COLUMN ONE : World Cup Overflows for Italians : The nation gets a $4-billion face lift for the soccer extravaganza. But labor unrest, construction delays and security concerns cloud the event.
The clock is running on the greatest Roman spectacle since the time of the Caesars. The world is watching. And here is Italy, like a tempestuous diva awaiting her cue, poised between triumph and disaster.
Luca di Montezemolo is in the catbird seat. Next month he will become internationally famous as maestro of the 1990 World Cup. Right now, he’s queasy.
“I’m like a passenger on a plane in turbulence,” he said from behind his desk, where dreams jostle with big trouble. “I hope the pilot is in good shape, but I can’t do anything myself.”
He has a red-green-and-white lapel button that proclaims, “Life’s too short not to be Italian.” But is time too short for the Italians to make a success of their prized role as host of the 1990 World Cup, a monthlong soccer extravaganza that many people consider the world’s premier sporting event?
With a month to go, Di Montezemolo says that organization of the matches themselves is on track--but hardly anything else is. The buck is passing rapidly among local and national officials who understand perfectly why the other guy’s job is not finished.
Di Montezemolo, 42, a slick, fast-talking adman, is manager of Italia 90, a tournament in which teams representing 24 countries will play 52 matches in 12 Italian cities between June 8 and July 8.
They will be watched in 170 countries by a television audience projected by international soccer officials at 26 billion. That means that everybody in the world could see five games--unless Italian television technicians strike.
Will Italy embarrass itself before the world?
“I don’t know,” Di Montezemolo says.
As the days tick away, Italy primps madly for its gala with the world, but it looks as though the kickoff will come before all the makeup is on.
Labor unrest by unions hoping to cash in on a national bonanza vexes planners. Smooth operation of communications, transportation and hotels hangs in the balance. Major-league security concerns persist despite broad international cooperation and elaborate precautions against lager louts, those beer-swilling, rampage-prone soccer hearties from England and Holland who are known generically as “hooligans.”
To prepare for the cup, the Italian government has embarked on an ambitious and costly national face lift. At about $4 billion and rising, public works spending is over budget and behind schedule in one city after another. A total of 24 construction workers have died in accidents.
Construction delays contort major Italian cities that expect up to 500,000 additional tourists for the games. Urban anarchy is not what Italy had in mind when it agreed four years ago to put on a festa intended to polish its international image, and to celebrate its status as a first-rank economic power.
Roman traffic, which moves tortuously in the best of times, now moves hardly at all. “All this mess for nothing,” scolded a Roman newspaper, counting 20 unfinished projects, traffic-clogging eyesores every one.
Much is promised for the Eternal City, where the final match will be played in an overhauled stadium that has survived 50% cost overruns and a court challenge from environmentalists but is still unfinished. For Rome, there are grand promises of more trash cans, outdoor toilets, extra buses and 2,000 new guards who will allow lengthened museum hours. Little has materialized.
“We will be ready to play in modern, comfortable and, most of all, safe stadia,” Di Montezemolo said. “In the other areas, like infrastructure, people are working hard and, I am sure, well. But we are in their hands. Clearly, our success is related to something we can’t control.”
For Italy, the World Cup is a celebration of traditional soccer passion and new national prosperity. Italians are now better paid than the British and are closing in on the French.
Soccer ignites 57 million Italians exactly the way it captivates entire continents for which the game is, hands down, the ultimate athletic kick. From Brazilian slums to Arabian palaces, it is a poor man’s zeal and a rich man’s diversion.
By agreement, the assembly line will stop at Fiat, Italy’s giant auto maker, during important games. By custom, office and shop staffs on five continents will evaporate when national teams take the field.
Pope John Paul II, a hometown goalie when he was wearing short pants in public, will bless Rome’s Olympic Stadium, ready or not, on May 31. One of the invited VIPs, President Bush, is said by Italia 90 researchers to be the only current world leader to have played soccer in college. Among 6,000 scrambling reporters at the games, Henry A. Kissinger, employed as a cup columnist by The Times, will add some tone.
This year’s cup play may even generate modest enthusiasm in that wasteland between Maine and Mexico where soccer’s popularity normally hovers somewhere between darts and curling. An American team will compete, for the first time in 40 years, in matches against so-so Czechoslovakia, not-bad Austria and, uh oh, powerhouse Italy. The baseball equivalent of an Italy-USA soccer game would be to schedule the Dodgers against Murmansk High.
The Americans are young and inexperienced, prime candidates for an 0-3 clobbering in a tournament that will be dominated, as usual, by West European and South American soccer giants. However chastened, the Americans will be back: The United States is to be host for the 1994 World Cup.
If there is one thing Americans can learn from this year’s cup it is that Italy will be a hard act to follow, and a good act to avoid following--except on the field, where the Azzurri (the Italian national team) are favorites to win the 11-pound, solid-gold World Cup.
Constancy, thy name is not Italy. Since being named this year’s host, Italy has had five prime ministers. There have been four mayors amid great melodrama and malfeasance in Rome; as many in Naples, hardly a clockwork town, and three in Palermo, where street lights cost five times more to install than in Turin.
Italy built two new stadiums for the cup, in Turin and Bari, and overhauled the rest. Now, unique in Europe where soccer fans are accustomed to standing, each of the 2.6 million spectators at the 52 games will have an individually numbered seat.
Inspectors from FIFA, the international soccer federation and father of the cup, visited all 12 sites and reported serious problems in Milan, Naples and Rome, which has been enlarged to seat 80,000 but, in the view of some critics, not improved.
“With a little bit of foresight we could have avoided this monstrosity,” said Antonio Jannello, head of Italy’s largest environmental organization. The stadium in Florence, home field for the United States, was criticized by FIFA for bad planning.
Milan’s field was resodded only last week. Whether it will be ready for the inaugural match between defending champion Argentina and Cameroon is now up to the elements.
“As usual, all the city officials blame their failures on government red tape,” the Rome newspaper La Repubblica noted tartly in a recent editorial.
Then, too, the newspaper observed, Di Montezemolo says his responsibility stops at the stadium gates, the national minister of sport and tourism says he got his job too late to be useful and his predecessor “was too busy campaigning for mayor of Rome” to immerse himself in cup preparations.
Overall, stadium costs have soared to about $800 million, nearly double the budget. Infrastructure projects--a rail link between Fiumicino Airport and Rome and a light-rail line from downtown Rome to the Olympic stadium are examples--have also mushroomed in cost. Neither is finished.
The Italian Communist Party, which has a reputation for probity in the cities it governs, is demanding a parliamentary inquiry to account for the many millions of lire that seem to have fallen off trucks on the way to the ballpark.
Somewhere in the welter are billions of lire being spent to guard Italy against the hooligans, those 20th-Century descendants of Northern European vandals who have sacked Italy before.
Holland has been banished to Palermo for its matches, and England to Cagliari. As riotous Dutch and British fans may have occasion to observe, Sicilians and Sardinians are not among the sweetest-tempered Italians.
Fifty carabinieri have spent a month in Britain learning from the British police how to deal with the rowdies. In all, 20,000 police officers, including 11,000 specially trained for the cup, will patrol training camps and stadiums where a big-brotherly eye will monitor crowds for a police-only TV network. Fans who survive checkpoints 100 yards away will be frisked again at stadium entrances.
Sardinia has long been reckoned the No. 1 trouble spot, but lately it has dawned on planners that Genoa may blindside them. The Scots will play in that Mediterranean port, which is preparing for the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World by its native son. And it is on Columbus’ Genoa that British, Dutch and Irish fans will converge to catch ferries for games in Sardinia.
If, as expected, England advances to the second round, it could actually play in Genoa, thereby offering a potential battleground for the Italian army.
The rowdies tend to be young, noxious and out of work, but the cup’s charisma also entices the elite. His Royal Highness Zayed ibn Sultan al Nuhayan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and the owner of the United Arab Emirates team, will have a king-size hot tub with inlaid brackets big enough for champagne bottles in his marbled hotel suite outside Bologna. In the hotel garden, Italian workers have set up a tent for use as a mosque by the sheik and his entourage of 40.
The sheik has already had a setback. Miss UAE, Najah Hussein, finished as an also-ran in the World Cup beauty contest. She paraded in slacks instead of a bathing suit to avoid offending Islamic sensibilities.
Despite a pricey Brazilian coach, the Emirates are hardly better than the Americans. They won’t win the World Cup either. Beyond that, in an Italy gridlocked and soccer-crazed for the next two months, anything at all is possible.
