The championship is distorted. The cups are distorted, Our daily life is distorted. The refrain is sterile, it is an empty exercise to face a situation that since February has not been the same all over the world, at every latitude, at every moment of our days. Closed and lonely. Football has the good fortune to be able to continue its activity, with limits and protocols that do not differentiate it from any other company among the few open, in case it privileges opportunities and accesses.
So to think that Leicester and Southampton are at the top of English football, like Villarreal and Real Sociedad in Spain or like Milan and Sassuolo in Italy, just because the stadiums are empty and “this isn’t football”, is frankly reductive and mystifies problems. serious structural problems of Real Madrid and Barcelona, the two Manchester and Arsenal or the same wavering Tottenham, Inter and Juventus. Who is in front has more merits, and that’s it. In this era, with these problems and in these conditions which, in their precariousness, are the same for everyone in a ruthless random Russian roulette. Where luck counts, but always a little less than strength and skill.
Napoli, for example, arrives at the direct confrontation with Milan (from the top, 30 years later …) in apparently disadvantaged conditions compared to the Rossoneri, but who has established that the absence of a center forward – Osimhen – is more serious than scored 1 goal in 2 months and will be replaced by the best scorer in Neapolitan history (Mertens), compared to the coach and his deputy from the opposing team? We do not hide the fact that other precariousness and absences could affect the San Paolo match, initially, but Gattuso knows better than anyone else the merits and defects, virtues and weaknesses of the Pioli band and therefore we start in perfect equality. In a challenge that is probably decisive only for Milan: by winning it, he could officially announce to everyone that he is running for the Scudetto. However, to no longer be dismissed as a meteor. Long last. Milan has acquired certainties and convictions, in recent months, which have allowed them to face with determination and fruitfully resolve 19 consecutive league games, a whole group. To graduate, however, he needs to charm all the juries, because up to now this long, extraordinary series has produced only applause and a good partial placement in Serie A and in the Europa League. The path will still be long after Napoli, but facing it with a more robust advantage and another undertaking in the game bag, will give the locker room the definitive feeling (to be cultivated to the end) that something great and unimaginable can be done. Believing it.
Leao also got injured in the national team and we know how decisive he has recently become, in the absence of Rebic or in the race. It is useless to blame the friendlies and the competitions of UEFA and the other continental federations, it is now too late. When the calendars were drawn up, no one (or rather, very few) resisted: football goes on and the national teams must go on too, they have their commitments and their needs. They all had to think about it first.
In recent years I have often wondered what exactly were the interests of the American lawyer Joe Tacopina in leading the consortiums first at Venice and then at Bologna, and what fascination Bologna itself had on Joey Saputo who created an empire, but in Canada . Same question for Pallotta to Roma 9 years ago, from Boston. And who knows what passion his successor Dan Friedkin, one of the richest men in America, brought to the capital, already knowing that the chimera of the new stadium in Rome is, in fact, unattainable. And it does not appear that none of these tycoons were fans of the clubs he bought, much less Thoir first and Suning later, despite the overwhelming popularity of the Nerazzurri in the East thanks to Nicola Ventola and his very famous, dated wife: Kartika. Something different in Rocco Commisso’s purchase of the Fiorentina, yes ok from Broccolino? No, nothing different, because Italian football clubs without owned stadiums – with 2 or 3 exceptions – are empty boxes.
In those boxes, however, money can be carried. Rivers of money. Across the continents. As long as nothing illegal is done and nothing illegal is revealed, as long as everyone is free to keep their doubts and perplexities, we can go on. However, if there is a club where the mysterious owner has a clear interest and purpose, being a global investment fund, it is Milan because the path traced by Elliott and his owners is obviously clear from the first moment: to grow the team and brand to earn and then resell. Yet they are the only empty boxes in which every now and then someone takes the trouble to go and poke their nose, to regularly discover nothing. To uncover empty pots too. They don’t have it with the Singer family or with Elliott, rest assured: the fact is that Berlusconi’s 30 years of presidency of Milan have bothered perhaps even more than his 9 years of presidency of the council …, or them they add up and are not in it. What is certain is that at the end of yet another vacuous scoop heralded (and slipped …), the only boxes full are now ours.
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