“The biggest scandal in the history of European football” Inside Calciopoli, the match-fixing bombshell that brought Juventus to its knees
At the time, it was called “the biggest scandal in the history of European football” – a sporting earthquake that was off the Richter scale. Dubbed by some onlookers as ‘Moggi-gate’, it became more widely known as Calciopoli, a match-fixing scandal that dominated Italian football and overshadowed the Azzurri’s 2006 World Cup success.
It resulted in Italy’s richest and most decorated football club, Juventus, being kicked out of Serie A, despite many saying that, given the club’s connection to the powerful Agnelli family – the owners of Fiat motors – such a thing could never happen. Of the other clubs charged with match-fixing, Milan, Lazio and Fiorentina were each deducted 30 points for the 2005-06 season, even if they were allowed to hang on to their Serie A status. The Rossoneri still finished third and qualified for the Champions League, despite their tally falling to 58.
What exactly was Calciopoli and how was it allowed to come about? Who were the power-brokers that made up Luciano Moggi’s network? In the months that followed, the scandal left far more questions than answers.
In understanding it all, the logical place to start is with Moggi, the man whose name became synonymous with football corruption. A former railway stationmaster from Tuscany, he was one of the most controversial figures in Italian football for more than 20 years. He started out as a talent scout for Juventus, then had periods as sporting director at Roma, Lazio, Torino and Napoli, before returning to Juve in 1994.
During that period, Moggi began to weave his web of useful contacts. His methods were controversial and he was tagged ‘Lucky Luciano’ after surviving a number of investigations, including claims that he laid on prostitutes for referees in UEFA Cup games while at Torino – claims that he denied.
Back at Juventus, the trophies began to pile up, but players and fans of rival clubs suspected that Moggi was using his weighty book of contacts to influence results. Everyone in the game had a story about Moggi, but no-one could prove anything. Moggi himself revelled in the mystique his power had created, sometimes jokingly referring to himself as ‘The Devil’.
The suspicions, it was later discovered, were not completely unfounded. The findings of an Italian Football Federation tribunal claimed that, making more than 400 phone calls a day, Moggi controlled referees, as well as having federation bosses and television presenters in his pocket.
His downfall came through intercepted calls. The Turin magistrates, who had brought criminal charges against Juve’s managing director Antonio Giraudo and club doctor Riccardo Agricola for alleged doping offences (Giraudo was acquitted at the initial trial, while Agricola’s charges were later thrown out by the Appeal Court), tapped the phones of the club’s directors for 48 days in 2004.
What the magistrates heard was of no use to their inquiry, but they passed the transcripts on to the football federation and to magistrates in Naples, who separately had been investigating links between football and organised crime in the south of Italy. The Naples magistrates tapped the phones of dozens of people from the world of football for the 2004-05 season and Moggi-gate exploded in early May 2006, when excerpts from those two sets of phone taps were leaked to the press.
“Graham Poll?”
The selection of referees for games in Serie A was entrusted to two ‘designators’: Paolo Bergamo and Pierluigi Pairetto. The names of referees were sorted into groups, according to experience. Then, in theory, they were drawn, lottery-style, and matched up with the weekend’s fixtures.
The evidence from the first wave of leaks suggested that not only was the selection of referees for Serie A matches not as random as it should have been but, even more alarmingly, that Moggi held some sway over the choice of refs for Juve’s Champions League games via Pairetto, who was also a member of the UEFA referees’ committee. Before Juventus travelled to face Ajax in Amsterdam on September 15, 2004, Pairetto phoned Moggi.
PAIRETTO: I know that you’ve forgotten about me but I haven’t forgotten about you.
MOGGI: Go on…
PAIRETTO: I’ve put a great referee for the game in Amsterdam.
MOGGI: Who?
PAIRETTO: Meier.
MOGGI: Great!
PAIRETTO: Anyway, it was just to tell you this. You see, I remember about you.
The referee was the Swiss, Urs Meier, most famous in England for being in charge of the Three Lions’ quarter-final loss to Portugal at Euro 2004. Juventus beat Ajax 1-0. There has never been any suggestion that Meier was in on the arrangement or acted at all improperly. It was by no means the first time that Moggi and Pairetto had spoken. After Juventus had drawn 2-2 at home to Swedish club Djurgarden in a Champions League qualifier the previous month, in which German referee Herbert Fandel disallowed a goal by Juve’s Fabrizio Miccoli, Moggi had angrily disapproved.
MOGGI: What the f**k kind of referee did you send us?
PAIRETTO: Fandel is one of the best…
MOGGI: Miccoli’s goal was valid.
PAIRETTO: No.
MOGGI: It was valid, it was valid. He can f**k himself. I have to make the return match in Stockholm secure, no? With another like [Fandel], it’s going to be a bit difficult, no? You follow me?
Juve won the return leg in Stockholm 4-1, with Graham Poll refereeing. Again, there has never been any suggestion that Poll was aware of the relationship between Moggi and Pairetto or acted improperly. After the match, Moggi clearly had nothing to grumble about, but the appointment of Poll had come as a surprise to him. Two days before the game, Lucky Luciano called the secretary of the Italian football league.
MOGGI: The ref is Cardoso, right?
SECRETARY: I’ve got Graham Poll written here.
MOGGI: Um… where’s he from?
SECRETARY: He’s English.
Minutes later, Moggi called Pairetto.
MOGGI: So it’s Cardoso, eh?
PAIRETTO: What?
MOGGI: It’s Paul Green! [He meant Poll]
PAIRETTO: What?
MOGGI: Paul Green!
PAIRETTO: Well something has happened at the last minute, he was sick or something.
MOGGI: Find out.
PAIRETTO: Yes, yes. I’ll look into it right away.
Innocenzo or guilty?
For domestic games, by rigging what was supposed to be a random draw, Pairetto and Bergamo could choose from a pool of referees who were considered to be pro-Juventus. Massimo de Santis had been due to officiate at the 2006 World Cup until the scandal broke, after which he was hurriedly withdrawn by the Italian Football Federation.
It was later claimed that the referees in the ‘pro-Juve pool’ would give Moggi’s men the benefit of the doubt in most situations, award non-existent penalties or deny the opposition blatant ones, and disallow perfectly good goals. They would use different criteria for Juventus and their opponents when deciding what merited a yellow card – most seasons, the Turin club had the lowest yellow cards to fouls ratio.
Sometimes they would be assigned to a game featuring a team that was due to play against Juve the following week. In those games, it was claimed that their job was to book or send off key players so they would be suspended by the time they faced Juventus.
They were not being paid for their favours or receiving lavish gifts. The system was much simpler. It was made clear to refs by Pairetto and Bergamo that if they wanted to get on, wanted to take charge of the big games, to have a career, they had to toe the line. Moggi also had a contact on the inside, the Italian Football Federation vice-president Innocenzo Mazzini.
When the Italian federation opened disciplinary hearings, Moggi’s network was described as a “sophisticated system which undermined one of the fundamental principles of sport: the independence of referees”.
Investigators alleged that Moggi also controlled what some television programmes said about the referees, to temper any public backlash against controversial decisions that had gone in favour of Juventus. The approach was subtle – the presenters were only to take Juve’s side in situations where there had been a close call. If a foul or penalty was obvious to everyone, it would have been counter-productive to pretend it hadn’t happened.
The following wiretap conversation, as later translated by a University of Perugia report, was between Moggi and Fabio Baldas, a former referee who was an expert pundit on a television programme called Il processo del lunedi [The Monday Trial].
According to investigators, the pair spoke before nearly every programme to discuss what was going to be said, but Baldas received criticism from fans for taking Juventus’ side when he analysed a controversial decision made by an official during a match.
BALDAS: Luciano, they tore me to pieces!
MOGGI: They tore you to pieces?
BALDAS: I tried to defend myself, but they attacked me from all sides and said I was a Juventus fan!
[Since this article was first published in 2006, criminal proceedings against almost all the journalists caught up in the wiretaps were dropped in 2007, although several were suspended by Italy’s Order of Journalists]
The other clubs
Lazio and Fiorentina were both run by businessmen who were new to football: Claudio Lotito and Diego Della Valle. The two men sensed there was something rotten in the state of the Italian game from the moment they arrived on the scene. Lotito talked about “moralising” the sport, while Della Valle attacked the system of selling TV rights, which ensured the big three – Juve, Milan and Inter – earned fortunes and everyone else shared the rest.
Key decisions seemed to go against their teams – as the 2004-05 season drew to a close, they were heading towards the trapdoor to Serie B. What to do? Go down with your principles still intact? Get real.
According to prosecutor Stefano Palazzi, phone taps showed that Lotito asked federation president Franco Carraro for help in four end-of-season matches. Carraro told ref designator Bergamo that he should “give Lazio a hand”. Fiorentina asked Mazzini for help in two vital relegation games.
Unfortunately for the two clubs, the federation’s sporting code makes no allowance for acting in self-defence. Attempting to alter the outcome of a game is an offence and the two clubs were later hit with 30-point deductions for 2005-06, with more points docked for the following campaign.
They argued that in comparison to Juventus they’d done nothing, but the trio of clubs relegated in 2004-05 – Bologna, Brescia and Atalanta – were unsympathetic. They also knew how the system worked, but asked no favours and went down playing football.
Quite why Milan ever got involved is a mystery. Perhaps they realised what Juventus were up to and felt they were being denied titles that were rightfully theirs. Palazzi accused Adriano Galliani, Milan’s vice-president, of backing the dodgy operations of the club’s referees’ assistant, Leonardo Meani: “Meani was in phone contact with linesmen, who were asked, when in doubt, to favour Milan, and Galliani approved.”
As Milan’s links with friendly linesmen became public, the joke within Italian football circles was that Juve controlled the refs and Milan the linesmen, while Inter – perennial underachievers at that stage – controlled the ball boys.
The punishments
By the end of May 2006, Carraro and Mazzini had resigned from the Italian federation and were joined by Pairetto and Bergamo. On July 14, five days after Italy’s victory in the World Cup final, the federation’s disciplinary tribunal handed out sentences:
- Juventus were sent down to Serie B with a 30-point penalty for 2006-07, and stripped of their last two titles; Moggi and Giraudo were both banned for five years
- Milan remained in Serie A but with a 44-point penalty for 2005-06 and a further 15 points for 2006-07, while Galliani was banned for a year
- Lazio were sent down to Serie B with a seven-point penalty for 2006-07, and Lotito was banned for three years
- Fiorentina were sent down to Serie B with a 12-point penalty for 2006-07, and Diego Della Valle was banned for four years
- Carraro was banned for four-and-a-half years, Mazzini for five, Pairetto for two-and-a-half and De Santis four-and-a-half. Bergamo resigned, effectively banning himself from football for life
Later, appeals further softened many of the penalties. Juventus remained in Serie B but with only nine points docked. They were stripped of two titles – the 2004-05 Scudetto was not reassigned to another club, but the 2005-06 title was awarded to Inter, making them champions for the first time since 1989.
Lazio and Fiorentina were back in Serie A, docked three and 15 points respectively for the 2006-07 season, plus 30 each for 2005-06. Milan had the same punishment for 2005-06, as well as eight deducted for 2006-07. Carraro’s ban was reduced to an €80,000 fine.
The reduced sentences caused outrage. Giovanni Semeraro, president of Lecce, one of the clubs relegated in 2005-06, said: “It’s something to be ashamed of, no?”
The verdicts had come against a background of increasing calls for clemency, or even a total amnesty, on the grounds that it wouldn’t be fair to punish the clubs that had provided so many of Italy’s World Cup winners. Populist politicians from both sides of parliament lined up to argue for mercy, and they were backed by the mayors of Rome, Turin and Florence. A member of the appeals panel admitted that the panel had also been worried about a violent reaction from fans if three teams – Juventus, Fiorentina and Lazio – had been kicked out of Serie A.
There were other factors in the softening of sentences. Lazio’s case was strengthened considerably when the club was allowed to call as a witness Daniele Tombolini, the referee who had been in charge of Lazio vs Brescia, one of the games in which the Rome club was alleged to have sought favours. Tombolini told the appeals tribunal that, far from giving Lazio a hand, he’d made mistakes in the game that had favoured Brescia.
Milan appeared to have convinced the appeals tribunal that its referees’ assistant, Leonardo Meani, had collaborated independently, and for whose actions the club should not be held directly responsible.
There remained an enigma at the heart of the matter. Moggi was widely recognised as a master of the transfer market. He’d never played at a high level, but had an eye for a player and discovered many who would go on to become legends. At Juve, he finally had the financial clout to hire Italy’s best coaches and the world’s top players.
By ‘signing up’ referees, journalists and federation officials to the club’s cause as well, according to investigators, he was admitting that the best wasn’t good enough – a surprising lack of faith in his own abilities and an insult to a generation of great footballers, from Alessandro Del Piero to Zinedine Zidane.
Moggi continued to protest innocence, though, seeing himself as a scapegoat who had been ritually sacrificed to pay for the sins of an entire system, with no intention of going quietly.
Bayern Munich CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge probably spoke for many in European football when he said in August 2006: “I feel sorry for Juventus, but the important thing is that people like Moggi are not around any more.” Asked whether he would return to football, Moggi told the newspaper Repubblica: “Of course, but this time I’m going to be the guy who breaks everybody’s balls. I’ll finger them all, by their first names and surnames. I’ll break the balls of all the false moralists who think that everything is clean now because they got rid of Luciano Moggi.”
This feature first appeared in the October 2006 issue of FourFourTwo
