Re: Serie A Thread - 2011/12 Season
baxter said:
At least today the King spoke up. Can FIFA have the power to end this historical revisionism?
the problem is "the king has no clothes". blatter has no credibility whatsoever in italy and whatever he says is basically considered irrelevant. uefa on the other side could do much more to end this embarassing situation, but platini is carefully avoiding to take any position. just last week he said "this is an italian problem, not a uefa problelm". that's bullshit of course. this IS also a uefa problem, but uefa made it clear they don't want to get involved in this. so i believe it's up to us and the italian federation... and that doesn't fill me with confidence, to be honest (but who knows, perhaps the federcalcio will surprise me).
baxter said:
I don't want to sound offensive or harsh, but italian's main stereotype is linked to mafia, and this reluctance to accept a court verdict is not helping to have a better image in the world. It remembers me Capone in the final scene of The Untouchables, when he refuses to accept he's guilty and he starts to insult the policeman.
don't worry mate, that's not offensive nor harsh. but i would suggest u to keep the concepts of "
social traits" and "
image" well separated.
social traits are behaviours, ways to perceive reality and to elaborate feelings wich are common to the people living in a specific country in a specific time (today's italians are different from medieval italians). people who live in the same country for a long period of time tend to develop common social traits because of their cultural background.
it's pretty much the same thing that happens inside a family. u and your brothers\sisters will develop your own temperament of course, but some traits in your characters will be extremely similar, because u have the same cultural background (education, enviromental factors, past experiences).
so, long story short, social traits are something "real", they are somewhat reliable. of course they don't apply necessarily to everyone (i know plenty of italians with no creativity whatsoever and a great sense of duty for instance), but on a larger national scale those traits are quite recurring (behavioural science is focused on studying theese common "national traits").
what u call "
image" instead (referring to the mafioso tipycal image) is just a representation of stereotypes offered by media and litterature. unlike social traits, "image" is mostly folklore, and is absolutely unreliable. the mafioso image is one of italy's most famous stereotypes. but it wasn't mafia itself who pushed this image, nor italy. media and litterature can have a much bigger impact than the truth, than history, than reality. a guy in america or in england or in japan watches the sopranos and he will be naturally inclined to believe that there is something "real" (or even just realistic) about what he's watching. today mafia is almost dead (at least in italy). all the major bosses of the last 20 years are in prison, along with their families and mafia's influence over italian people and politicians is close to 0. as a matter of fact mafia is today one of the least powerful crime organizations in europe.... even in italy there are other organizations, like camorra, 'ndrangheta and those chinese gangs wich are much more powerful and dangerous than mafia today.... but no one outside italy even knows that. more than 6 billions people live on this planet. only a few of them have ever lived in italy for more than a few months (or have an italian friend who can explain them a things or 2 about italy)..... but u can be sure many, many of them have watched at least once in their life the godfather or the goodfellas or the sopranos. that's the power of media and folklore.
and that's why we shouldn't concern ourselves with our image. it's not somehing that depends on us and there's little we can do about it, so why bother. take serie a for instance. ask 1000 football fans from all over the world what they think about serie a and the other european leagues. most of them, at some point, will mention serie a's defensive nature. some of them won't even mean it in an offensive way..... actually some of em might even find it a good aspect of italian football. anyway most of them will agree that iserie a is a more defensive league than, say, the epl. this is false, but people will repeat that, because this is serie a's image. and mind u i'm not just talking about some ignorant fans; even professionals (football players, coaches, pundits, people who should know better) will repeat those bullshits. and that's how powerful (and irrelevant) "image" is.
u wanna know how and when this stereotype was born? 40 years ago, serie a coaches created some sort of a tactical revolution in italy. now i won't explain what happened exactly as it would take too much time, but let's just say that in a few years serie a turned into an unbelievably boring league, where all the teams wer playing the very same brand of conservative football. as a result of that, the "average goals per matches" ratio decreased enourmously. just a few stats, to give u an idea of what i'm talking about.
season 51/55 - 3,87 goals per match
seasons 61/66 - 2.77 goals per match
seasons 66/71 - 2,04
seasons 72/76 - 2,02
seasons 76/81 - 2.00 (lowest goals-per-match ratio ever in the top european leagues!!!)
seasons 82/86 - 2,10
seasons 87/91 - 2,12
u can clearely see why serie a earned the label of defensive league! during that same period the english league goal per match average was much higher and the same goes for all the other major leagues. so for about 25 years (from 1966 to 1992) serie a was indeed a defensive league. then the sacchi revolution changed everything. today the average goals per matches ratio in serie a is on par with every other top european league (just look at this season; in the epl the ratio is 2.8 goals per match while in serie a is 2.6).
but despite that most of the fans, players, coaches and journalists still talk of serie a as if we were in the mid 70s or in the early 80s! the man marking era ended 20 years ago in italy, and yet people still use the same stereotypes and cliches to picture serie a's image.
sorry for the double posting, but those were 2 completely unrelated topics and i thought it was better to separate them in 2 different posts
Juve fans are hilarious. Reminds me of Liverpool fans and their claim to 20 titles because they'd won the North Championships Second Round in 1943 or something stupid.
