“There’s millionaires over there — all they do is be these experts on soccer and appear on these shows Monday through Sunday.”
Padova 95-96
‘A selling team’
Padova is and has been a selling team — they sell their players and they make a lot of money on selling players. You look through the league and the amount of players who have come through the Padova system: guys like [Alessandro] Del Piero, who plays for Juventus, [Angelo] Di Livio and [Demetrio] Albertini of Milan. It’s one of the smaller clubs, and that’s how they make their money, by selling players.
Obviously, when we had a good year last year and stayed up, which was a success, and a lot of our players played very well, they were ripe for selling to big teams. We sold off three of our starters [defenders David Balleri and Marco Franceschetti and striker Filippo Maniero to Sampdoria].
From a soccer standpoint, that’s an interesting and difficult sort of move to make. From the business side, it’s wonderful, and that’s where they’re coming from.
The problem we have now is that we lose that experience, and we start back a little bit. The way that we’re going to have success this season is by learning much quicker. Last year, it took us half a season to learn how to play at that level in the Serie A, and we didn’t start performing consistently until we got the second half of the season. We can’t afford to waste a whole season dropping games we shouldn’t drop.
I’m still very, very confident, but it will still be about staying in Serie A.
Favorites
‘Three teams’
With the addition of [Roberto] Baggio and [George] Weah, Milan has got to be one of the favorites. [Hristo] Stoichkov playing at Parma — they sort of have a foreigner problem. They have all these great guys — [Fernando] Couto, [Tomas] Brolin, Stoichkov and [Faustino] Asprilla — and one of them has to sit.
Then Juventus had such a great year it’s a matter of whether they can continue that sort of consistency. Those are the three teams.
Inter is making a push right now. They’re going to be in the UEFA Cup, they have [Paul] Ince. They have a new owner, and they’ve thrown around a lot of money. Do I see them? I don’t know. I still think it’s going to be between the three.
Toughest strikers
‘Quick in their actions’
[Gabriel] Batistuta is such a pure goalscorer and is playing very well for Fiorentina. [Ruud] Gullit is not there this year, but he has so much experience and is very quick. There’s [Giuseppe] Signori and [Alen] Boksic.
[Gianluca] Vialli and [Fabrizio] Ravanelli are strong. When I’m marking a guy like [Marco] Simone from Milan, who is so quick and so small, or [Gianfranco] Zola from Parma, and I have to be aware because they’re so quick in their actions that they can beat me. Obviously, because of my size, it’s a little more difficult than marking a Ravanelli, who is much more a brute force sort of guy.
That’s what has made my game better, facing these different types each game. When I have to go from marking Vialli or Ravanelli to marking Zola or marking Asprilla, completely different types, that’s what makes your game better.
Fans
‘A warped perception’
It’s so difficult to explain to Americans how seriously they take the sport and how extensions of the game on the field go into the stands and how their actions off the field they consider to be part of that whole war on the field.
All I can say is that people in the U.S. have a warped perception of how dramatic the violence is. Obviously, the only time CNN shows something is when something bad happens, so you get the perception that this happens every single week, and that is not the case at all. That doesn’t justify the fact that it even happens once, but I can tell you the amount of precautions that are taken in Italy to try to ensure that this doesn’t happen: the dogs and the rifles and moats and the barbed wire and the cameras and riot people bussing the fans into different sections. It’s incredible the amount of organization and steps they’ve taken to try to control it.
Of course, a lot of it has to do with society. As anyone can tell you, that’s a very difficult thing to change. When the thing in Genoa happened with the fan dying, it was very impressive to me to see how they reacted and how cognizant they were of how it was going to be spread all over the world.
People were so disappointed that this was going to reflect on Italian society. That was good for me to see how they reacted — it wasn’t just a blasÄ approach:
“Oh, just another soccer game.” They are really aware of how it’s scarring people’s view of Italian soccer and, ultimately, of Italy.
Media
‘It’s not a burden’
It’s something you really have to experience to understand: how intense and focused it is and the scrutiny — it’s non-stop, 24 hours a day. When I get up in the morning and go outside, I know it’s started again. It’s not a burden. I realized it and accepted that this is the way I am living. It’s something I chose to do. It’s not something forced on me. And coming from a culture that doesn’t have that, I enjoy it.
For me, it’s more than football coverage or baseball coverage. It’s so much more part of the culture and history and it’s not just sports.
I used to get angry in the U.S. when someone would misquote me by a couple of words. That doesn’t even bother me anymore because I’ve had paragraphs attributed to me, not just words out of place, complete lines of thought I’ve never said.
I’ve had incredible stuff said about me, but it’s kind of funny. It’s to sell papers, and that’s it. There’s paparazzi wherever you go and there’s people trying to find out stuff about you. You go someplace where you think you’re alone, and there’s newspaper reporter or a photographer there. That’s all part of living the life, but it is about selling newspapers.
Player ratings
‘A great cushion’
You say you’re not going to read the ratings, but you end up reading them anyway. It makes you feel good when you get a good rating, and when you get a bad rating … you can say the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, regardless of how you play.
When I first got there, I had to prove to them that the World Cup wasn’t a fluke. I had a wonderful base when I got there because they had seen me perform at the highest level to them. That gave me a great cushion that no other American ever had — I was very lucky in that sense — but then it was about proving and continuing.
That was the wonderful thing about it. One day they can hammer you and you can be the absolute worst and they can call you every single name in the book and the next day everything is forgotten and you’re the king — and the next day you can go right back down. Their memories are very, very short and they’re always on to the next story. The bad things never last very long and, unfortunately, the good things never last very long.
Soccer talk shows
‘Every single night’
I really thought it was hilarious, maybe I didn’t quite get or understand it. Every single night of the week there’s football on multiple channels: talking about it, discussing it, analyzing it, predicting it and so on. It’s incredible, all for this little game, and more incredible because of where I come from and the experience I’ve had getting here and the fact that most of us have done it for free and never really thought we’d be in this position where people take it so seriously.
There’s millionaires over there — all they do is be these experts on soccer and appear on these shows Monday through Sunday.
I enjoy doing it, plus I can get on there and I can do some music.
Italian music
‘They overproduce everything’
Italian music on TV is very theatrical — we’d consider it very cheesy. Italian music, in terms of the recording of it, is very into making things sound as flowery and as beautiful as possible. and they tend to neglect the power of raw music. Classic rock doesn’t exist.
It’s much more processed because they don’t have the history and they are sort of making it up from what they hear, and it’s very difficult when you don’t have the history and you don’t realize how rock ‘n roll started and the power of just an acoustic guitar or just the voice and the power of not overproducing stuff. They overproduce everything.
Do I like it? No. I’m very lucky to be involved with musical people, and with a label over there that is very educated in terms of the international scene and the American scene. They know the history of all that, so there wasn’t a lot of that in the music that I was doing. I think that’s part of what appealed to a lot of people — that sort of sound. That’s something people want to hear —
that cleaner, sort of natural feeling.
by Soccer America Managing Editor Paul Kennedy