Borussia Dortmund have won the German league title two years in a row, and now they’re in the Champions league final. They have a huge stadium, which is sold out almost every time. They have fan culture, youth, success, and a healthy economy – and still they must see one of their stars move to Bayern Munich.

Bayern is a big and prestigious club, and it’s perfectly understandable that most players would like to play in a such a club. They can also pay quite the wages. But Götze does not come from a small provincial side. He does not come from a small football country. He does not come from somewhere where he doesn’t have the possibilities to win titles or to be recognized as one of the game’s greats. He comes from the twice German champions and the possible winners of the UEFA Champions League.

If Dortmund, and with them all well managed clubs with a lot of fans, shall hope to ever truly upset and even change the order of European football, it might not be imperative that they keep each and every good play they have. But selling a local boy, a star, years before he had the chance of becoming an icon is a sign of battles lost before they are even engaged. It’s not as much the club’s fault as it is the lackluster morals of Götze. Sorry. Normally I’m all for live and let live and do what though whilst, but leaving Dortmund for Bayern at this stage is shady to say the least.

Dortmund is in a position where the club can hope, not only to win the CL trophy in three weeks, but also challenge for national and continental success for years to come. They might even have the chance to rise into the absolute top level of clubs, that only the oil barons’ toys of Chelsea and Manchester City have succeeded to penetrate in the last decade or so. Götze’s move, which is indicating that he all along has seen Dortmund as a stepping stone rather than a goal in itself, undermines these hopes. We don’t know if it will lead to an immediate drop in performances for the black and yellow, but it is a chunk of spit in the face of every Dortmund fan who had hopes for their club to emerge as a real European top club.

Bayern’s purchase of Götze is not only good for their team. It’s showing every other German club that they might try to compete for a year or two, but that every hope and every effort will be in vain in the long run. The mental hit taken by Dortmund is the worst. And they share that hit with every club around the world which aspires to become a steady part of the top. The conservative, capitalistic, cold embrace of the leviathan that is the organization of football in Europe is squeezing the hopes out of not just the meek but also the almost mighty.

I like that some clubs are bigger than others and that some clubs’ mothers are bigger than other clubs’ mothers. I don’t, however, like that it’s almost impossible for even big clubs with huge fan bases and good economy to establish themselves in the very top. Mario Götze moved to the worst rivals (apart from Schalke I guess) and took the hopes of thousands with him. Not because he is THAT good, but because his act is symbolic.

The only thing that might ease the anger of the Dortmund fans is that there will forever be a scent of betrayal tied to Götze’s name. He might win everything with Bayern, but he’s still a mercenary fighting his own – with whom he could have won everything as well. It’s a lesson to be learned. Not only in Germany, but also in Italy and everywhere else.

Photo by Fanthomas (2)

If a time traveler from ancient Greece happened to be a spectator at any of the last two Napoli matches he would be excused for thinking that someone smuggled a Trojan horse looking like real defenders but containing Britos, Cannavaro, Campagnaro, and Gamberini into the team. The Napoli team is an attacking machine, second to few in Europe, but the machine stands on feet of clay. Of the brittle kind.

Comical own goals, goalkeeping howlers, loss of concentration – the list of sins are longer than in confessions in an average Italian church. But the poor Napoli defenders are not the real bad guys. To a certain extent they are just following the orders of their superiors without having the adequate quality to succeed in the task put before them.

The Napoli 3-5-2 exposes the back line time and again. This is not a problem in itself, but if your defenders are Britos, Cannavaro, Campagnaro, and Gamberini and not Nesta, Silva, and Maldini you must expect to see blunders now and then. Coach Mazzarri might jump up and down and frantically take his jacket on and off, but the problem will not go away until he adjusts his tactics or get some better players to work with. That the fading veteran Aronica has been exchanged with the more capable Gamberini from Fiorentina has changed little defensively.

If Napoli want to keep the likes of Hamsik and especially Cavani at the club president De Laurentiis must invest in one if not two top class defenders, and maybe even a new goalie in lieu of the increasingly howlertastic De Sanctis, OR the coach must teach his wingbacks or defensive midfielders to shelter the defense more efficiently. As it is now it’s often left to the attackers, notably Cavani, to track back and save the day. But Cavani is not a defender, and as we saw with the penalty he gave away against Torino and the goal that Edu Vargas gifted Cesena last season, you cannot expect eager strikers to avoid mistakes when defending. Teamwork is important for Napoli’s game, but it can also be relied too much upon.

I expect the Napoli defense to lose second place to Milan and I expect the attack to keep the team in third spot, ready to play an all important CL qualification in the beginning of next season. But the defense issue has to be addressed. Teams have won Lo Scudetto with worse attackers than Cavani but probably never with just as bad a defensive structure as Napoli’s. I have a strong feeling that the two things go hand in hand. The options as I see them are to let go of either some of the defenders or get a new coach OR lose Cavani. That choice isn’t hard really is it?

Photo by clickybd

I love Napoli. I have followed them for more than twenty years. Somewhere along the line “them” turned into “us” as my love for Napoli and Italian football became indistinguishable from the rest of me. I try to watch every game, thrashings by mediocre Czech teams aside, and I talk about the games and the team whenever I have the chance. Napoli has given me so much, and I believe that I have given much to Napoli, but somehow the present is illusive even to me, as thoughts of an insecure future dominates the feelings of a wonderful present.

I have a colleague at work, who’s quite interested in football. He prefers Man. U. as half of the Danish population (the older one – the younger half prefers Barcelona), but he enjoys most football. He always checks out Napoli’s result in order to quiz me about my feelings on our chances of Lo Scudetto or CL qualification. He never asks about the game, how it was, if Napoli dominated, sucked, or were lucky or unlucky. The game I used a couple of tense hours watching is not interesting to him. Only the situation in May is of importance to him. He is not alone in this. I partly feel it myself. The focus on the goal is relentless while the path we tread is forgotten.

More and more I feel a need to redefine the nuances in what makes Napoli such an important part of my life. I want to leave some of the thoughts, and anxieties, of the future behind and focus on what Napoli gives me now and what it has given me in the past. I want to enjoy every path, every goal, and every San Paolo scenery instead of focusing on a vague objective at the end of the season. I want to experience the path I walk with me beloved team and not just think about what lies somewhere ahead still obscured by lumps, cracks, and detours. The end result comes just once a year, if it truly ever comes at all. The lumps, cracks, and detours are always with us – they are what really make football a part of us and us a part of football.

What I want to do for myself and urge other football fans to do as well is to enjoy every game, as the games are the only secure thing we have. I will still look with a mix of fear and anticipation into the future, but I will relish all the small details, every Napoli player’s smile, each minute of those Sunday afternoons where my team gives me the best entertainment I can wish for. An entertainment that is taking place in my heart as well as on my screen. Those moments are what Napoli truly gives to me.

This thankfulness of the present and the seizing of the moment can be applied outside football as well. Suddenly the end is there. You might, or might not, have gotten what you wished for, but and end is still an end. A spot in time. A starting point for another path for us to forget if we are there to experience it. Enjoy the path you take. Don’t forget.

There is no destination, only the journey.

Photo by Horia Varlan

I often go to watch Serie A on Vesterbro. Normally I go to High Q on the corner of Dybbølsgade and Søndre Boulevard, but at times I have to go to O’leary’s at the main station. I used to frequent Pub & Sport at Vester Voldgade a lot back in the days, but I haven’t been there for a good while.

My goal with this post is to gather a group of people, who share the passion for calcio, and who would like to share those Sunday nights with me and each other. It’s a bit sad sitting on the edge of the seat during another 3-4 Roma defeat or witness another stunning Cavani goal when everyone in the bar apart from my is occupied with something as irrelevant as La Liga or NFL.

What I imagine is that we make a place and time (may I suggest 20.45) to meet up every Sunday night. Together we enjoy, or try to enjoy depending on the circumstances, the night’s game. I’m not talking boozing, just a beer, some coffee, a cola, or whatever you want.

So what we simply need to do is to make a deal on where to meet. High Q is a place where it’s allowed to smoke. Personally I don’t smoke, but it’s close to my home, and I don’t mind the smoke too much. O’leary’s is non-smoking but also without much charm. Pub & Sport is more or less the same, but here you can often encounter a few Italians following the games. If you know other bars, where they show calcio on a regular basis, I’m open for them too.

Please note that this isn’t a club, and you don’t have to tell if you’re not coming. The goal is just to gather calcio lovers to share the fun.

The first game is Milan – Udinese tonight the 3rd of February. I will be at High Q. It’s close to Dybbølsbro station. Just walk down Dybbølsgade and when you reach Søndre Boulevard you’ll see it. NOTE – It’s on Pub&Sport on Vester Voldgade instead! Next week I’m going skiing, but I’ll work hard to make this initiative work going forward. Please join me in the fun (and occasional loathing…).

Please share this with whoever you know who might be interested. I suggest that we use the Facebook page of “Alt om italiensk fodbold” to communicate. http://www.facebook.com/aoitalienskfodbold?ref=ts&fref=ts. I’ll start todays’s thread asap.

Forza!

Photo by Dom Dada.

On the way back towards his own half the goal scorer is presented with a yellow card. The referee is not angry. He is merely following the rules. The player couldn’t care less either. Only the manager on the sideline is sighing slightly in the middle of the joy. It looks like another stupid booking, but it is another stupid rule.

Football is about scoring goals and yet we punish players, and thus the team, and thus the fans, for celebrating when they do just that. The rule that tells the refs that a player have to be booked for taking of his shirt in joy is wrong and should be changed.

I know the reason, or reasons, behind the rule. First of all it’s important that celebration should not turn to mocking of the conceding side. Letting a goal in and losing a game is punishment enough. Bad losers might be irritating, but there’s nothing more annoying than bad winners. Rubbing the losers nose with their defeat is a lack of class and should not happen, hence the general rule that prohibits exaggerated celebrations. I’m all for that.

Taking your shirt off is apparently an instinct in a lot of footballers. I’ve never really understood why, although I remember doing it as a kid when scoring at an indoor tournament back in 1993 or so. I remember thinking it was cool, funny and looking awesomely professional. I guess most people present just thought I was a weirdo. That instinct should be allowed to flourish nonetheless. Football is about that kind of instinct, passion, and momentary loss of control.

Taking the shirt of and waving it to your own fans is not an exaggerated celebration meant as an insult towards the losers. It’s completely random that stripping a bit is punished with a yellow card, when every other non-provocative celebration is considered completely harmless – line-sniffing excluded… It is on of those instances where the ref is giving the booking not because the player did something wrong, but because it says in the rules that he has to. It’s a small and absurd theater where everybody loses. I also imagine that the comfort it offers the conceding team is rather limited.

The other main reason, I guess, behind the rule is that the ref’s job is also to get the game going, and that the taking the shirt off and on is often a part of a lengthy procedure that takes the time away that the conceding team could use to regain the lost ground. That’s also why too many minutes of intimate piling is frowned upon by the officials, who rightly but sometimes a little over zealously try to get the players back playing. They could just add another minute in the end of the game after all.

All in all the reasons behind the rules demanding a yellow card for a player who takes off his shirt are all well meant. They do however miss the point and do little else than annoy fans, players, and officials. A change of the rules is not critical for the survival of football, but it would be small step for the better, relieving us all from an unnecessary formality that punishes players for celebrating when they do exactly what they’re supposed to do – score goals, be happy, and share the passion with the fans.

Photo by Pitchside Photo

I must admit that I have a very mixed, not to say bad, relationship with the Genoa president Preziosi. I admire and appreciate that he spends his money backing an Italian football club and even one with a wealth of tradition and (very) old glory. I also hate him, not only because of his erratic ways of running his club towards the brink of disasters, but mostly because he’s one of the few main persons in Italian football who has been convicted for a matchfixing attempt and still roams the scene like nothing has happened.

In 2005 Genoa, sporting Diego Milito, were about to be promoted to Serie A from Serie B before the last game, but Preziosi still wasn’t totally sure that Venezia would take the role as lamb to the slaughter seriously, so he simply tried to bribe them to do so. Thankfully the shady affair came to the light and Genoa were relegated to Serie C. At first Preziosi was banned for five years, but in classic Italian fashion the sentence was softened to a short lived stadium ban. The club was down in the gutter, shamed, humiliated, and the man who brought them there was still at the helm.

In 2007, just two years after the Venezia scandal, Preziosi and Genoa were back in Serie A. Like a phoenix from the sewer, they rose to come third in a Serie B campaign that saw a historically strong triad of teams promoted. Juventus, Napoli, and Genoa all came back to haunt the top of Italian football.

Five years down the line Juventus have taken back their position as Italy’s top club. Napoli have progressed almost every season to become a national and European force. Genoa however are caught in a Dante-esque Limbo where nothing is happening. This sad state of non-motion is paired with what should be the exact opposite – an eternal and never ending revolution that sees players and coaches flying in and out faster and harder than protons at the CERN. Viva el revolucion siempre.

For followers of Italian football it’s no surprise that Genoa is currently languishing in the relegation zone with a drop back to Serie B being a real risk. Of all the Italian clubs with a colorful reputation Genoa is probably the worst. Preziosi’s way of running his club makes Palermo president Maurizio Zamparini appear like a man with cunning long term plans.

To be fair the calcio funfair didn’t really take hold in Genoa before 2010 where coach Gian Piero Gasperini was fired after four successful years at the club. Since then Genoa have taken a sharp turn downwards finishing 10^th in 2011 and 17^th in 2012. Over the run of two years the club has had five head coaches and seen the coming and going of a vast number of players, some of whom like Kevin-Prince Boateng were bought as pure investments and who were never intended to strengthen Genoa’s own squad. This winter the trend is set to continue with Preziosi talking about revolution once again. A revolution apparently involving swapping Ciro Immobile for Antonio Floro Flores. Italian football is a world of many words. Sometimes they come short.

On top of 33 players in the first team squad Genoa have 27 players out on loan and 18 players on co-ownership deals. That’s 78 players all in all. While this number isn’t much higher than in many other Serie A clubs, very few of the 78 players form part of a coherent plan for the future. The Genoa fans don’t have to force the players to take off their shirts in dishonor. They just have to wait for around half a season and the players will take the Genoa shirt off all by themselves.

With Genoa reduced to hot relegation candidates and general laughing stock Preziosi will fire the current coach Luigi Delneri within a few games and probably bring back Luigi De Canio who himself was sacked by Preziosi a couple of months ago.

In Genoa bread and butter quickly turns into bread and circus. It must be hard being a Genoa supporter at the moment. As a Napoli I will miss them in Serie A should they go down all hired guns blazing. Their president however shall not be missed.

Photo by Hop-Frog

Each time a dubious call is made, and followers of Italian football will know that that is quite often, conspiracies are rising. Each time a wrong call is made presidents, managers, and journalists are hinting that it’s not coincidental. And they are right. It’s not. It is however not a result of bribing or shady phone calls, not normally anyway. The reason is that the ref’s job is much harder than he can cope with – no matter how good he is.

The repeated mistakes leading to wrong goals or wrong calls in disallowing goals happen because the football is too fast and too complex to the human eye. It’s a huge irony that the people in charge of the decisions have much worse work conditions than the pundits and presidents lambasting their calls after the game. We need to give the refs proper work conditions. We need to enter the 21^th century. We need to start to use TV in order to put fairness back into football. Now.

Every time a legal goal is disallowed due to an error by the ref the result of the game is altered artificially. If someone in the FA after the game said ”you know what? Shouldn’t we just give Catania a goal less today?” and then changed the result, there would be outrage. In fact it sounds (almost) to absurd to happen. Why is it we accept that a representative from the FA, the ref, alters the result during the game? Conservatism. Nothing else.

The fear that the use of video will start a slippery slope of breaks, which will take the ”charm” and ”flow” out of football is hugely exaggerated and also just plain wrong. Taking legal goals away from a team or giving goals to a team that didn’t score them is not charming. It’s theft. That some part of the Juventus leadership claimed that the disallowed goal in Catania didn’t matter because their team ”dominated anyway” is just laughable. You don’t deserve a victory by dominating. You deserve a victory by scoring. Catania scored. Juventus did not.

It’s important to me to stress that I don’t accuse Juventus of cheating. It’s the other way around. I want to protect Juventus, and any other team, from being accused of cheating week in and week out. The easiest way to do that is making it much harder to cheat. If the ref and everyone else can see the ball crossing the line in slow motion, it’ll be pretty hard for him to abstain from giving the goal no matter how much money (or vodka or fur or ladies) he has received before the match. Juve won the game against Catania, even if they didn’t, but they also become target of even more hate and more distrust than before. The latter is far worse than the first.

That the Juventus board failed to acknowledge that they were wrongfully given the victory and that we should prevent those situations in the future was a huge chance lost. They would have been fair and we would have been closer a solution to the situation where teams are robbed almost every week. A goal is a goal and an offside is an offside. We need a good way to see when they happen. What is so hard to understand? The technical side of it is not an issue. All it takes is a monitor on the sideline.

The lack of debate regarding the use of video evidence almost looks like a conspiracy in itself even if I’m sure it isn’t. It’s just stubbornness or laziness in the media, the FA, the club boards, FIFA and among the players. Someone should speak out. I’m baffled that the more or less (especially more) mad Palermo president Maurizio Zamparini was one of the few to actually speak sense two weeks ago. His sensible calls for video evidence were met with silence – at least as far as I understand.

The silence indicates that a lot of people are apparently willing to accept theft as a part of football. Think about that.

Photo by Live & Basic

I started the series before Zdenek Zeman became the boss of Roma, but his arrival just underlined the almost ridiculous similarities between the Roma of calcio magic and the red of cardboard magic. Zeman is quite simply the calcio version of the renowned goblin commander Ib-Halfheart. Zeman might have a tad more balls than the poor Ib, but their tactics are more or less the same.

To command his forces on the pitch of battle Zeman needs a champion. Someone elegant and yet lethal. Someone cunning and yet fiery. Someone strategic and yet hot headed. He needs, and he has, calcio’s equivalent of Jaya-Ballard – Francesco Totti.

Totti is sexy and powerful, and he knows it. He knows that he can make the opponents bleed slowly or choose to blow up everything. The downside is that he’s also fragile and that he needs some time to set things up. The upside is that he just like another Goblin hero, Squee, always comes back – even if people write him off and discard him time after time. At some point he might actually go away for good, but who knows when it’ll happen?

Under the leadership of Zeman and Totti the whole Roma side is like calcio version of the classic red concept of a creature that needs to attack each and every turn. Sometimes it will almost be irrelevant and sometimes it’ll be extremely scary. Like with an Ashen Montrosity it depends very much on the circumstances.

Roma might be a dangerous and frantic place, but they do have their loyal knights defending their realm against the hegemony that is the powerful northern clubs like Juventus, Milan, and Inter.

Totti is one, Daniele de Rossi another. And before them we saw fragile masterminds like Guiseppe Giannini and Agostino Di Bartolomei . To go with the stalwarts they have had success with hiring the right gun at the right time. The Mark of mutiny their threw on Gabriel Batistuta to win their last Scudetto in 2001 was well timed to give them just the extra power their needed to make the northern empire crumble – for a while.

But in the end. Whatever the situation. When following Roma you always sit with an eerie feeling that the world as we know is ending unless something dramatic happens very soon. So either way something dramatic is bound to happen very soon. Worldfire, Obliterate, you name it.

All in all Roma tend to burn down themselves in their drastic attempts to take out everyone else. Roma in calcio as well as red in Magic is just the right blend of power end naivety. Even if neither Roma nor red are my favorites I appreciate what they do. They keep things straight, fair, wacky, and wicked at the same strange time. They say ”You’re clever aren’t you? Well take this!”.

The referee of the day was a teacher of mine. She had no clue about football, but just wanted us kids to enjoy ourself. At a point I got the ball, ran past an opponent, and lopped the ball over the keeper with my left foot. It was at least one level better than anything I would normally hope to do, and I was ecstatic. My left foot?! I can merely control it enough to walk on it. I turned around, running, smiling, and just about to brag – just a little. The goal was disallowed.

The teacher had seen some kind of infringement. It wasn’t there. I was livid. I accused her of destroying the game with her ignorance. I told her she was a moron. I told her to find a person with even the slightest knowledge of the rules, before embarking on her crusade to make a 14-year old boy’s day miserable. After an Antonio Cassano-esque tantrum I ran away and refused to speak to anyone. The point is, that I was a 14 years old boy, and even a quite childish one of the breed. Most football fans and all Serie A presidents are grown up men, and yet they still behave like I did that day in 1994.

Serie A refs are a sturdy species. Week in and week out that are ridiculed and lambasted by a flock of people, who know a lot about football, but who would stand no chance doing half as well as the refs were they given the possibility themselves. That both fans and presidents behave like brats when even minor refereeing errors go against their team is embarrassing. How is it that those people don’t know that refereeing mistakes are a part of football and have been so since the birth of the game?

In Italy it seems like a part of the sport to mock the refs – as if that in itself would better the quality of their calls. If anything it worsens them by making the refs nervous. Asked in another way. Who of you would take a job where you’re payed a laughable fraction of the wage of the people you’re helping doing their job, all while being taunted by thousands of people week after week. I know I wouldn’t. Let’s not forget that the refs help the football take place. I’m sure most people would agree that football with non-perfect law enforcing is better than football with perfect law non-enforcing.

Week in and week out people all over the media and all over Twitter run rampant with ref-hate. Week in and week out club presidents and managers pick up sorry excuses from refereeing calls that weren’t a 100% clear. How on earth is a ref supposed to judge something in real time when it’s hard to judge in slow motion? Until we get goal line technology (it’s a joke that we haven’t got there yet) or actual TV evidence, then we need to accept the fact that refs make mistakes, just as we do when we do our work.

I’m a historian, and if I believed in God I would thank him that I don’t have to explain the finer nuances of Dutch Maritime Cartography in the Renaissance (coincidentally one of my specialties) or date an weird artifact within a time frame way shorter than it takes to read this one sentence. That is what we ask our refs to do. And then we hate them when they get some details wrong. People under the age of 15 can be excused. The rest of us cannot. We need to grow up.

Photo by Kate_Lokteva

The Fidanza donkey pegasus

What is this? A donkey pegasus without trousers? With a cow tail? The poor animal is obviously excused and should not be blamed for its lack of front to back coherence, but the situation it’s in is the fault of humans. I know that Donald Duck walks around without trousers like it was the most normal thing to do – it is not – but pegasuses (pegasi?) have four legs, so why just dress two of them? This is like a human being walking around with only trousers on one leg – a trouse if you will. While this would be perfectly ok, it’s still a weird thing to put on a football crest.

All while being clad rather insufficiently the poor animal is also holding its front legs in a quite strange position. I know it’s probably supposed to look like a noble steed, but it looks like it’s about to fall off the big, light blue football it’s balancing on. Someone save the poor animal.

The Messina lion

This lion is actually very well drawn. It looks majestic. It looks strong. But why oh why did someone chose to trap the ill-fated animal in a mouse wheel? I know that hamsters and rats like to run without end in a wheel – but a lion? Aren’t they supposed to sleep for something like 20 hours out of 24?

It’s lucky for the Messina officials that the logo depicts the lion and its wheel at almost the exact moment when the club name is at the bottom and easy to read. Had the crest been drawn seconds later the wheel would have spun a quarter of a circle (depending of the remaining strength of the lion) and revealed the horrible case of animal mistreatment. The smaller bonsai lion in the little crest seems to have a much easier job holding a Danish flag. That’s at least something.

The A.C. Napoli shorseage

I’m a historian. I know that things change over time. But the existence of sausage animals in 1920′s Naples was new to me. Some people might think that this is just a normal horse, and they ARE easy to mix up, but the hind half of this specimen clearly reveals that this is a bona fide shorseage.

A.C. Napoli was the name of the big club in Naples before the name was changed to SSC Napoli in 1964. The SSC Napoli logo is a quite dull big N, but with attempts like this one, it’s easy to understand why the clever people behind that logo opted not to go for an animal logo. While shorseages were perfectly fine animals for their age, things have evolved a bit since then, and they do seems a bit strange to most people of our time.

The trend of placing innocent animals on round and unstable objects is continuing in this crest. On top of that the shorseage also have to navigate three big flying letters. It does, however, look like the animal is taking the challenge rather well, as it looks out of the crest towards a future that wasn’t meant to be – for him.

Check out more awkward football animals here.