Is soccer a matter of life and death? “It’s much more serious than that,”
the droll Bill Shankly, who managed Liverpool in the club’s glory days,
once remarked. But how much more? “Us, out of the World Cup?” Carlo
Tavecchio, the head of the Italian Football Federation, said to
journalists, after Italy lost a crucial qualifying game in September. “It
would be the apocalypse.” What he seemed to be saying was that it would be
something so bad that it surely couldn’t happen. But then it did.

“THE END,” the enormous headline of the Gazzetta dello Sport confirmed, when, on Monday, contrary to all expectations and pundit
wisdom, Italy failed to score against a modest Swedish side and crashed
out of the forthcoming tournament in Russia. “The sporting equivalent of
the sinking of the Titanic,” the paper clarified in its following
edition. “Soccer Caporetto,” a journalist for a southern paper, the
Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, wrote, recalling Italy’s loss of ten
thousand men in a single battle on the Austrian front in the First World
War, almost exactly a hundred years ago. Whatever your preferred
analogy, it was always a “National Disgrace,” as the headline of the
Rome-based Il Messaggero declared. Time for everyone to hang their
heads in shame.

Why this mad excess, this extraordinary investment of emotion and
rhetoric in what is, after all, just a game that ended badly? This is a
country where thirty-five per cent of young adults are unemployed, a
country which, in the last decade, has lost a large part of its
manufacturing base and building industry. It faces a dramatic ongoing
immigration crisis that has African men, women, and children frequently
dying in the sea around its coasts. Banks falter, political parties
split and bicker, the elections set for the spring of 2018 seem destined
to deliver a parliament with no clear majority and hence no coherent
government. Yet the most dramatic headlines seem to be exclusively
reserved for soccer. “A sadness that infects us all,” Il Messaggero lamented. “An indelible stain,” Corriere dello Sport moaned, offering
a choice of metaphors: “Apocalypse, tragedy, catastrophe.”

Way back in 1821, long before the modern game of soccer was being
played, the poet Giacomo Leopardi wrote “To a Winner with the Ball.”
It’s not easy reading. At twenty-three, Leopardi was profoundly
pessimistic. The world was “a solid nothing.” People’s loss of religious
faith had exposed all human beliefs since the beginning of time as
groundless, nothing more than errors. Yet it was precisely those errors,
Leopardi thought—believing in heroism, believing in glory, believing in
artistic achievement and romantic love—which had made life bearable. The
best that modern man could hope for was somehow to construct and sustain
such like “illusions” for himself, dreams that would give life some
sense, but all the while knowing deep down that they were meaningless.

It was a tough proposition, and what made it tougher still in Italy,
Leopardi thought, was that people were too cynical, too disillusioned,
too intent on their own private interests, to create these “errors” or
“values” together. While the French respected each other and talked
themselves up as a nation, creating a sense of social worth, the
Italians just insulted and mocked each other. It was hard to see how
they could get together and create some kind of dream for themselves.

But, in the poem “To a Winner,” Leopardi, watching a crowd go wild at a
ball game, sees that sport might be a way to make life seem meaningful
and to mimic, in miniature, the grand heroic achievements of the past.
“The echoing / Arena and the circus, the roaring support / Of the crowd call you to
illustrious deeds,” he writes, apostrophizing the player, in the first
stanza. “Today our dear country is / Coaching you to repeat the examples
of the ancients.”

For the spell to work, he notes, you had to feel you really were putting
everything into the game, even laying your life on the line. “No one
boasts being Italian born now . . . What’s life for? To be despised.” Soccer
had to involve risk, even violence. If you could forget yourself in
physical frenzy and the determination to win, pushing yourself “even to
the banks of Lethe,” then you would “come back the happier.”

But only if you won. Leopardi was clear about that. Invest all that
emotion and lose, and things are going to look pretty bleak. Like the
Greeks defeated by the Persians, you’ll be plunged into “inconsolable
grief.” Sure enough, after that crucial game with Sweden, the press
focussed on the tears of the team’s veteran goalkeeper, Gianluigi
Buffon, as if casting around for an image of extreme and noble emotion
in which to immerse itself. In the days following, the media has seemed
fascinated by the mockery of fans and newspapers in other parts of the
world. One particularly grotesque video, produced by the French site
Minutebuzz, showing what is supposedly a handsome young Italian fan
going through a profound existential crisis made up of the crassest
stereotypes—over-boiled pasta, posters of Berlusconi, and vaguely
offensive erotica—was widely publicized on Italian news sites, as if to
encourage everyone to feel as bad as possible.

Then the knives came out. Because sport offers this entertainment, too:
the purge of those who had us invest our emotions. “Everyone has to go,”
a desperate fan, commenting on an article in Corriere dello Sport,
wrote. “Everyone out,” was the headline in the paper itself. Very soon,
the defeat was being explained in terms of people and organizations
pursuing their own interests, not the collective good; it’s an analysis
of Italian affairs that hasn’t changed since Leopardi’s time. On taking
the job, in 2014, Tavecchio, the head of the Football Federation—and a
man who approved the organization’s purchase of twenty thousand copies of
his own book on football, at a cost of a hundred and seven thousand euros—appointed a coach for
the national team, Gian Piero Ventura, with no great achievements in his
long career, largely because he cost less than other more successful
coaches. In this regard, several reporters remarked, the failure to
qualify simply reflected the sad state of the nation as a whole.

The idea that people seek power in order to surround themselves with a
clan of yes-men, and to get rich rather than actually do their jobs, is
always seductive in Italy, and very often accurate. In this way, the
emotions of the defeat are perpetuated in waves of carefully nourished
resentment. Needless to say, Tavecchio, having quickly fired Ventura,
has no intention of resigning from his own lucrative post, nor are the
big Serie A clubs, whose interests he is attentive to, eager to dump
him. The story can run and run. Meanwhile, shares in RCS, the publishing
group that owns the Gazzetta dello Sport, have fallen by seven per
cent. Huge losses in TV advertising during the World Cup are predicted.
Some experts have even forecast higher interest rates and a fall in
G.D.P. It seems that people’s emotional involvement is not without
economic consequence.

And yet, for many Italians, the morning after the great defeat was a
morning like any other. There were even those who were pleased. “Sigh of
relief,” one friend wrote to me. “We won’t have to put up with the usual
flood of rhetoric and stupidity we get with the World Cup.” As Leopardi
understood, each dream is only as real as people decide to make it.