In July, Italy won the World Cup in circumstances that some thought shamed France, as Zinedine Zidane infamously ended his football career by being sent off the pitch after headbutting Marco Materazzi in the chest.
But less than a week later, the Italian clubs that had provided 13 players of the triumphant national squad were punished in the denouement of football's latest and most devastating corruption scandal.
Over decades, one man had established networks of influence in the highest echelons of football, the media and politics. In Observer Sport Monthly this Sunday, Jason Burke reveals how Luciano Moggi brought down one of Europe's greatest clubs - and shamed a nation.
For those of you who can't wait until Sunday, here's an extract:
This weekend Luciano Moggi, a 69-year-old man with the aquiline nose, bald head and the taste for fine cigars and tailoring that you would expect of a senior Italian football official, agent and, it has now become clear, crook, will be thinking about his future. He may be admiring the view over the Mediterranean from his villa in the Posillipo hills above Naples or relaxing at his town house in the northern city of Turin. Or he might stop by for a drink at a favourite private club on the Mediterranean island of Capri, from where he may go out on his yacht. After all, having just been banned from football for five years and witnessing his life's work collapse around him, he has time on his hands.
Moggi will have much to think about. Last month the luck of 'Lucky Luciano' finally ran out and he was forced to resign from his post as general manager of Juventus, the best supported and most successful club in Italian football, the present champions. On 14 July, a specially appointed tribunal found that, as a result of Moggi's activities, Juventus had, over a period of years, won games that they otherwise might not have done. The richest team in Italy were as punishment relegated to the second division, Serie B, docked enough points to ensure that they will remain there for at least two seasons and stripped of the championships they had won in the past two years. AC Milan, Fiorentina and Lazio were also punished - all docked points and all but the first being relegated. Italy, even with its history of sporting and political scandals, had never seen anything like it. And all this in the month when the national team had returned from Germany with the country's fourth World Cup.
Moggi's 'system', known as 'Moggiopoli', has been picked over by scores of magistrates, detectives and special legal investigators appointed by the Italian Football Federation (FIGC). Hundreds of pages of recorded conversations between key figures have been made publicly available. Less available but circulating none the less are thousands of pages of further documents. Together they show that, in addition to four of the most powerful clubs in the world, the scandal touches the top ranks of most of the major Italian football administrative bodies, dozens of referees, several of the best known Italian sports commentators, even a former government minister and, at least indirectly, several of the World Cup squad.
The question is a simple one. How did one man buy - or at least gain control over - what is one of the richest European leagues, a league that has just produced a World-Cup winning squad (all of the 23-man squad played for Italian clubs)? Finding out is not easy. First, there is a problem of sources. The documents produced by the various inquiries are voluminous but inconclusive. Second, few want to talk about the scandal. A third reason is the very nature of Moggi's activity.
Earlier this year, for an article published in our January issue, I investigated match-fixing networks in northern Europe, predominantly in Belgium and Germany, though there were connections to Greece, Turkey, parts of Scandinavia and, possibly though it was difficult to prove, France, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland. Here the modus operandi of the criminals, who were often from eastern Europe, was quite simple. They corrupted referees and, if possible, offered cash and girls. A referee and two players would be enough to ensure a result. The money was not huge - German players agreed to throw games for a thousand or so euros - but the profits were substantial. By betting on games or sequences of results on the internet, the fixers could earn millions with little difficulty and little risk. This was relatively traditional sporting crime, I wrote in January.
Read the whole story in this month's OSM, free with The Observer.
