It is not the first time that Prime Minister Mario Monti has expressed a negative opinion on the world of football. And this time, following the latest developments in football betting, which are once again – after the endless events of the last few decades – outraging fans and public opinion, he does it without half measures: “I wonder if for two or even three years it would not be appropriate to suspend this game completely”.
The shocking proposal of the President of the Council, who had also had to do with the world of football at the end of the 90s as European Commissioner for Competition (he also proposed a Bosman-due, to further liberalize player transfers), arrived at the end of the bilateral Italy-Poland match (Poland is the country that will host Italy's group at the next European football championship). “It's particularly sad, let's say it makes you shiver, when a world that should be an expression of the highest values such as sport, young people and competition, instead proves to be a concentration of disloyalty, falsehood and the search for demagoguery“, Monti said in a press conference, specifying however that “it is not a question of a government proposal”, but of a personal opinion.
Already some time ago, after Calciopoli, the prime minister, in the past a great AC Milan fan, had expressed his "disaffectedness" with football: “I haven't been to the stadium for many years, nor have I watched the games on television. I feel for football – I mean big professional football – a growing disgust. Under the noble mantle of the values of sport, it is increasingly a concentration of dubious interweaving between finance and politics, seasoned with worldliness", he wrote in the Corriere della Sera.
