would say encouraged, to run riot; the game is financially bankrupt and propped up by utterly illegal government largesse, which is quickly hoovered up by greedy players backed by a nasty underworld of fixers and agents. And, as the recent Juventus scandal has proven, it is not played fairly or without drugs, either. There is no point at which Italian professional football is not utterly corrupt. It would do the country no harm at all if this snake's nest were allowed to finally slide into the well-deserved bankruptcy from which it has for so long been sheltered.

Comments

[sevenorora.livejournal.com]

Hi, just "friended" you.

It’s indeed a shame what happened, not only for Italy but for all the soccer/football fans all over the world. It gives us all a bad name . Unfortunately it wasn’t the first time this Champions League season that something like this happened in Italy. (AS Roma-Dinamo Kiev)
Mostly it is just a few dozen people between the twenty thousand that act like this. Alas it ruins the evening for all the other supporters and the two teams.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The point is that thuggish fans are only a part, and perhaps the least guilty part, of what is wrong with Italian soccer. As I said, it is financially bankrupt, propped up by flagrant abuse of taxpayers' money (one of the few things in which mr.Berlusconi's criminal abuse of the state system is bipartisan; nobody, not even the most puritan left-winger, wants to bankrupt football teams - even though they ought to). It is riddled with malpractice, and we have evidence - as soon forgotten as discovered - that the leading team has been abusing forbidden drugs with the abandon of an East German women's swimming coach in the old days. There is nothing, literally nothing, that is right with the game as it is currently set up. And I speak as someone who loved soccer from my birth, and who still remembers the great night in 1982 when we won our last World Cup as one of the great events of my life. But the truth is that nothing can improve in our national game until it has been cleansed, like the Augean Stables, by a tsunami-like catastrophe.