Football crazy?

It's bizarre enough that the son of one of the world's most notorious dictators should take a stake in a top Italian football club. But then to sign up as a player with one of their rivals... Peter Popham tells the strange story of Al-Saadi Gaddafi

He wanted, they say, to buy Liverpool; he dreamt of playing for Manchester United. Given certain little local difficulties connected with the names Yvonne Fletcher and Lockerbie, neither of these hopes stood much chance of being realised.

But this week a tall, sleek young billionaire called Al-Saadi Gaddafi shook hands in the Grand Hotel in Rome with a football manager called Luciano Gaucci, and the Italian football club Perugia, which plays in Serie A (Italy's Premier League equivalent) had itself a piece of history: he is the first son of a foreign head of state to sign for an Italian football team.

The manager with the Midas touch, known for his outrageous shirts, his excessively young girlfriend (she was one of his daughter's classmates at school) and his extraordinary, headline-making signings, had done it again. Gaucci was the man who signed the first Japanese to play in Italy (Nakata), the first Korean (Ahn), and the first Chinese and Iranian. He is the man with a proven genius for lifting obscure players out of the lower divisions or amateur leagues, bringing out qualities no one else saw in them and later selling them on to the country's richest clubs for stupendous sums, to howls of outrage from the fans and the delight of the Perugia shareholders.

But this time Gaucci has outdone himself. For Gaddafi, the move is an extraordinary gamble, and he risks humiliation and ridicule if it fails. These are not emotions someone born into his position can know much about. He is the owner and director of a Libyan team, Al-Ittihad, for which he also plays; once when the team's Italian coach had the temerity to drop him, Al-Saadi had the man fired.

But on Sunday, at the press conference announcing his decision to join Perugia, Gaddafi was all humility and sweet reasonableness. "I just want to be treated the same as everyone else in a climate of healthy competition," he told journalists. "I would like to understand if I can adapt myself to Italian football and the environment of Perugia."

Perugia's coach - Serse Cosmi, another of Luciano Gaucci's legendary discoveries - was diplomatic. "I can't give my judgement on the player, as I have only seen him play once," he said. "But thanks to this meeting I now know that he is a very intelligent person with a humble and flexible approach to his role."

Gaucci brusquely turned aside questions about who paid whom and how much. "All those things are secondary," he insisted. "He has come here because of his passion. And we are pleased to have him. This agreement gives Perugia a place in history."

In some ways, Gaddafi is like Gaucci's other exotic discoveries: a player from a country that does not spring immediately to mind when people talk football, who has yet to undergo the trial by fire of playing in the game's top echelons. But there are a couple of differences. Having just turned 30, Gaddafi is a little long in the tooth to be embarking on a career in the Italian game. And he is the son of Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator of Libya since 1969, an American bogeyman on a par with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and a bizarre, gnomic autocrat up there in the weird league with Kim Jong-Il of North Korea.

So the signing of Al-Saadi Gaddafi by Perugia raises a lot of interesting questions. Is this the story of a young man feverishly seeking an exit, however improbable, from his destiny? Does Gaucci really mean to play him, or does he just recognise a brilliant publicity stunt when he sees it? (The deal originated, Gaucci revealed this week, in a phone call from Al-Saadi.)

Most intriguing of all: what is Gaddafi senior's stake in the agreement? Can it be a coincidence that his son has signed with the only Italian football manager who has claimed, on the record, to be a close friend of President George Bush?

There are differences of opinion about Al-Saadi's gifts as a player (he is a midfielder), but no one quibbles about his commitment to football. He is transparently mad about the game, immensely ambitious for his national side's success, and he has done more than anyone to put Libyan football on the map. It is Al-Saadi who is credited with persuading his father to lift the ban on the sport, since when it has become enormously popular in the oil-rich north African country. Matches between the top sides can draw crowds of 100,000.

One reason football has become so popular is because it offers Libyans a relatively safe outlet for any feelings of hostility they may have for the regime that has ruled them for 34 years - by coming to matches where Al-Saadi is playing and shouting themselves hoarse for the opposition. Two seasons ago, a donkey wearing Al-Saadi's shirt number was thrust on to the pitch during a game, to wild applause.

But whatever the grumbling against his father's regime, no one disputes that Al-Saadi has been working overtime to turn Libya into the star of African football. On Sunday he flies to Kinshasa to play for the Libyan national side against the Democratic Republic of Congo for a place in the finals of the African Cup. With oil money sloshing into the game, Libyan sides have recently begun to lure top stars from other African countries. In the past, these players have headed for Western Europe to make their international names.

Al-Saadi Gaddafi's dream is to host the 2010 World Cup finals. "We don't have any diseases here, unlike other African countries," he told the Corriere dello Sport newspaper, "and security is of the highest level... We are not lacking on the economic front... We intend to construct the most beautiful stadiums in the world."

But if Al-Saadi wants the world to come to Libya, he is also hellbent, for whatever reason, on taking his own talent and his father's money to the world. Manchester United and Liverpool were destinations he once dreamt of, but the British animus towards the Gaddafi regime meant that those teams were always going to be a long shot. Instead, his roving eye settled on Italy, Libya's former colonial overlord, now formally apologetic for its misdeeds, a near neighbour across the Mediterranean - and possessing players of the most beautiful football in the world.

Al-Saadi has been cruising Italian football for years now, probing its defences, questing for the opening that could lead to a glorious goal. His most striking initiative to date was taking advantage of the desperate financial crisis that has overtaken the car-maker Fiat, which is strongly linked with the great Turin side Juventus, and buying a 7.5 per cent stake in the club. Juventus now play in shirts bearing the name of Tamoil, the Libyan state oil company.

But 7.5 per cent, even of a team as great as Juventus, is nothing like as interesting as outright ownership, and when the Serie A side Lazio, of Rome, came on the market recently, Gaddafi was tempted to go back to Dad for an even bigger cheque to buy a majority share in the side. But Lazio is saddled with enormous debts - the club has yet to pay Manchester United several million pounds it owes for the Dutch defender Jaap Stam, bought in 2001 - and ultimately the Libyan footballer thought better of it.

Instead, by jumping into Perugia feet first, Al-Saadi is trying something very different. He has played outside the African continent before, but in a small way: he was allowed to train with Juventus once he had sunk money into the club; he has played for his side, Al-Ittihad, against Barcelona in Libya (he paid the Spaniards €300,000, about £210,000, to make the trip), where his team was slaughtered 5-0. But this is the first time he has put his talent on the line outside the country where his father's word is law, trying to break into the European game at the highest level as a player.

Training with the Perugia squad begins on 1 July. Should Al-Saadi prove hopelessly inadequate, Perugia retains the option to let him go before September. That, however, is unlikely to happen: the passionate young Libyan surely has deep enough pockets to assure himself a place on the team's bench, if not on the pitch. But even if he should, against the odds, prove to be Perugia's amazing new star, the question remains - what is his purpose? And why did Daddy say yes?

The likeliest clue is contained in a remark Luciano Gaucci made to the newspaper Il Messaggero this year. "I am a friend of Bush's," the 63-year-old manager said airily, in the context of making some predictions about the war in Iraq. "I know him well, and consider him a delightful person."

Slowly, fitfully, unpredictably, over the past five or six years the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi has been coming in from the cold. Libyan guilt for the death of the policewoman Yvonne Fletcher in London and the Lockerbie airliner tragedy has been partially and grudgingly admitted. Tripoli is still by no means a regular stopover for Western heads of state, and the Libyan dictator remains as much of an oddball as ever. When the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, flew to Tripoli last October for a one-day visit, he got a typical Gaddafi greeting: the airport was closed down and all telecom links to the rest of the world were severed for the day "as part of the mourning," the government said, "over the victims of the savage crimes committed by the Italian fascists against the Libyan people..."

None the less, the trip - the first by a senior European leader in decades - was seen by both sides as a success. But the Libyan dictator has yet to make any headway with the United States. He has been taking a pro-US line consistently since September 11, but the definitive removal of Libya from Washington's list of rogue states - not to mention a state visit by President Bush - look as remote as ever.

So Gaucci's alleged "close friendship" with Dubya must have reached Colonel Gaddafi's ears. And who was more likely to bring word of it than Al-Saadi? You can imagine the scene: the leathery old ruler in his tent, nodding thoughtfully while his impetuous son pours out the amazing information that the only manager in Italian football likely to sign him up is also a friend of the American president. Gaddafi senior juts his chin in terse assent. Go then, he tells the football fanatic. But get results.