Sky Sports’ celebrity transfer journalist Gianluca Di Marzio
Later tonight, representatives from every football club in Serie A and Serie B will at the ATA Hotel in Milan, hoping to thrash out last-minute transfer deals before the January transfer window closes. At the ATA, each team will have a booth from which they can meet other club reps and agents in order to bolster their squad and dump dead wood for the second half of the season, while Italian media covers events live from the hotel.
Granted, it looks like not much will occur to set the pulses racing in England today, but Italian football, in its current state of soporific malaise, has its own unique kind of deadline day tedium. On Friday night, celebrity transfer journalist Gianluca Di Marzio more or less summed this up when he spammed my Twitter feed with hot news of how Chievo’s deal for Czech striker Tomas Necid will be put back to June “due to problems with the striker’s medical”. Later on the same evening, he appeared on Sky Sport’s powerfully naff show Calciomercato, offering the latest from the ATA, where Sicilian rivals Palermo and Catania were battling for Parma’s perfectly average nobody defender Andrea Rispoli.
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“It’s a fiery transfer market derby!” he exhorted in extreme close up, a transfer oracle looking down from a screen in a studio that resembles the lounge bar of a B-Movie space craft.
Imagine going to a circus, and instead of seeing a lion tamer or a tightrope walker, you got a lawyer from the lion tamer’s union discussing their client’s T&Cs with another circus’s accountant. Meanwhile, the tightrope walker’s agent is putting pressure on management to double his cut, or he’s taking his flamboyant young charge down the road to Cirque du Soleil. This is the transfer window in Italy, and it’s boring. The aspiring sports journalist dreams of big interviews, filing match reports from the ground, or being retweeted by James Horncastle, and I feel privileged to have accomplished all three of those things. Transfer deadline day, though, is shit. You already know days in advance who’s going where and for how much, so you spend the day waiting for the player to sign on the dotted line so you can file your prepared four to eight pars with an inserted quote from the player, club or club Twitter feed. And while the vast majority of transfers will be forgotten the next day, in Italy you will hear talk of little else – it’s a national illness.
While in the UK Sky Sports turned the transfer deadline day into a bizarre vaudeville of gurning supporters and sex toy assaults, at least rendering it a light-hearted affair, in Italy it is a deadly serious business, a melodramatic Latin version of Dallas in which the ramifications of every fine detail of every potential deal are explored microscopically. Fans discuss the tactics behind a transfer campaign, whose directors are sneakier, smarter and better at pulling off deals. CEOs, directors of football and agents are celebrities followed by a pack of thirsty local hacks, who will report on what restaurant the bigwigs ate in while striking their deals, what they had for lunch and what cars they drove off in. Every utterance is turned into a shock admission or denial, heavily reworded or flat out fabricated.
The whole dreary process is perfect fodder for the country’s three national sports ‘papers, which in the summer have to fill 40-50 pages with something if they want to keep the punters interested. So alongside the beachside snaps of players and WAGs and articles describing their holidays, speculation of the sort that would shame the red tops into extinction is splashed across the front pages. Turin-based Juventus propaganda sheet Tuttosport is legendary for its invented transfer stories, but in truth they’re all at it: the world-famous Gazzetta dello Sport once gave its front page to an entirely hypothetical series of events that might see Cristiano Ronaldo move from Real Madrid to AC Milan, while the Corriere dello Sport dared to lead with an apparent €100 million bid from Inter Milan for Lionel Messi. Every now and again you get some good stories – this time last year Lazio fans held a protest outside club chairman Claudio Lotito’s house when they sold Brazilian midfielder Hernanes to Inter Milan, while a failed swap deal involving Juve’s Mirko Vucinic and Inter’s Fredy Guarin led to an amusing period of verbal handbags between the old rivals – but it’s mostly…
“AS Roma have signed free agent midfielder Urby Emanuelson on a one-year contract, the club said on Friday.”
Samuel Eto’o being unveiled by Sampdoria next to the shark tank at the local aquarium
Transfer news can be fun when it’s big players making big moves, but these days the Serie A transfer window more resembles drawn-out divorce proceedings than a burst of young love: the big stories are increasingly whether a club can keep one of its stars from leaving to the shinier stadiums and heftier salaries offered by the big hitters abroad rather than who they can bring to Italy. Last summer it was Juventus’ Arturo Vidal, this year it’s his extremely promising teammate, French international Paul Pogba, a 21-year-old midfielder who has been “linked with” £70 million moves to Chelsea and Real Madrid. Sadder still is that the discussion isn’t so much about if than when: he will leave, if not this year then the next, and there is absolutely nothing that Juventus can do about it.
So starved is Italy of glamour signings that when Roma’s reserve striker Mattia Destro – a good player, no doubt, but hardly Andriy Shevchenko or Marco Van Basten – signed for the once-great AC Milan he was met at Milano Centrale train station by club CEO Adriano Galliani, dozens of journalists and as many fans. He needed a police escort to leave the station. While Lazio once bought Paul Gascoigne, now they sign Ravel Morrison. Sampdoria celebrated the capture of pensioner striker Samuel Eto’o by showing him off by the shark tank in the city’s local aquarium. You only need to cover one transfer deadline day to see that a league that not that long ago was the envy of the world is in a state of possibly permanent decline. And that’s as depressing as it boring.
