Giorgia Meloni grew up politically in the Italian extreme right after the liberation of the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, whom he praised in public statements. Followers of the same ideas boo African footballers and ask them to be removed from the national team. Such are the cases of Moise Kean and Davide Ogbonna, among others.
The dream of Meloni and his people is that For Italy only Italians playno matter how much talent Mario Balotelli and Stephan El Shaarawy can provide, they are on the pre-list for Euro 2024 in Germany.
Meloni questions football after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Bosman Law, born after a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which forever changed the history of football on that continent.
The rule that is now more than 25 years old is the one that bears the name of the Belgian player Jean-Marc Bosman and eliminated the foreigner quota for players with a European passport. ““Football players earn millions thanks to me, but I live in misery.”, once declared the former soccer player who erased national boundaries and made the leagues of the old continent explode with talent, the Italian one above all. The same thing happened with the business surrounding every pass market around the world.
This fall of borders and community passports did not result in “the Europe we dream of”, according to the perspective of the woman who today governs the land of Calcio.
Italian football questions it and confronts it. The Federation and the clubs reproach him for having taken the tax benefits for those teams that hire foreigners and they fight their project to create an organization that audits their accounts. The other match that the premier disputes with her detractors could be played at the Olympic Stadium in Rome, her hometown and center of Italian politics and sports.
They also accuse her of having abandoned her love for Lazio and now embracing the colors of Roma, her eternal rival. Meloni and the “gioco Calcio” claim each other in a conflictive relationship but from which neither party can escape.
Meloni, heartbroken between Lazio and Roma
Is it difficult to imagine Javier Milei supporting River online and then recognizing himself as a Boca fan? Or Alberto Fernández, a renowned Argentinos Juniors fan, cheering Platense in old interviews? The same with Macri, Alfonsín, Duhalde… Insert the presidential surname you want here. It would be, a priori, a scandal.
In countries where football is for many more than any state policy, a politician changing teams does not enter into anyone’s head. Not from a fan, not from a voter. They can change parties, there are plenty of examples, but not clubs.
Guillermo Francella’s character already said it in The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentine film that won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2010. “The guy can change everything: his face, his house, his family, his girlfriend, his religion, his God… but there is one thing he can’t change: he can’t change his passion.”. Giorgia Meloni, the first Italian minister, comes to counteract this intangibility of passion.
In Rome, their city, where the locals discuss from table to table about the weekend’s matches as in any Buenos Aires, Rosario or Córdoba neighborhood, they are clear that the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, is a fan of Inter Milan and enjoy the new Scudetto won by the Nerazzurri, led by Lautaro Martínez. But with Meloni there is confusion.
Italian Internet users allege that He used to be from Lazio, a team identified with the extreme right, although Meloni maintains that his heart belongs to “La Loba”, AS Roma, a club where Gabriel Batistuta and Walter Samuel shone. The classic rival.
The Italian journalist Carlo Pizzigoni, author of Crazy about football. Pelé, Messi, Maradona, he told Clarion that, in Italy, Meloni is not known as a soccer fan.
“I once heard that he is a fan of Rome, but I don’t think it is something of true passion”. However, in the Italian capital, among so much elegance and within sight of the Colosseum, fans of both are gladiators when it comes to debating about “fans”Whose representative is she?
According to La Repubblica, some users of old Internet forums claimed that Meloni sent messages, under the nickname “The little dragon“(“The Little Dragon”), such as: “I’m from Lazio. Wait, rather, lazialisima“; “May Roma lose everything there is to lose“and assured that he would die as a biancoceleste, a passion he had inherited from his mother.
In 2015, he confronted the French newspaper The world, in defense of Lazio. The French media accused the light blues of launching a black t-shirt in honor of Mussolini’s “black shirts.”
Le Monde ironically stated that the intention was for Paolo Di Canio to return from retirement, a former footballer who gave the fascist salute to celebrate his goals.
In response to Le Monde, the Italian head of state insisted: “This is nonsense. That is, PSG or the All Blacks can wear a black shirt, but if Lazio does it, it is from the ‘Third Reich’. “It’s as if they banned red from Eastern teams, because it’s too communist.”
In the end, he remembered his mother and almost apologized to her for not sharing colors. Perhaps he has overcome the need to reaffirm that she is Wolf and not Eagle. “It is well known that I am a Roma fan and, obviously, my football faith does not allow me to wear the blue and white shirt, but I will always show my solidarity for Lazio, because, unfortunately, my mother is ‘laziale.'”
In “Io sono Giorgia”, his autobiography published a few years before coming to power, he does not talk about his love for football, however, on social networks he is busy celebrating, lamenting and making himself present on the football planet. She celebrated the Conference League In May 2022, she mourned the death of Diego Maradona and, when Silvio Berlusconi described her as a flea, Meloni responded with irony and Argentine football.
“It is an honor that he calls me the best player in the world”he said in X.
Meloni wants Italian football to return to what it was
Giorgia Meloni was barely 5 years old when Italy won the World Cup in Spain in 1982 and the President of the Council of Ministers was the liberal Giovani Spadolini.
He had been in the Youth Front, a political group with a neo-fascist tendency, for two years when the Azzurra lost the final with Brazil in 1994 and at the head of the government was Silvio Berlusconi, the media businessman and boss of the powerful Milan between 1986 and 2017.
In 2006, when her country’s national team was consecrated for the fourth time, Meloni had just joined the Chamber of Deputies as a legislator, while “Il Cavaliere” finished its second term in the Chigi Palace.
In three decades, the Azzurra won three titles, but experienced its worst years on the international stage. After being champion in Germany, he was eliminated in the first round in 2010 and 2014 and did not qualify for 2018 or 2022.
For many, the passage of the Bosman Law in 1995 was a turning point for many European teams. The rule opened the door to foreigners with a community passport and changed the map of global football; Meloni intends to rewind this film.
This rule caused business to skyrocket, but at the same time, over the years, it caused Calcio to lose its status as a star league. Today that medal is worn by the Premier League, as the Spanish League did in the times of Messi, Neymar, Cristiano Ronaldo and Beckham, among other extraterrestrials and galactics.
But the championships full of stars weakened the selected teams and due to the lack of new talent, covered by stars bought in an exponentially larger market, the young promises were diluted. Consequently, they began to look for “reinforcements” in children of immigrants. Then the Mario Balotelli and the Mauro Camoranesi, to name a few, began to defend the shields of other countries.
The return of the extreme right to Europe let FIFA know that something had to be done about it, but the proposed projects failed. Still, the attempts do not stop.
In that battle, while the Italian federation and the clubs reject the creation of an entity to audit their accounts, Meloni is still savoring his political victory for the repeal of the Beckham Law, which allowed a reduction of up to 50 percent in the taxes that entails the arrival of a footballer from abroad.
Introduced to Calcio in 2019, for example, it facilitated the arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo to Juventus.
Following a premise of Jean Marie Le Pen, who knew how to say “it is artificial that we bring foreign players to baptize them as the French team. The majority do not sing it, or clearly do not know La Marseillaise”, Meloni, in his book “Io sono Giorgia”, proposed launching an “Italian plan” to develop Africa. Far from altruism between nations being its only objective and prevent its inhabitants from having reasons to want to come to Europe.
The 23/24 edition of Serie A featured 47 African footballers, of which 10 are Nigerians; 6 from Ivory Coast and Morocco; 4 from Cameroon and Ghana; 3 from Algeria and Senegal; 2 from Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Mali and 1 from Zambia, Congo, Gabon, Zimbabwe and Tunisia.
Xenophobic speeches gained another boost on the fields thanks to politics. In November 2021, Roma was at the center of controversy for racist chants and in January 2023, Lazio was punished with closed stands for discriminatory acts. The club itself should have clarified that it does not adhere to those ideals.
The issue does not escape FIFA. “Racism is terrible, a scourge that exists in our society and that has infiltrated football. Those people who think they can engage in racist behavior in the world of football must know that we do not want them; we want them to leave,” said Gianni Infantino at the closing of the 74th Congress of the federation he presides.
Miguel Montuori, born in Rosario, is remembered as “the first black player” to wear the Italian shirt. It happened in the late ’50s. But he was not the first foreigner because in 1934 Luis Monti, Raimundo Orsi, Enrique Guaita and Atilio Demaría, all Argentines who became tanos, lifted the World Cup.
The glorious and “pure” football that Meloni wants to return to seems to have never existed.