How can a writer, someone who has read certain books, an “intellectual”, be a fan and take the Sunday match or even the football championships and its champions seriously? This was the question that we asked Vittorio Sereni. And here is his reply

I am here to take the side of Inter [Football Club Internazionale Milano, known as Inter, an Italian club with a black and blue strip, hence the team’s other name “nerazzurro”], or even to justify my similarly coloured thoughts and sentiments. Although this question has an easy answer, the issue is certainly more complex than what one might suppose. I realise that my words will be different today than what they might have been in 1936, in 1954 or even 1960, not only because I and the team have both changed, but because the game in general has also changed; and more importantly, the relationship between the public, the nation and the game has also changed. […]

Today I feel almost split in two, divided between objective considerations on football-related affairs and those of my favourite team. I feel a progressive detachment – in certain moments verging on total indifference – and the call of that nerazzurro phantom [referring to the author’s infatuation with Inter; black and blue are the colours of the Inter Club] that has accompanied me since when I could see nothing else but “Il Peppino nazionale” as Giuseppe Meazza was better known. Zizì or Cevenini iii belonged to my footballing prehistory when my heart was set on Genoa. Indeed, my hero was De Prà, who was also the national goalkeeper; two notable qualities in the same player, something which in my opinion is rare today, leaving aside my weakness for today’s Inter goalkeeper Giuliano Sarti. This split of which I speak has accentuated over time, but not through greater wisdom, because this phantom still creates the same anguish and joy, sometimes even worse than before. When I say “worse”, I mean in the symptoms and side effects of a “passion” that still exists for me with all its many signs. And so, what is the object of this passion?

I often find myself being asked questions such as: “But tell me, someone like you, someone with certain types of interests, like writing and reading certain books – well, we could even define you as an ‘intellectual’ – how can you take certain things so seriously? Are you trying to pose, or is this some type of intellectual quirk? Are you trying to be ostentatious, just to be different?” My sincere response is that this is an illness one catches when very young: it may go away, but if it doesn’t – as in my case – then you just have to accept it, because it is not a problem and not even something to be ashamed of.

The listener usually shakes his head incredulously, and you can see that he is still doubtful. You understand that he didn’t catch that illness when he was young. You only hope that the discussion doesn’t move on to psychoanalysis, sociology, mass persuasion, etc. I might even read with deference a future essay on this aberration affecting some football supporters, and might even take into consideration the proposed diagnosis when next called to account for my illness. As you see, the discussion about supporting one club or another is no different from that wider discussion on general interest in the game. I am one of those people who believes that without being a fan you cannot really be interested in the game, because to be a fan of one team or another is an essential ingredient of that interest. When talking about that split, did I perhaps mean to say that my interest has waned, whereas the fan has remained intact? How to explain this?

Well, I continued to hope for years that the future would have brought Inter a new Meazza. As everyone knows, this great player had a long career, which included some temporary (some shorter, some longer) eclipses, metamorphoses, reincarnations, etc. Some people even say that he alone was Inter. And naturally in our imagination he was Inter; but speaking seriously, this would be total nonsense when speaking about football and the technical perspective of the game. We could even make portraits of the other Inter players of the Thirties to show their individual peculiarities: my friend Giansiro tried to do so, but sadly, he is such a Milan fan that he even brought in some traits from the opposing side: there would be no Milan if there were no Inter (and obviously vice versa) and such unbridled emotion for one team obviously has some fallout effect on the other.

Therefore, the typical Inter player would be tall and long-limbed, blonde tending towards ginger, sensible (so technically prepared to appear fast even when jogging), cold and correct and dangerous: this does not mean dubious underhandedness in front of the referee, but more improvised sleights of hand when the cards are on the table, ruthless and unexpected prowess, cold-blooded impulses that transform into indisputable and truly fearsome facts – a prelude to the stadium going crazy – and carried out when least unexpected or seemingly impossible. These characteristics make me think of Meazza, and so if I want to depict a portrait of the typical Inter player of those times, do I not have to search elsewhere, in players like Castellazzi, Campatelli and Olmi – blonde and long-limbed, and very different from Meazza – a very different kettle of fish than my divo, to whom I reserve the role of ingenuity, the diamond-tipped and blindingly resolute sharpness rather than the rational functionality of others? A true and at the same time untrue definition, because after one of Meazza’s metamorphoses, he also transformed some of his qualities precisely in the direction of the golden mean sketched above – excluding obviously blondeness and slenderness.

But memories continue to pass through my imagination; recollections of three or four of Peppino’s emblematic moments. The sudden change in direction of a long diagonal pass, a long kick that picks up speed; a parabolic “penalty” shot that seems too high but then takes an unsuspecting downwards curve (today we would say “it drops like a leaf”, but perhaps that is different) just enough to reach the goal posts (the players and spectators are immobile, watching the inevitable result), and his feints making the defenders collide, the ball slipping between them and past the grounded goalkeeper to finally roll slowly between the goalposts… And then some coquetry, the double somersault of joy – or so I was told, as I was not there – after a goal against Austria in 1931 at San Siro; a calculated delay in the Littoriale Stadium in Bologna with the teams already lined up and the spectators impatient (Meazza isn’t there, Meazza is missing) and then he finally jogs out from the tunnel, bending down to tie his laces to the sound of the referee’s impatient whistle… and then, the tussle in front of the goal, the corner kick that makes everyone jump and then fall except for Meazza – almost submerged in a sea of football strips – who at the very last moment is seen rising above the other players. That radiant little head standing out from the others delivers an implacable diagonal header with his forehead and it’s a goal.

Meazza bathed in the limelight of the national team – or was it the national team that bathed in his light? In some of those dreary Sundays in the Arena when the grandstands were not too crowded and you could move right down to the barriers and observe the players and even hear words being exchanged – curses and all – you could identify their true and less-true physiognomies taken as real by the spectators who normally observed from the distant grandstands. For me, Meazza was the only player whose appearance never changed; no matter how colourless and dull the game, whatever he did – even when he wasn’t in the mood – he evoked the magic and vitality of other tough battles fought out elsewhere, such as Colombes, the Prater in Vienna or wherever… I don’t know how to explain this better, but the fascination of the Italian team was not felt by a large part of us football managers. A strange reaction for such a prestigious institution, a beacon of national pride and one of the few international concessions that brought the wind of the continent into the closed world of the peninsula.

In that period opinions were very changeable; for example, the idea that passion for sport or more specifically, for football was a type of drug disseminated by the regime, whether or not it was conscious of its effect of distracting the crowds from other much more serious matters. There was also another impetus which seemed to come from below and to generate a desire for energy, vitality and freshness where it was not to be found. This was not an official doctrine and therefore stands in antagonism – deliberately or not – with the official stance. That this too was all too appealing, so much so as to exist to this today, in so different an atmosphere and with different characteristics, is subject for another conversation. And subject of another conversation yet is that the phenomenon of football has not only grown in vitality but has expanded to its present form despite the twenty years of Fascism and its propaganda; this does not mean that today’s sport did not suffer the consequences of that period and might still nurture a germinal seed from those years. I do remember how many of us on the front lines, in occupied territories, or in concentration camps would think of this sport as one of the three or four things that we could never renounce as symbolic of those simpler times when the country was at peace:

…feeble larvae without a footprint gathering on the shaded “pelouse” of reviviscence: the more acclaimed teams spread out like fans without precise profiles of the players evoked only by the absence of their names. Spinning like tops with no one stopping longer than a transitory period: what was important was the name that resisted becoming part of that formation of eleven, the apex of the triangle focused on the wide-open goal. This search continued obsessively, accompanied by a provocative mix of vowels and consonants: or else I hoped for a name that would evoke that still recalcitrant companion in those memorable acquisitions hastily bought for hundreds of thousands of lire to the joy of Sunday crowds. That chink in an almost impregnable armour brought with it obstinate nightmares of emptiness! But in the end even the most quarrelsome athlete rushed into the pitch of memories to be reconquered step by step.

These words are from an unpublished text of my friend Giosue and portray a moment when memory and consciousness were retrieved after a bout, unfortunately not of a football tifo [Italian for “cheering”], but of an epidemic typhus contracted during segregation in Germany. It is also a sign of how the image of our favourite sport has penetrated into our inner beings to nestle in the most hidden recesses of our unconscious.

I waited for years for the advent of a resurrected Meazza, or at least someone who could in some way take his place. In the meantime, I could only continue to support Inter, the natural setting for this great return if ever it were to occur. Then Lorenzi arrived and I thought I recognised Meazza in him – even more after his first, or was it his second championship match against Juventus – when about halfway through the first half, the future “Veleno” had already scored two goals against Sentimenti iv and even burned out Parola with his sprint. Who offered him guidance from the sidelines, and to whom did this new star display, in almost theatrical manner, his strip, which had been ripped off by an adversary who had no other way of stopping him? Meazza, none other, who had moved on to become Inter’s coach. It did not take long to realise that Lorenzi was no Meazza, without subtracting anything from the player who would become Veleno; his irrefutable prowess and unorthodox approach, some astonishing goals but in a certain way something completely different. Those few times – not many – that Lorenzi evoked Meazza, it was due to an extraordinary nervous charge, whereas the maestro simply drew on his profound instinct for the game translated into style.

These almost messianic periods of waiting accentuated the aspect of infatuation, and the true expert rejects them, seeing them as something degenerate: people like that begin by seeing a single player, and ends up in the best of cases by seeing the game of their “own” team. Players come and go, as do coaches. Nyers and Skoglund came and went, and Angelillo too; team formations were changed, as were their techniques and style of play, and this kind of person is still there waiting to rejoice or be saddened by a team that has nothing in common with the team of his heart other than the colour of their football strip.

He is like that poor Bologna fan who returned by train from Lugano after a terrible Switzerland-Italy match that ended in a one all draw, longing for those times in which Biavati or Sansone – he watched them with his own eyes, would you believe it, while they practised – were able to keep the ball in the air 70 or 80 times in a row using feet, heels, forehead, nape of the neck and passing it with sheer bravura from front to back and vice versa. You would have liked to tell him that this was not the issue, this was not the difference; it was not that today’s players did not know how, if only they chose, to do the same things, but you preferred to remain silent – because is it true or not, that he too was also a victim of a certain infatuation?

Thank goodness you were a little shrewd and common sense told you that the national team made no sense and did not reflect the true make-up of the championship, and you wished that it became a sure loser, and so would finish by upsetting the clubs, which were always more reluctant to cede their players and less accepting of the honour of being called. And yet, certain matches turned out well, even friendly matches and even when played at night, between teams from Hamburg or Barcelona, from Moscow or Lausanne, from Milan or Stockholm: teams with players used to playing as a team, with a game that was not imposed externally but practised so many times as to have become natural. And so that day arrived when your eyes are distracted from the nerazzurro phantom and you notice a change or mutation in yourself; the era of ace players has gone, and that’s why Meazza will never return; you yourself have become more mature, as a spectator, for the Champions Cup.

This is where the game of football and the football championships stand today: if one looks a little beyond the football pitch, and rummages around the changing rooms and tunnels, in the Club headquarters, then you will hear various comments of persons who live off the sport – albeit with increasing difficulty – and who return to the pitch ever more reluctantly. One should really ask oneself whether a match really ends without any aftermath after the final whistle of the referee, like it does on video with the commentator’s last words. If it did, every pretext would be legitimate, just as for any other performance, to prohibit the abandonment of the stadium and the abolition of televised coverage. Past experience and the evolution of the phenomenon could lead to a detached, non-binding, non-eternal, changeable predilection for the team that built itself piece by piece over various seasons, through patience and reasoning, and without depending on astounding acquisitions, or else depending on them only in relation to the team’s real necessities, aiming at an equilibrium between the quality of the players and a clear and predetermined vision of the game. Instead of forming itself with champions, it would itself form champions, to the same degree to which it built itself as a team. And so, what about the Fiorentina of Bernardini? Or the Bologna of today? Or Milan of two or three years ago? And why not the Inter of Herrera (and of Moratti)?

None of these gain or gained any lustre from the national team, which has been in serious trouble for some time for well-known reasons (reminiscing on these is always an abstract and affected task, a superimposition that in this phase is more about competition between rival teams and not about select players); local pride, amidst all these “interchangeable” pieces, lives on only in absurdity, or in savage fanaticism; a good president cannot adopt any other role than that of a capable administrator, of an entrepreneur who knows what he is doing – or else he is a villainous bungler; and no one will put up with a player unless he is first of all a serious professional. So, with these wise observations, I am destined to become an expert, no?

Well, let’s see. Today, Inter has nothing of that eccentricity and elegance that it was once renowned for. It is now distinguished for its regularity on the pitch. They say that it is based on a highly organised and articulated defensive “block”, and a manoeuvred but extremely energetic game from its side of the pitch; and something else – these are all the words of others – a murderous counterattack (when conditions are right; but sometimes they are not, and it is wonderful that today’s team still holds out even when conditions are not ideal). If anything, the Inter of then – blonde and long-limbed – could be mirrored in the game Milan played two or three years ago, even with its ups and downs. This is not all; there are games in which things look pretty bad and at a certain moment, one can only shake one’s head and not look on anymore. As far as I am concerned, I just sit and surrender and accept what comes and fear for the worst and wait for the derision (incidentally, in a distant Milan-Inter match that ended up well for me, did I not take my eyes off the game out of pure cowardice, at least for the first few minutes of play?)… And now we get to the part of Inter today, and its fans, those with their sirens and their banners displaying the writings: “Sia la sorte azzurra o nera – viva l’Inter viva Herrera”: they never sit, and they never give up; and often, never sitting nor giving up, they turn the game around.

This is where the true identity of the fans is to be seen: in that meeting between your character and its semblance, the identity that the team takes on in your eyes, by analogy and also by contrast or simply complementarity with respect to the image you have of yourself. The team becomes a metaphor of your own existence, the team’s destiny – without becoming your own, which would be too much – is a possible roadmap of your destiny: or in less solemn words, it is a roadmap of how things can go well or badly for you. Certain moments before the match begins, before the pre-match performance and the sudden silence that accompanies the announcement of the formation: those unnerving moments when music is played to the spectators in a sort of announcement of death or a duel to the last breath, or a horse race in some cowboy movie in which honour and courage must be defended. These are the moments that are like unexpected chinks in the conscience, landslides of silence in the inner landscape, harbingers of a settling of debts that drag you into their darkness, like branches and leaves that are caught up in the wind signalling the arrival of a hurricane: the wait is an equally tiring moment, rather like the wait for an imminent attack in warfare.

Instinctively, a defensive stance is adopted, and while the first players come into the open running onto the pitch and take some trial shots, it is normal to compare their states of mind with your own, and to ask yourself if they too are prone to these passing winds, if their minds are caught up in these same vortices, if their inner beings are torn with the same trauma. And you, incredulously watching from nearby the events that are about to take place; events that cannot be taken lightly, and you are obliged to reason, to try and convince yourself that you are at a game, and so it may as well be enjoyed more or less comfortably, hoping that it will be a good show. This exhortation is useless, as useless as watching some well-made horror film, even though we know that the celluloid images will not change anything in our lives. But in that moment, your nerazzurro faith makes itself felt in your very being, a brand that cannot be removed, and it would be easy and you would give anything to be free from it and be able to adopt an indifferent and more relaxed way of behaving…

There is also another side to the medal, that of euphoria at the positive outcome, of concession to what is happening in front of you, even it if be adverse – all the more if it be adverse, when things finally start to go well. The amazing spectacle of a compact crowd gathered around a team still exists, amazing because on how many other occasions can we see so many people gathered in such a small space, so many as to create the illusion of an authentic and unending expanse of city (the night game with Borussia this year, and the uninterrupted wall of faces which seems to contain all the faces of past supporters in many years of play)? As far as I am concerned, this portrait would not be complete if one disregarded the immediacy with which all this fever is spontaneity replaced with that bitter sense of emptiness and almost remorse, as soon as the stadium is emptied and that enormous and now silent bowl becomes the very image of squandered time.

[…] Now that the ancient nerazzurro phantom has been placated, we return to the calm and regard things from above, while a young boy who looks just like we once were is avidly watching every move of his Suárez or Rivera, nothing more and nothing less than our Meazza of 30 years before. But of course, everything has started again and everything has to be redone.

A lot of this seems strangely similar to life, to work, and also to art. In the beginning there is a strange obscure personal fact, perhaps a predilection in the choice of colour made once and for all and without any true motivation, but then it is transformed into something personal and with all its pride and anxieties, and all the petty or great cowardice. Those who live above this know it very well. And also the technical trainers – bless them – those truly competent persons whose sheer objectivity to see inside the phenomenon, inside that furnace that feeds our frenzy and creates our identification between this and the other types of game. Having said this, it is completely irrelevant, or at least so far as public discussion is concerned, whether one be a fan of one team or another. We will never be able to understand each other, we who after so many years still are not able to see if an action is a foul or off play, and we have no difficulty in admitting that the game of Bologna, as it is today, is much more fun.