Italian Football and the Dead Cat Bounce

To say I'm un-pleased about Italy crashing out of the World Cup qualifying playoffs this week is a gross understatement. Not that I'm raging or weeping and gnashing my teeth, but the idea that my team won't be there for the second tournament running has grabbed hold of me and won't let me go.

The main thing is Italy is now officially in the worst run of form for a previous winner. Since winning in 2006, Italy has gone out of the group stage twice (2010, 2014) and failed to qualify for two (2018 and now 2022). The previous worst showing over the four tournaments after a win was England's: after winning in 1966, they went out in the quarterfinal in 1970, failed to qualify in 1974 and 1978, then topped their group in 1982 before going out in the second group stage. Most other winners have won the tournament again within the next four attempts, but none have been so abjectly bad.

It's still too early to tell what the records for Germany (2014) and France (2018) will be for the equivalent period, but Spain has already had a better showing in the two tournaments since it won in 2010. But the thing that worries me the most is how inconsistent Italy have been, because their record in the European Championships has been miles ahead.

In 2008 Italy came second in their group because France was even worse than them, and went out on penalties to eventual winners Spain. In 2012 Italy smashed Germany en route to the final, where they were in turn humiliated by Spain 4-0. In 2016 Italy won its group, finally won a game against Spain in the second round and then went out on penalties to Germany in the quarterfinal. And then, of course, they won the 2020/1 tournament, beating England on penalties after having dominated in the group stage and seeing off the likes of Belgium and Spain (again).

There doesn't seem to be an easy explanation for this Jekyll-and-Hyde record. The qualifying process for world and Euro championships isn't too different, so why should Italy be so bad in one and not the other? Italy's weak goalscoring record has been mentioned by some journalists, and it's true that the team that faced North Macedonia this week was missing several key players. It could just be that this was an unlucky break, as happens at times, though these sorts of failures can stack on one another and influence future performance.

If Italy manages to qualify for 2026, it will have been 12 years since their last appearance in the tournament. There will be almost no one in the squad with the experience of playing at that level, while those in the management team will be well aware of the past four failures. Italy's football administration is generally quick to fall back on old patterns, so even if coach Roberto Mancini hasn't been sacked yet, it's possible that they opt for a "safe pair of hands", which has already been mooted as including former coach Marcello Lippi in the setup - this would be fine, as it was his team that won in 2006, but he was then back for the disaster of 2010, having opted for the older players he knew and leaving out newer players that might have made a difference.

It's also hard not to consider how weak Italian football has become at club level. No Italian club has won the Champions League since 2010, when Inter won under José Mourinho, and only Juventus has even reached the final since then, losing to Spanish teams each time. In the Europa League the record is even worse, as an Italian team hasn't won the competition since 1999 (when it was the Uefa Cup). In that time, Inter has been the only Italian team to reach the final, where they lost against Sevilla in 2020; but even that carries a hint of defeat, because Inter had only dropped down to the Europa League because they'd crashed out of the group stage of the Champions League.

This season Inter did better, but it and Juventus still got knocked out in the second round, meaning no Italian team is participating in the quarterfinals. It's a little depressing, if you think about it.

I don't know enough about Italian football to say why it's been so lackluster at club level. There's probably some aspect of over-reliance on foreign players, but other leagues, like England and Spain, have that problem and they've dominated the Champions League. It could also be residual shenanigans among the selections of referees; I've seen it suggested that, bribe scandals aside, larger clubs like Juventus still have more sway over referee selection than in other leagues, so they could just be used to everything going their own way at home, and not being able to cope abroad.

Whatever the cause (and I'm sure there's not just one cause), it feels like Italy's debacles of the last few years underline what a hollow exercise the European Super League would be. It's no surprise that Juventus's president is still pushing the idea, because he probably sees his club sliding out of Europe's elite, and wants to find a way to keep them there. Some pundits have asked if Juventus would really want to be at the bottom of the ESL every year, but I suspect that they wouldn't mind, as long as they didn't have to worry about getting knocked out and potentially failing to qualify. That's the attraction of a cartel model, after all...

All things pass, though, and I'm sure this current wave of Italian under-performance will end someday. Given its record in the last few Euro tournaments, it's also reasonable to expect Italy to do well there, too. But much as I love the European Championships, there's nothing like seeing Italy perform on the world's biggest stage, win or lose. 

Unfortunately, through complacency, poor squad selection or simply bad luck, I won't be able to root for my team at the World Cup this November. And yes, it's only a game... but it still hurts.

Bullitt, Dirty Harry and Old San Francisco

For the last couple of months, I've been scanning the "Last Chance" section that HBO Max helpfully adds, so that you can see which movies and TV shows are about to disappear from the service and plan your watching accordingly. It's a nice feature, which I wish more streaming services offered, though I also wish HBO Max were a little less glitchy as an app.

This month there were relatively few things I wanted to watch in Last Chance, so after I finished Bullitt, I moved on to the Dirty Harry movies, all of which are available on HBO. While Harry Callahan and Frank Bullitt are very different characters, they fit together nicely as Neo-noir cop films, and it helps that they all have soundtracks by Lalo Schifrin and are set in San Francisco. In fact, seeing the city as it was back in the late 60s and early 70s (I haven't yet watched the last two Dirty Harry films) is amazing, because SF is pretty different from back then.

As some background, I'd previously seen the first Dirty Harry film, but not since college, and I've caught bits of The Enforcer (the third movie) on TV over the years, but never watched it start to finish. Bullitt, meanwhile, is familiar to me more as a reference (the car chase, Steve McQueen on the movie cover), but I also hadn't seen the full movie before.

In both cases, it's been fun looking at where individual scenes take place and seeing how different they look now. The biggest thing has been the bits that take place on the Embarcadero, which is now an open thoroughfare with great views of the bay but then was dominated by an elevated freeway. That freeway, which collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, was by its demise generally considered to be an eyesore, so the city took the opportunity to remove it and opened the area up.

That said, when Bullitt and his partners are guarding their witness, they put him in a hotel just by the Embarcadero, in a room at the same height as the freeway's top level. The views you get of the area there and in the Dirty Harry films are much grubbier than the neighborhood is now.

It's fair to say that much of SF is grubbier in those movies than it is now, even despite the big homeless problem that the city currently has. Though it's also a lot more working class than we imagine the place to be now, since the tech industry hadn't quite taken over yet. As a result you get scenes and references that hark back to the working class Irish and Italian communities, not to mention the Black community (The Enforcer has a subplot around some black nationalists), which have maybe been forgotten in the last few decades.

The other fun thing about the early Dirty Harry movies (moreso than Bullitt) is the little slices of big-city weirdness you get in between the large plot points. There's the foot chase in the Enforcer, where Harry and the criminal he's chasing accidentally crash a porno shoot, but there's also the jumper in one random scene in Dirty Harry and the brief flashes of nudity that we see when Harry's staking out a building or chasing the Scorpio killer.

Stuff like seeing a woman receiving her guests for the evening completely nude, or glimpses of a gay interracial date through Scorpio's gunsights, is intended to show the weirdness of a big city in the wake of the hippy era, the weirdness of a big liberal city, and the general chaos that Harry Callahan lives in daily. It's a little dismissive (the second movie, Magnum Force, is co-written by the rather conservative John Milius) but also charming in its depictions of this bygone world.

It's also funny seeing Harry shaking his head at "wokeness" fifty years or so before the current culture war we find ourselves in. Now, of course, conservatives are mostly railing against LGBTQ people and especially trans people, while then they'd had it with women's lib, but it's clear that the arguments then were the same as what we're hearing now.

As a final point, the other thing I find interesting about that era of film-making is that they even set the movies in SF at all. Mute Witness, the book that Bullitt is based on, is apparently set in New York, but became SF when being translated for the screen: I feel like nowadays you're more likely to see the opposite case, where the source material is in San Francisco but for the screen becomes New York. Dirty Harry's another movie series that doesn't really have to be set in SF, and I can also think of films like The Towering Inferno that I guess were set in San Francisco for cultural reasons that are lost now.

It seems too bad that you don't get many movies just randomly set here anymore. Now it seems that every film that wants to depict life in a big city just automatically opts for New York or Los Angeles, unless the story has to be set somewhere else. One example is (500) Days of Summer, which was apparently set in SF in the screenplay but switched to LA.

The reason this bothers me is that, despite all the undeniable problems (the heartbreaking homeless encampments, the soulless co-optation of the city by the rich, and the ridiculous levels of income inequality), the city is dramatically sited and carries more stories than just tech people. I still haven't seen The Last Black Man in San Francisco, but it sounds like it makes great use of the location, though I wonder how much SF is a character in the film the way it is in the Dirty Harry movies.

That's probably to do with the fact that big cities in America now all want to be New York, but fail. And if every city's just a cut-rate NYC, why not just film in the real one and take advantage of that? I just question why we've decided (or why Hollywood has decided) that everything in New York is automatically more relevant to everybody than the rest of the country. One of the great things about the Wire was how it dug into Baltimore, rather than just being another crime show in New York; we have this cultural understanding of New York that makes, perhaps, for easier storytelling, but I think we're missing out on the opportunity to get under the skin of other cities, and show that worthwhile stories take place everywhere else, too.

Different Types of Gatekeepers in Star Trek

It may surprise no one to learn that I'm a member of a private group on Facebook devoted to Star Trek (for the record, I'm also a member of one devoted to comics). The idea is to celebrate Trek and share memes, and for the most part it's good to see the silliness that the other members share. Lots of memes about Garak being "that bitch" or Captain Picard telling dad jokes, as well as sharing actual news about Trek shows. And because it's a private group, it's not overrun by trolls who are pissed off about Trek's supposed wokeness.

Sometimes, though, the relentless positivity of the group gets to me. Not everybody feels this way, but there's a vibe that everything that's new in Trek is automatically good, and taking it a step further, that any criticism of it is just one of those trolls I mentioned above.

I've gone on the record as being a little underwhelmed with some of the most recent Trek. My issues aren't culture-war issues, but quality issues: what I've seen of Discovery and Picard has some good points, but also frequently veers too much toward the bombast and special effects of the movies, rather than the cerebral messages of the TV shows. Discovery is more guilty of this, since both seasons that I've seen feature big battles at the end. Discovery also does a really poor job developing characters, which was something the shows in the 80s and 90s always did better.

But whenever I air these criticisms in the group, I feel like I'm the only one willing to point out that these new shows aren't perfect. Nobody's been shitty to me about it, but a bunch of memes shared on the group feature people getting mad that people are liking the new Trek shows, or mad that they're canon, or whatever.

This attitude (also present on that comics group) seems to be an outgrowth of the days when liking Star Trek or comics or Star Wars was a niche interest, and you risked becoming a social pariah if you said you were into them. It definitely comes from the days when superhero movies didn't rule the box office and when Trek shows were relegated to weird, off-brand networks like UPN. Back then you didn't have as much Trek or comics content, so even if it was bad, you had to be loyal to it.

We don't have to now, though, because as I say, superhero movies rule cinemas and there are no fewer than five Trek shows in production right now (Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy and the upcoming Strange New Worlds). Even in what I call Star Trek's "imperial phase" in the 90s, there were never more than two series in production: The Next Generation ran concurrently with Deep Space 9 for a few seasons, then when it ended Voyager ran alongside DS9 until that ended.

So I understand where the attitude on the groups comes from. But at its worst, this relentless cheerleading for whatever happens on Star Trek can shut down honest discussion about the shows just as much as those churlish gatekeepers who complain that adding gay characters or non-White male protagonists ruins the show.

Again, though, I can understand that when there's so much vitriol aimed at progressive shows, the first impulse on hearing criticism is to assume that it's motivated by this vitriol. I pointed out once that a use of the word "fuck" in Discovery was gratuitous, and was met with "Oh gawd, are you one of those?" I had to explain that, no, I'm not "one of those", but the thing bothered me because it was clearly put there to show that Trek had "grown up" or something, rather than any story- or character-driven need for swearing (I love Data's "Oh, SHIT" in Generations, btw).

That's the internet in microcosm, of course. People lose their shit at each other on social media so easily because in 99% of cases when someone says something shitty, they're doing it on purpose and in bad faith. We've had 20 years to understand that some people are only there to troll, and so the response has been a quick "fuck you" and a blanket block. The problem's only gotten worse as various organizations have learned that they can get a lot of exposure by amplifying misinformation and shittiness... so it's no surprise that misogynistic pick-up artist sites also carry reviews of new Star Wars movies decrying the fact that women have the lead roles.

There's not really an answer or a fix to all this. Private groups like the ones I'm part of are a good way to keep social media from turning too shitty (although they're also turning out to be good vectors to spread QAnon or anti-vax propaganda, which is also shitty). Arguing also doesn't help: if I say I don't like something in Discovery, that's my opinion, and all I can do is respect the opinions of those in the group who feel differently.

It would be nice, though, if the good-faith actors on the internet weren't so on-their-guard against trolls all the time, so that we could admit that these new shows could be better. That would require there to be fewer trolls, though, so I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I need to watch the next seasons of Discovery and Picard, and see if they're an improvement on what I've already seen. Because, like my more boosterish friends, I want to see good Star Trek, Star Wars and other nerd content.

The End of the Abramovich Era at Chelsea

Amid the chaos in Ukraine and the rush for everyone to divest any Russian links or securities, a little drama has been playing out in West London, as Chelsea Football Club has found itself at the center of some of the controversy. The club is owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, about whom Labour MPs have been asking why he's not being sanctioned. Abramovich claims no links to Russia's president Vladimir Putin, though certain reports have linked him with the Kremlin, so it's fair to say that things are a little murky there.

When the war started, Abramovich said he'd transfer the day-to-day running of Chelsea to the trustees of its charitable foundation, a move that was scotched when said trustees said they wouldn't do it, and that it fell afoul of regulations. He then said he'd sell the club, with the proceeds going to benefit the victims of the war (though that phrasing implies that it won't only go to Ukrainians).

In the wake of the news Abramovich has been held up alongside the more recent sports washers that he helped to enable, like the Saudi acquisition of Newcastle and the Abu Dhabi acquisition of Manchester City. Certainly his acquisition of Chelsea led the way for other oligarchs, whether Russian or not, to buy their way into European football, so it's interesting to reflect on his time in charge of the club.

I remember when he bought Chelsea back in 2003, and the club immediately used its riches to buy essentially an entirely new team. The manager at the time was Claudio Ranieri, who came in a respectable second but was still sacked for not winning any trophies (and for not being José Mourinho). Because nothing like that had ever happened, there was a lot of excitement around Chelsea and what they might achieve with their new wealth.

In the short term, they certainly broke the effective duopoly on winning the Premier League, previously held by Manchester United and Arsenal, and won every domestic title available. It took a few years, but they also eventually won the Champions League and the Europa League, and most recently the Club World Cup.

The success came with high expectations: the club has had 15 managers in the time that Abramovich has owned Chelsea, not counting caretakers who took charge for one or two matches. That number does count both of Mourinho's terms as manager, and both of Guus Hiddink's terms as interim manager, since they came mid-season and involved significant chunks of their respective seasons. That's almost one new manager per season for the 18 years that Abramovich has owned the club.

In terms of honors, the club won the Premier League five times; the FA Cup five times; the League Cup three times; and the Champions League and Europa League twice each; as well as the Club World Cup, which makes for a trophy each year on average. The club is out of this year's League Cup and unlikely to win the league, but is still in the FA Cup and the Champions League, so has a chance to win at least two more trophies this season.

It's clear that Abramovich's money helped buy a big chunk of Chelsea's success, though I also think he brought in good coaches who really stamped an identity on the club. A lot of the iconic Chelsea players from the first Mourinho era were already there, but Mourinho undeniably molded them into an impressive unit, which survived long after his own third-season implosion. But of course, money doesn't just buy success, it also buys expertise.

In terms of accusations of sports washing, it's hard to put Abramovich on the same level as the owners of Newcastle, Manchester City or Paris St-Germain, though he certainly opened the door for rich owners to swoop in to buy a club and turn it around. You could argue that Manchester City have taken that same model and done it even better than Chelsea (City have won 13 trophies since being bought by Abu Dhabi in 2008, and have had just four long-term managers under that ownership), while other clubs have had rich owners but far less on-field success. Certainly, if discounting the war in Ukraine, Abramovich would likely still pass any version of the fit-and-proper persons test that's been changed to keep out people who are known to have ordered the murder of journalists.

At any rate, when he bought Chelsea in 2003 there was no concept of sports washing, and if anything I thought at the time he was trying to safeguard his money in case Putin ever got sick of him. It was just seen as the rise of Russia after a few years of post-Soviet chaos, and one that heralded the imminent primacy of Russian football in Europe. That didn't happen either, of course.

Looking to the future, I wouldn't be surprised if Abramovich is done with football after this. He'd already largely given over the running of the club to others, intervening only when someone needed to be sacked, so even if Russian owners can ever buy clubs in the rest of Europe again, Abramovich will probably turn to other interests.

As for Chelsea, a Swiss-US consortium appears to be poised to buy the club, but it's an open question as to whether they'll be as successful under the new owners. Abramovich's Chelsea was successful because he didn't seem to mind how much the club was costing him, as long as it delivered trophies (particularly the Champions League) and signed players he wanted, like Ukraine's Andriy Shevchenko. The new breed of super-clubs, like Manchester City, seem to be even more intent on maintaining stability at their clubs, which has been key to their success, and presumably the new owners will want to do that. A key indicator of upcoming chaos will be if they try to sack the manager, Thomas Tuchel, despite him being one of the most desired coaches in Europe.

At the very least, it'll be interesting to see how many of the great players of the Abramovich era continue to be associated with the club after he leaves. Certainly they'll stick around if the titles keep coming.