How do you kill a football team. The 0 to 1 suffered by Parma in the melancholy recovery of the championship against Chievo Verona, on a field at the limits of practicability, is just one of the many fires of a twilight spanning 38 games. The script was the same as always: in one way or another, Parma loses. There are already seventeen defeats this year (out of twenty-one games). Seventeen, just like the consecutive matches without ever losing in the last championship, an entire group, from Juventus to Juventus.
What changes in a year? How long is a year for a soccer team? You look at the standings and you see that, all in all, nothing has changed. Juve are always in a head race, chased by a somewhat knackered Roma, while Napoli struggle between great splendors and small miseries in a league of its own, too discontinuous for the first two and too strong for all the others.
Lazio, for better or for worse, always remains in the range of the Lotito era (a sporting mediocritas aurea), while Fiorentina still refuses to grow, always the victim of its own Peter Pan syndrome. Meanwhile, Genoa is going up again, entrusted to mercenary captains capable of carrying every ship in calm waters, and Palermo is discovered and little Sassuolo has become a teenager and will soon have his final exams and so on.
Everything changes to remain essentially the same. Parma no, Parma drowns. Without stimuli and salaries, in a long descent which, as such, begins right at the highest moment, in that UEFA Cup qualification (excuse me if I don't call it the Europa League) caught at the last useful minute, in the penalty of Cerci who delivers himself trembling into the unsteady arms of Rosati, obscure second goalkeeper of the province who became a hero for one night for someone else (and not for his fans, rather indifferent to the company), giving Parma sixth place in the standings.
The descent begins there, in the image of Cassano grazing on the touchline (although the match he is playing is still in progress), without the courage to look. In the breakneck race of an entire team wearing a celebratory shirt that looks like a cruel joke, seen today: "The dream is reality", and behind it "We are in Europe".
And then a long, hot summer of sun and sea and stamped papers. And the goal of the field that slips away for a personal income tax withholding, a negligible amount, say those of Parma, two hundred thousand euros on the exodus incentive for a handful of the 250 players that Parma has to send around in some minor league and, perhaps, to line someone's pocket.
And President Ghirardi, a Neapolitan and very Italian mask - the "chiagni e fotti" as a means of perpetuating the ruling class -, who tenders his resignation at the press conference because that's how things go, and when they take away a dream from you, the first instinct is to stop hoping, and walk away. And perhaps this is the point, that Parma has stopped hoping for a better future, and so they gave up.
But the descent had probably started earlier. Because 96 million of net debt doesn't build up in one day. And the story of this Parma looks more and more like those of certain films or certain lives, in which the protagonist lies to everyone and claims to be a heart surgeon while instead he is unemployed, until he is overwhelmed by the weight of all his lies, and his inability to hold the strings any longer, and he explodes.
And then off to the stampede. Those who can, those who have a chance and at least a minimum of the market should save themselves. Via Cassano, Paletta, even Felipe. All, except Crisantemo (copyright of the alleged phenomenon of Bari Vecchia, one who has never understood the difference between sincerity and meanness) Donadoni, who sinks with the whole ship.
Off to other shores, while Parma passes from hand to hand just to enliven the season, given that the standings are always at a standstill, while the Lega Calcio looks on, incapable of the rhetorical imagination for which everyone's salvation becomes everyone's . The only concern is to expel the cancerous body before it infects the system.
The killer is never the butler. More often it is the president, or the CEO. And a year, in football as in life, can be a geological era. An ice age. Parma's dream never came true, neither last year nor fifteen years ago, when with Crespo, Buffon and Thuram they dreamed big and, even then, lived beyond their means. Now that dream looks more and more like a nightmare.
