Two Global Powers, Two Roads to the World Cup

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The New York Sun

For most of the world, there are still 17 days to go before the World Cup gets started. But for the 4,000 citizens of Weggis, a Swiss lakeside resort, the main event is already underway. The Brazilian national team is in town and a state-ofthe-art facility has been built for them, including an indoor training field, a gym, and a press center. The tiny stadium belonging to the local amateur club used to have no seats at all; it now has 5,000, plus a perfect new grass surface.

The Brazilians, runaway favorites to take the world title, will conduct 14 routine training sessions in Weggis. But, of course, Brazilian soccer is never just routine. The interest is enormous. More than 100 countries have bought the rights to broadcast the training sessions, with Brazilian television arranging for several live transmissions. Eight hundred press accreditations have been issued for the training camp.

Watching Brazil’s stars train ranks high among soccer’s delights. When 55,000 tickets for the team’s 14 sessions went on sale at $16 apiece, they were all snapped up within two days. There has even developed something surely not often seen in Weggis – a black market, with tickets supposedly going for four or five times their face value.

But the mini-World Cup of Weggis has its sad side: The 300 potential spectators whose living quarters overlook the stadium will not be allowed to watch. They’re being moved. They may not be too concerned – they’re pigs, belonging to farmer Alfred Stoeckli. It was Stoeckli’s idea to shift them. He told Reuters, “Some Brazilian officials had already been here inspecting the site. They didn’t say anything about the farm, but I knew that the stench can be pretty bad when the wind is blowing, and I didn’t want some tabloid paper writing that Brazil’s World Cup preparations had been damaged by the smell of my pigs.”

The gesture was appreciated, and the Weggis town council donated $7,350 to Stoeckli in support of his efforts to ensure that the Brazilians train in a stench-free stadium.

A few hundred miles to the south in Italy, the atmosphere is anything but stench-free. The scandal over influence peddling and game fixing continues to spread, and has now reached deep into the Italian national team World Cup preparations. Late last week, coach Marcello Lippi was called in by the investigating magistrates and spent over three hours with them. Reportedly, the magistrates were trying to discern whether Lippi was pressured or influenced by the official at the center of the scandal, former Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi, to select certain players for the national team.

“I was questioned as a witness,” he said last Friday. “I responded to the prosecutors’ questions … I have nothing to fear from the investigations and I have never thought of resigning. From this point on, I will only think about the national team.”

Case closed? Obviously not. If it were simply a case of Moggi trying to pressure Lippi into selecting Juventus players for the national team – something that has been widely discussed – there would be little to worry about, because there is no evidence of such pressure.But Lippi’s position is greatly complicated because his son Davide is a player agent working for the company Gea World – of which Moggi’s son, Alessandro, is a director. It was with Gea that this investigation started, with suspicions that the agency was using “unfair competition” to sign players. The trail led to the elder Moggi, then to Juventus CEO Antonio Giraudo, who is suspected of “false accounting”in player trades. Both have since resigned.

Many in the Italian press feel that Lippi has become a liability in his high-visibility position – the man who will, in effect, be the public face of Italian soccer during the World Cup. Over the weekend, La Repubblica cryptically reported that “a movement from the top, which may be political, has decided to push for Lippi to end up in the list of those who, for various reasons, have decided to quit.”

Any accusations leveled at Lippi are likely to go back to his time as the coach of Juventus, before he was put in charge of the national team. The most important of Italy’s sports dailies, Gazzetta dello Sport – evidently fearing revelations to come – has commented that “Lippi at the World Cup is a risk.”

Yesterday, though, was a much better day for Lippi. As the team prepares to travel to Germany, Lippi was visited at its base in Florence by Guido Rossi, the man appointed by the government to run the Italian soccer federation after the scandal brought about the resignation of its two top executives.”I am here to offer the utmost support to Lippi,” said Rossi. “To replace him would be total madness, and would mean punishing someone who is not guilty. There is nothing to reproach Lippi for.”

Such was the intensity of Rossi’s enthusiasm and confidence that he found it necessary to publicly criticize one of the sport’s greatest names, Franz Beckenbauer. “I’m sorry that Beckenbauer has said certain things … Let’s hope we can prove him wrong on the field.”

Beckenbauer had been quoted as saying that “Italy will pay the price on the field for the psychological shock of the scandal … It will damage the team, the players will have their minds elsewhere, it’s too big a scandal to forget.”

The Americans, drawn in the same group as Italy, would benefit from a distracted Italian squad, but they should not count on such fortune. History speaks against Beckenbauer on this one. Twenty-four years ago, Italy entered the 1982 World Cup in Spain in the wake of a betting and game-fixing scandal that had convulsed the sport in Italy. The team was in turmoil throughout the tournament and imposed a ban on talking with the press. Only the team captain, goalkeeper Dino Zoff, would speak – something of a joke, as he was renowned as the most taciturn of men.

Yet on the final day of the tournament it was Zoff who lifted the World Cup trophy after Italy beat Germany 3-1. The star of the azzurri, as they are called in Italy – and the top goal-scorer of the tournament – was Paolo Rossi,who had been involved in the scandal up to his neck, and had only just returned to the field after a two-year ban. Not much evidence of psychological shock there.


The New York Sun

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