When Pope Wojtyla died on April 2, 2005, and Moggi worked a miracle, with postponed matches, to resume play not with the next round but with the unplayed one
After asking Interior Minister Pisanu (who had sought his help to save Torres) not to postpone the matches, he solved the problem with the approval of the FIGC, of which he was the shadow president
(Translated into English by Grok)
To the everlasting shame of Italian football and its worm, the 2004-05 championship went down in history as the only tournament concluded without a winner, thus without a Scudetto awarded. There seemed to have been a winner, though: Moggi and Giraudo’s Juventus, coached by Capello, which finished the season with 86 points, ahead of Milan (79) and Inter (72). But if you take a look at the Serie A roll of honor for the 2004-05 season, next to Juventus’ name, you’ll stumble upon a gigantic asterisk: and the footnote it refers to reads “title revoked.” In other words, the Scudetto was taken away. Erased. Not assigned.
The Scudetto that Juventus had won, cheating as they had for years (as stated by the judges of the Court of Cassation), was stripped from them and left unassigned; moreover, the one from the following season, 2005-06, was awarded to Inter. Put on trial, the Old Lady asked for the favor of being punished for her prolonged thievery with only a relegation to Serie B. For far less in Italian football, others have faced the penalty of expulsion: a punishment the judges imposed on Juventus’ two top executives, General Director Moggi and CEO Giraudo, found guilty of turning Italian football into a giant, festering open sewer. Yet Juventus was essentially spared. If they had started from Serie D, it would already have been a lenient treatment: instead, it was decided to send them to purgatory, meaning Serie B, for just one year, and the following year everything resumed as before. Perhaps even worse than before.
Of that shameful gang of scoundrels who had turned Italian football into a mafia-like enterprise (not for nothing were Moggi and Giraudo found guilty of criminal association in collusion with referees and federation officials, escaping punishment only due to the statute of limitations), one episode, not widely known, came back to my mind, similar to what happened in recent days following the death of Pope Francis. In 2005, on April 2, a Pope, Karol Wojtyla, also passed away; and just like today, the issue arose of suspending all sporting activities, including the football championship, with the inevitable repercussions that such an extraordinary measure inevitably causes.
Well, do you know what happened back then? Just as in recent days with Inter, which, by Marotta’s own admission, tried (unsuccessfully) to postpone the recovery of the postponed match (Inter-Roma) to May in the hope of having Bastoni and Mkhitaryan serve their suspensions not against Roma but against the next opponent, Verona, a theoretically much easier team, Moggi’s Juventus found itself in a similar situation. They were supposed to play in Florence against a Fiorentina team depleted by numerous injuries and with two suspended players, Viali and Obolo; but the death of Pope Wojtyla led to the postponement of the entire championship round (the 30th).
Moggi had a meltdown: giving up the advantage of facing a decimated Fiorentina would have kept him awake at night. And even though the regulations stipulated, as they do today, that in the case of postponements of championship rounds due to extraordinary events, the standard practice is to recover the suspended matches at the first available date while maintaining the order of the rounds to avoid disparities (in other words: they should have resumed with the 31st round, and the 30th would have been recovered at the first available slot a few weeks later), Moggi didn’t care about anything or anyone, neither the regulations nor Pope Wojtyla in his grave. Like a magician, he managed to pull off the feat of postponing all subsequent rounds, from the 31st to the 38th, so that the championship would resume with the 30th round postponed due to the Pope’s death: all to allow Juventus to play against a Fiorentina team crippled by absences.
To achieve this, Moggi moved heaven and earth, at one point even involving Interior Minister Pisanu who (incredibly but true) had turned to him asking for a favor to ensure that Torres Sassari, the team from his hometown, would be saved (!): which, in fact, happened thanks to Big Luciano’s services. The Minister owed him a favor: and Moggi went to collect, asking Pisanu not to postpone the Serie A matches.
The circumstances, however, were extraordinary, and it was impossible. So Moggi took matters into his own hands and handled everything in-house, meaning within the FJGC (Juventus Football Federation), which, in defiance of the regulations and established practice, decided that the championship would resume, once the mourning for Wojtyla’s death was over, not with the 31st round but with the postponed 30th.
I recounted all this, and much more, during the dark days of Calciopoli in the instant book Calcio Truccato (Rigged Football), written for the magazine Controcampo, which was published weekly as the print counterpart of the Italia 1 sports program for which I was a writer. Here, I reproduce the paragraph dedicated to the issue at hand. Provided you can stomach the disgust for the corruption in which Italian football was mired (and still is?), I’m sure you’ll find it entertaining…
(From “Calcio Truccato”, Press TV Editore, May 22, 2006)
(…) From one palace to another, from the football federation to ministerial palaces: the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of the Economy. As an old Carosello slogan used to say: everything counts! This explains the mystery of the close contacts between Moggi, Juventus’ general director, and Pisanu and Siniscalco, the ministers of the Interior and Economy, respectively.
Phone intercepts lift the veil on what happened: the first is dated February 8, 2005, and it’s Minister Pisanu himself who takes the initiative and calls Moggi.
PISANU: Hello.
MOGGI: Beppe!
PISANU: Hi Luciano, how are you?
MOGGI: All good, all good… well, results are good, then the criticism…
PISANU: Listen, Lucià, I’m calling because I know the president of Torres Calcio is coming to see you on Saturday…
MOGGI: I was going to call you tonight at home.
PISANU: Eh… well, when he comes, give him my apostolic blessing. Tell him you’re receiving him thanks to me.
MOGGI: Don’t worry.
Whether by chance or not, after the president’s meeting with Moggi, Torres wins away after a two-year drought. The Sassari club’s executives, over the moon, call Moggi.
DE NICOLA: Mission accomplished! Torres won and…
MOGGI: Eh, in style.
DE NICOLA: I’m here with the president, I’ll pass him to you.
PRESIDENT CARTA: Luciano, it’s been two years since we won away, Lucià!
MOGGI: See, things are starting well? Don’t worry.
CARTA: My goodness! Two years without an away win!
MOGGI: Eh, but there’s always a first time… don’t worry.
CARTA: We’ve started well, haven’t we?
On March 26, Minister Pisanu, who is with Torres’ president Carta, calls Moggi again.
PISANU: We had a good chat about various issues, and since we’re planning to give Torres a strong relaunch, we absolutely need you. So, Lucià…
MOGGI: No, no: but now let’s study the matter a bit… I’d say with Juventus… let’s do some work, bring back some enthusiasm. It’s clear that until the end of the season, things need to go as smoothly as possible…
PISANU: Well, with the hope that… I don’t know, that there’s some helping hand to save it from… serious risks, you know.
MOGGI: What, are they at risk of relegation?
PISANU: Eh… today we got a referee who had already caused trouble. They sent him back… they sent him back to Sassari when they could have kept him somewhere else.
MOGGI: Alright, I’ll take care of it.
Luciano takes Torres Sassari’s fate to heart, sending former Juventus player Cuccureddu to coach them. When president Carta asks about the cost of the hiring, Moggi replies: “I’ll take care of it personally.”
The question Moggi might be asking himself is: will there ever be a way to cash in and have the Interior Minister return the favor?
The idea dawns on him when, on April 2, with Pope Wojtyla in agony, Minister Pisanu considers suspending the matches (and all sporting events) in case of the Pontiff’s death. Moggi hears the news, turns pale, and calls the minister: he wants the matches to be played at all costs for a reason he later explains, in a separate conversation, to Antonio Giraudo in a hilarious phone call summarized in the investigators’ report as follows: “The attempt to avoid the championship’s suspension was driven by a technical advantage: Juventus was set to face Fiorentina, which had two important players suspended and several others injured.”
To be clear: the Holy Father is dying, Italy and the world are holding their breath, but Moggi is thinking about Fiorentina’s Viali and Obolo, who are suspended, and Juventus, which risks losing the advantage of facing a Fiorentina team decimated by suspensions and injuries. When a Pope dies, another is elected, he’d like to tell Pisanu. What’s the big deal?
In the end, struck like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, Luciano has a second, decisive epiphany: the next day, the 30th round won’t be played, fine, but when play resumes the following week (Wojtyla’s funeral was held on Friday, April 8), it won’t be with the 31st round but with the 30th, pushing back all the remaining scheduled rounds, so Juventus can capitalize on the bonus of facing a Fiorentina team without the suspended Viali and Obodo and numerous injured players.
Pope Wojtyla can thus pass away in peace, and Moggi and Giraudo, contrite, make the sign of the cross. Amen.
P.S. Random Thoughts. They say a divine curse fell upon Juventus with the force of the eleventh plague of Egypt. What if the idea of trading two suspended players for the Pope’s death wasn’t, in the end, such a great idea?
