Italian football officially entered into a phase of permanent crisis in
the summers of 2002 and 2003. The benefits of the “20-year boom”—
which began with the World Cup victory in Spain in 1982 and was
followed by the success of club sides in international play, after meager
results in the 1970s—have been exhausted, resulting in unprecedented
political and economic hardship for Italy’s most important
sport. Recent managerial folly, with clubs spending much beyond
their means, has been followed by an ebb tide of adversity, characterized
by institutional wreckage and an adventurous search for a
new equilibrium. With no solution in sight, the current situation does
not bode well. A marked tendency to protect particular interests, the
emergence of latent internal divisions, the daily delegitimation of
institutional actors, an apparently insurmountable difficulty in realizing
a mature market structure, the incapacity to renew the managerial
elite, and pockets of shady deals creeping into the structures
charged with overseeing the legality and economic-administrative
propriety within the game—these are just a few of the ills that are
troubling the game in Italy.
