Let’s forget about history, and the “senatus populusque romanus” later becoming an acronym of rude teasing of the capital’s inhabitants: at stake here is the completion of a process of football-assisted anthropological change which started with what was an already bruising vividness at the time, but only for those who showed an interest in observing it more than twenty years ago. That football was carrying the weight, pretext and metaphor of an overall Italian condition is a hypothesis that I have supported since the mid ’70s, when I wrote in the “Repubblica”, founded in January ’76 without sports pages…. “Football worship” is a neologism of mine from that time, when it could have seemed to be a sociolinguistic provocation. A quarter of a century has gone by, now I assert myself with my son who finds the large numbers of football worshippers confusing, though he plainly states “I don’t particularly care about Roma, I like Inter but only because they have Ronaldo, I go to the Circus Maximus to celebrate and watch Ferilli’s striptease with my Roma friends...”. And so let’s move on to the present, and catch up a bit after so many years spent witnessing (“At the final stage - A Republic built on football”, Rusconi, 1983, “Years of leather”, Newton Compton, 1987, “Bad signs”, Pironti, 1993 etc.) what was going on in football and the (“footballized”) society which encapsulates it. Roma has deservedly won their third Italian league title: the first one dates back to the Fascist Period, the second won in the ’80s in which the cynical, Andreotti-like skill of a chairman, Dino Viola, the oenological wisdom of a great ex-champion, Nils Liedholm, and the logical genius of a European Brazilian, Paulo Roberto Falcao, made a breach from the centre into the north of football. Now, firstly Cragnotti with Lazio then Sensi with Roma have shown, though with different characteristics (Cragnotti is a financier, Sensi an entrepreneur), that the capital is so also in football. Next year will see whether it is lasting geopolitical change. For sure Roma, like Lazio a year ago, have experienced what it means to feel a strong wind from the halls of power blow behind their backs, read as: referees, environmental context, favourable signs of fate, so Juventus-like in nature, to understand it in the most classic tradition…. The money, already invested randomly over the years by Sensi, was this time aimed at immediate success; Capello has proved himself the ideal field marshal with the necessary baton; Tommasi and Del Vecchio have masqueraded or rather dressed as champions, if it is true what Nietzsche says “one only becomes that which one is”; the Roma support has completed the deed. Well, this jubilant million, or even million-and-a-half tells us so much, summed up in a main deed and another substitute one. The main one is that, despite all its flaws, football seems to hold precisely as a weight and pretext of celebration, aggregation, social contact even if in crowds: naturally on condition that one wins. Roma supporters today, Lazio fans yesterday are willing to turn a blind eye to what football has been reduced to, in terms of sporting ethics and criminal code, just to be able to hope in celebrations. This refers to those duties of credibility of the football worship show which have been so openly violated. Football is ending up in a bad way - like the Florence/Fiorentina/Cecchi Gori case has undertaken to demonstrate in such an explicit manner to seem …. cinematographic …, financially and socially bankrupt (read as: stadium hooliganism), and it does not appear to pick up the very considerable signs of decay, to judge by the hundreds of billions of Lire that still go around in a rather unclear way, with clubs being held as “hostages” by banks when there is not the so-called “real” money of (Agnelli, Berlusconi, Sensi, Moratti, Tanzi). It really seems that the ruling football class (oops …) are deaf in this ear, accompanied by the political one, cf. the new mayor, a Juventus supporter from birth, going around carrying Roma’s colours. I only ask you to consider very tritely the characteristics of the league celebrations, of the million and more that indeed celebrated Roma’s second title back in ’83, but absolutely without these features of self-identification, of centrifuge, which shows that eighteen years have precisely pushed the “footballization” process much further on, mentioned above. I said that the Football Worship Celebration is okay, civilly or almost, if one wins: if one loses, there is the risk of a spilling over into a general fit of social anger. Has all this been allowed for? Have we therefore arrived at the case of awarding league titles with one eye on the stock exchange, business, and the other one on public order? Anything but the football played!!! But I was saying that the celebration also brings to mind a secondary, substitute deliberation. It concerns a fan’s remark on the Tg3 news: “And now all to Genoa for the Champions’ League rehearsals at the G8 talks”. If it really were so, if there were a transverse thread that concerns each type of event, each public, sporting, social or political moment whatever, pro-Roma or anti-globalization? Mull it over, readers, mull it over ... P.S. I would not wish to find myself once again ahead of time with the latter point, that puts forward a link between the people of Seattle and those of Tormarancio, crossing through a series of knots all still to be undone, and yet already here, in front of us, like the others twenty years ago, these footballing ones now so entangled so as not to be undone any more, perhaps cut “gordianally” (there is a suburban district of Rome called Borgata Gordiani …). But by who?

(* S.P.Q.R. – abbreviation of Senatus Populusque Romanus. The original effect of the Italian acronym: “sono pericolosi questi rotondolatri” : “these football worshippers are dangerous”, is obviously lost in the translation of the title).

(trad. Interpres sas Giussano)