Field of dreams, tears of despair

Italian football, once the epitome of glamour, skill and sporting passion, is now in deep financial crisis. So what went wrong with il calcio bello (the beautiful game)?

Maurizio Guerra, a young engineer from Padua, speaks with a mixture of sadness and anger as Italian football, which he says was once so beautiful, lurches back into life this weekend – two weeks late and fiercely excoriated for, among other things, selling its soul.

Guerra, a fan of Roma, says, "The football of Italy was the joy of my life. I was so proud of its style and its glamour. Like all my friends, I thought of it as simply the best, the pinnacle of football culture. My boyhood heroes were men such as Paolo Rossi and Marco Tardelli (World Cup winners in 1986) and the young Paolo Maldini. Now I see it dying before my eyes. It has become anything but a joy. To be honest, I think of it as rottura di palle – a pain in the balls."

Guerra, along with most of Italy, is unmollified by the midweek breakthrough in negotiations between the rich and the poor of the big league, Serie A, and the satellite TV companies. A breakthrough that staved off the prospect of another unprecedented delay in the kick-off of a national game that has long been seen as the apex, both financially and artistically, of club football worldwide.

The average Italian, struggling to pay his rent and make the repayments on his Fiat, is turning his back on football in disgust that a dream has been so corrupted.

Liam Brady, who left Arsenal at the start of the Eighties for Juventus and spent 10 years in football's bel paese – winning two titles with Juve and enjoying four-year stints with Sampdoria, of Genoa, and Internazionale, of Milan – is now head of youth development at his old London club, currently the most successful in English football. But he admits: "While I always thought I would finish up back in English football (he came back to play for West Ham United), I knew right from the start that I would be leaving part of my heart in Italy.

"Quite apart from the fact that I earned five times more than I did in England (his salary when he left Highbury was £25,000 a year), I was completely overwhelmed by what I found. I felt I had walked slap bang into the very heart of the world of football. Nothing could be better than this. The tackling could be brutal, especially if you tried to do a bit on the ball, but there was so much skill and real beauty in their game. You would go out on the field with your heart thumping with excitement, and whatever you were feeling came back from those great terraces.

"Now, when I talk to my old friends in Turin and Genoa and Milan, I can hardly bear to hear what they are saying. It is truly a terrible state of affairs, especially when people you know who adore the game are beginning to talk of it in the past tense. Yes, that's right about the game being a pain in the balls for so many Italians now. You hear that kind of phrase all the time. People feel betrayed: they think something precious has been taken away from them."

In a summer of desultory transfer activity – until a late flurry took the Lazio stars Hernan Crespo and Alessandro Nesta to Internazionale and AC Milan, respectively, it seemed as though the top deal would be the piffling £8m move of Adriano from Inter to Parma – the sense of crisis deepened with every desperate club announcement about the need to conclude the television deals that would keep them afloat. When Ronaldo won the World Cup for Brazil with a fusillade of goals and the swagger of the game's leading player reclaiming his throne, the unthinkable was happening in the boardroom of Inter, his club back in Milan. The discussions did not include a massive celebratory reception for their re-burnished demigod. Top of the agenda was the proposal that Ronaldo and other top players accept a 10 per cent wage cut. Ronaldo's first reaction was philosophical. His second was to conclude a deal with the moneybags Real Madrid.

"You see all this happening," says Guerra, "and you know that the clubs have made a complete mess of it. Now they expect the ordinary people, who travel to games when they can, to bail them out by buying satellite television, which can cost £40 or £50 a week. So, many of my friends are saying, 'To hell with it – let's go skiing or let's go to the beach.' If I had a load of money invested in football in Italy I would be very scared because if they look around they will see that more and more people are already regarding football as a thing of the past. It was great and we loved it, but our feelings have been destroyed. There seems so little honesty in the game. Anyone who knows about football knows that Italy played badly in the World Cup – let's be honest: they were really crap – but what did we hear on every television and radio? We heard how Italy had been screwed by the referees. They were hyping the product, of course – they took us for fools."

Brady has precisely the same view. "If, when I left Italy at the end of the Eighties, you had told me that an Italian fan would be talking in this way in a little more than 10 years, I would have said you were off your head. Remember how it was then? Italy were building up to hosting the World Cup, which they were going to win, and Silvio Berlusconi had bought AC Milan a series of European Cup wins with the brilliant Dutch trio of Van Basten, Gullit and Rijkaard. But Italy didn't win the World Cup; they played terribly and lost to a bad Argentina team, and you would have thought the world was about to end, and Berlusconi, having dominated European football, decided to move on to dominating Italian politics. You could probably trace the start of the decline then – the Berlusconi model was being copied around the country, and, of course, it is always a worry when one big guy takes over a club, and its fate suddenly depends on his continued wealth and interest. When I arrived in Italy, the football culture was really solid. There was a lot of respect for the leading players. In Turin, you still heard people talking affectionately of big John Charles, who captured the heart of the city back in the Fifties.

"Unlike in England, the fans came to watch football rather than make trouble. Now I'm told even that has changed. In fact, the worry has been developing in recent years that only the really big games have been drawing in major crowds. Below that level, you could see that the fans were drifting away. One of the problems was the lifting of the limitation on foreign players. When I arrived, it was one foreigner for each club; but then, when the floodgates opened, I think there was a loss of identity. The foreign players were seen to be chasing the money without showing any real loyalty.

"When I arrived at Juventus, I was befriended by players such as Marco Tardelli and Roberto Bettega, really big names but guys who made the effort to help me settle down and give me a feel for the club and the city of Turin. You had a feeling that you were somebody, and that gave you something to live up to. One of the toughest jobs was paying in a restaurant. You'd ask for your bill, and they would laugh and wave you away. When it came to playing, you'd think, 'Bloody hell, I'd better show I'm worth all the trouble.' I'm not sure that is the case now."

The all-clear for the belated kick-off to the new season came with the eight have-nots of Serie A – Atalanta, Como, Perugia, Piacenza, Brescia, Chievo, Empoli and Modena – making deals with the pay-per-view channels Tele+ and Stream, and the big six – Juventus, Inter Milan, AC Milan, Lazio, Roma and Parma – agreeing to cough up €6m from their revenues for redistribution farther down the football food-chain.

Enrico Preziosi, president of Como, was, perhaps understandably, less than euphoric about the compromise, saying, "The agreement doesn't satisfy anyone but the championship will now begin as normal."

Brady, who was a beautifully subtle talent custom-made for the Italian-football cognoscenti, reflects more than a little wistfully on his days in what could be fairly described as il calcio bello – the beautiful football. He was, he admits, devastated when, after contributing to the two title wins of Juve – the classic team of Italy, nicknamed the Old Lady – he found himself whisked away to Genoa to play for Sampdoria. "You look at yourself carefully when something like that happens, but I felt I played well. The thing was, Michel Platini of France was the new heart-throb of European football, and he came in to take my place. I consoled myself with the thought that Mr Agnelli (the club president and owner of Fiat) fancied a new flavour of ice-cream. But I couldn't be too bitter. I had eight more great years in Italy, with Sampdoria and Inter. Sampdoria were taken over by a petrol magnate, Paolo Mantovani, and he vowed to win a scudetto – the league shield. He got there in the end, but Sampdoria are not exactly in the frame right now."

Sampdoria's condition, however, is not as parlous as that of one of the great names of Italian football, Fiorentina. The team of the De Medicis' city ran out of survival tactics last season when their financial ruin – they are facing bankruptcy – was with banishment to the depths of Serie C2. That is a little like Arsenal being grouped with Frickley Colliery and Winsford United. Brady says, "When something like this happens to a team such as Fiorentina, who were competing for the European Cup not so long ago, I think it means that you have to tremble for the whole game. The Italian game is in a mess, and a lot of clubs here are struggling. What is happening in Italy is a warning to everyone, and I think the biggest lesson is: you shouldn't sell your soul to anyone – and that includes television, high on the list. Obviously, the game here has benefited a lot from the involvement of Sky TV; by and large, I think it has done a pretty good job in promoting the game. But the Italian business is very sad. It is also a terrible warning. It shows that you simply cannot lose touch with the people – the moment you do that, you are in really big trouble."

A few years ago, Brady returned to Juventus for the club's centenary celebrations; a fellow guest was King John Charles. "It was remarkable to see how he was received," Brady recalls. "Even the young kids loved him. They had been told, I suppose, what he represented. That he was a great big warm man who played football wonderfully and was clearly in love with the game." When Charles walked around the ground, the ovation was thunderous, and tears streamed down his eyes. "It's just lovely to come back", said the big man, "and to be remembered like this." Perhaps his fans were also remembering something else – a time when the game was indeed beautiful, when players didn't move from club to club at the drop of a contract and sometimes with the help of a false passport.

Now, the penalty is being paid. Included in it must be the weekend plans of Maurizio Guerra. He is not quite sure about them yet. A former goalkeeper for a junior team, he may take his wife for a drive in the country. Or he may polish his skis.

Additional reporting by Mark George Palmer