Customer Reviews

Forza Italia: The Fall and Rise of Italian Football

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This was a very enjoyable book to read. Lots of great perspective on Italian Football. It is not the most complete book on the subject, but it is a very easy read. I always appreciate a book that is easy to follow and keeps your attention. The author is also very objective. He addresses allot of issues that are quite controvercial, but he tends to never come across as too judgemental or as somebody that has all of the answers.

Unfortunately, the subject matter was a little bit disheartening. Agnew pulls some really ugly skeletons out of the closet on the subject of Italian Football. Knowing what I know now, it will be hard for me to enjoy Italian football quite as much.

Usually I hate books that place the author in the story but somehow this works mainly because Paddy Agnew is a person I think many of us can relate to. He talks about his life and how he and his wife came to the decision to move to Italy and how that morphed into this freelance position as a Irish Protestant (and soccer fan) who ended up covering the Vatican...and Serie A (and B, C and D as well) soccer.

The majority of the book focuses on the modern post-'80s history of Italian soccer with just a sprinkling of the history (for that go to John Foot's excellent Calcio). Agnew also is not a cynical writer and is a fan of soccer so it makes for a read that all fans can relate to. Lucky for us he was in Italy covered soccer just as the whole Diego Maradona w/ Napoli saga unfolded. He is also the first writer I feel who has been able to link the betting scandal of the '80s to Italy's 1982 World Cup win to the '90s match-fixing scandals that led really to Italy's 2006 World Cup win.

The book does not get bogged down in some sort of season-by-season chronolgical look at Italian soccer. Chapters on Berlusconi and how his Milan soccer team shaped his political successes and a look at how the Italian vs. British press operate by viewing it through the eyes of ex-Lazio and ex-England manager Sven Goran Eriksson rank up there with the very best of soccer writing.

The only two chapters I skimmed over were the Juventus on Trial and End Game which focused on the doping and match fixing scandals. Maybe because these were fairly recent and still somewhat at the forefront of my cranial lobe, they just did not grab me as much as the others.

just a few mistakes to start with: the legenday 'libero' of the '80s, is not Giacinto Scirea :-((
is Gaetano Scirea, Giacinto Facchetti was a left back defender in the 60s-70s,
the former played for Juventus Turin, the second for Inter Milan, it would be like naming Maurice Richard as John... or Kobe Bryant as Shaq...

the frankenstein-like defender built up this way would rather be an amazing player...although he never existed...

in 1990 - the world cup semi-final between Argentina and Italy final score was a tie, 1-1 - not an Argentinean victory as it is stated, and Maradona played rather bad, he scored the penalty kick in the series of shoot out after the game ended, leading Argentina to the final

the book features a never ending list of clichés and stereotypes on Italy and Italians, such they are generally enjoyed by wealthy British people living in the countryside, and is packed with minor mistakes such as the above-mentioned ones;
Italy looks that way if one were to live in a mansion in Tuscany, or in a villa in the countryside outside Rome;

life in the cities though is totally different, and hence the perspective one would get from, having to deal on a daily basis with corruption and organised crime and violence and abuse is totally another deal;
would have loved that the author spent at least a couple of days on those realitites, before phylosophying on a country only seen through the mirror of legends and clichés

the report from Turin, or from the South are un-realistic and fed with biais- the bar talks on monday morning in any bar in the country is rather more profound and documented;
the last chapter references to the 2006 match-fixing scandal are undocumented: if the author were to speak with any (any...) Italian fans, he would had been told what the recent trials held in Napoli is showing: the so-called-scandal was a general practise, behind the scandal sat other motivations such as rivalry within Agnelli family for the control and real ownership of Juventus and Fiat on one part (gianni agnelli's vs umberto agnelli heirs), a massive debts of big teams (Inter Milan and above all Roma and Lazio) towards the Italian revenue Agency of about 450 millions euros on the other , a debt that was cancelled by the Berlusconi's government a few months later B who also happened to be the president and owner of Milan...);

nothing of that backdrop is shed light upon; which is a little poor content for an investigative reporter

if anybody were to collect such a list of mistakes, misinformation, clichés and stereotypes, shallow analysis on either UK of the United States, the anglo-saxon communities would be outraged