Gazzetto Dello Sport has a nicely chalked out primer Monopoly board on Calciopoli including recent developments. In an ideal world, the perpetrators would be facing considerable amounts of time in jail without bail.
The Calciopoli scandal which engulfed the Serie in May 2006 exposed the web of match fixing and rigged refereeing in the Italian league. It led to Juventus losing the Scudetto and relegated to Serie B. Fiorentina, Lazio, and AC Milan were the other clubs docked points.
However, four years later, the reverberations of Calciopoli are still being felt with the revelation that more clubs were involved.
The disgraced Juve general manager, Luciano Moggi has come up with 74 such phone taps that implicate not just Inter but the presidents of Palermo, Reggina, Cagliari, and Bologna who were in contact with FIGC referee designators. The biggest fish obviously is Inter because they benefited most from Juve’s fall by being awarded the 2005 Scudetto.
Lawyer Paolo Trofino, defending Moggi, manager dropped that bombshell last month.
He read part of what he called “the mother of all phone calls.” Giacinto Facchetti, Inter’s president at that time talking on the phone to Paolo Bergamo and saying, “Put in Collina, into the grid for the draw.” Bergamo is one of the referee designators.
The Collina reference is the most obvious one in a series of phone calls between Fachetti had with Bergamo and Pierluigi Pairetto, another designator. But there are others to Gennaro Mazzei in charge of assistants, Massimo De Santis, a former referee, Francisco Ghirelli, the FIGC secretary, and Tullio Lanese, the former president of the Italian Referee Association. The phone calls took place between 2004 and 2005. All the above mentioned except Pierluigi Collina were charged following Calciopoli and given varying sentences.
In one call Bergamo refers to Nicola Ayroldi, a linesman recently in the news for officiating a recent Fiorentina vs Inter match and then engaging in a small celebration after the match ended in a draw. The gesture did not escape the eagle eyed Jose Mourinho who instantly surrounded the linesman and demanded an explanation. It is commonly believed that Ayroldi is a Rossoneri fan.
Another call states that Paparesta was well prepared. Gianluigi Paparesta was a referee implicated in Calciopoli in 2006 and stripped off refereeing duties. So was Silvio Gemignani and Salvatore Racalbuto, two other referees named in the phone calls. In yet another call, “Trefeloni is calm and available.” Matteo Trefoloni was the referee who caused quite a stir sending off Michael Beauchamp, instead of Mikael Jacobsen, for a foul on Rangers striker Georgios Samaras, in a Champions League match against Aalborg last season.
Facchetti talks to Mazzei asking him to,” choose well the assistants for the Saturday game.” With Pairetto, “In the message, did you inform Trefoloni these are private matters.”
These are indications that Calciopoli was not just a scandal, it was a way of life in Italian football with its cozy connections with referee arbitrators and match officials. After all it is only a scandal, if a few get away with it. What if the whole system is rigged to benefit all. That might be what Moggi is telling us this with these new revelations. He most obviously took the fall. But still one would be dismayed at the prospect of the great Giacinto Facchetti, a player as clean as a whistle in his Inter career, being exposed as yet another idol with feet of clay. Where have you gone Joe Di Maggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes at you.
The expansion of the investigation takes place just a month before the World Cup in the same way Calciopoli hit a month before the 2006 edition. It led to the alleged suicide attempt of Gianluca Pessotto, Juve’s vice president causing turmoil amongst the Juve members of the squad. Captain Fabio Cannavaro, a close friend of Pessotto returned for a brief time in the midst of the campaign to offer solace.
The Gazzetta primer is a great read. It is in Italian but hopefully the website might carry an English translation soon.