Calcio by Foot John

Author:Foot, John [Foot, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 2010-01-20T23:00:00+00:00

Re-inventing football coverage and subverting the genre. From Bar Sport to Mai Dire Gol

‘The first transmission in Italy to really take the piss out of the world of football’11

In 1983 a local, left-wing radio station in Milan, which had been set up as a militant, illegal pirate station in the 1970s, decided to cover a football game for the first time. This decision, in the words of radio journalist Sergio Ferrentino, broke ‘the taboo on the left towards football’. After Juventus lost the 1983 European Cup final to Hamburg, the station opened up their phone lines and discovered a whole new type of listener: ‘Thank you, Magath [the Hamburg goalscorer]’, they cried, in delight, ‘shitty hunchbacks’, ‘Viva Germany’. The two journalists – both Juventus fans – just had to sit there and take it. ‘It was a hard night’, one later wrote. After that, they had the idea of a football programme, on Sunday nights, ‘but we needed to find another couple of idiots first’. They did, and Bar Sport was born. One of the first conscious decisions taken was to adopt the language of the fan, and not of the football expert. Luther Blissett, for example, was ‘simply crap – and that was it’. The programme, as journalist and Inter fan Gad Lerner put it, helped people ‘rediscover the fan-beast within themselves’. Maradona, for example, was usually referred to as ‘the fat dwarf’.

In the early days the programme consisted simply of comments on what had happened that Sunday on the pitch and on the way it was being reported by the most popular sports programme of the time, Sporting Sunday. Bar Sport would also ring up people in Milan – fans and intellectuals – and then give out two prizes – perbacco (good!) e devi morire (you must die! bad) – for the best and the worst ‘things’ of the week. There was then was a kind of vote, where people phoned up and expressed preferences – for players, managers or TV commentators.

Another innovation of Bar Sport was that the people who phoned up would be treated extremely rudely, especially if they stated that they were ‘first-time callers’. Usually, when someone did say this, they were immediately cut off. Commentary on the game – which rarely talked about the actual game – was interspersed by debates about entirely irrelevant issues, music, and random phone-ins. The ‘commentators’ were a mixture of fans and amateur experts, often saying that a pass was ‘rubbish’ or that a player was ‘a wanker’.

With the Roma-Liverpool European Cup final of 1984, the team started to ‘commentate’ on real matches, inviting listeners to turn down the television volume, and turn up their radios. Some of these early experiments were even more surreal, because the fake commentators commentated on both the ‘real’ commentators and the match itself. In the end, this became too difficult, so the sound was turned down (at least in people’s homes, not in the studio, where it was occasionally turned up).

So the central idea behind Bar Sport was both simple, and brilliant.

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