The global football betting markets are being severely disrupted by the state of the Italian game following reaction to the death of Filippo Raciti last weekend (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/02/disastroso.html).
Most bookmakers are delaying pricing up this weekend's Serie A games until the issue of the empty grounds has been concluded and there is a knock-on effect for the UEFA Cup markets next week and the following week's Champions League matches. As it currently stands, only the matches at Roma, Sampdoria, Cagliari, Palermo and Torino will be played in front of spectators this weekend and Milan and Inter may well play their Champions League games in France or Switzerland.
The repetitive nature of these periodic uproars in both the Italian game and in Italian society at large creates an increasingly volatile marketplace. The seemingly annual delays to the start of the season; points reductions and demotions; the inevitable appeals to such punishments; the extensive use and occasional selective targeting of the use of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs); clubs with financial difficulties; governmental interference; corruption among the match officials; linked clubs; violent and racist ultras operating with official collusion. All part of the game in Italy.
Yet, even though the Italians throw these occasional histrionic hissy fits and overreact to the particular issue, at least they attempt to face up to the issues that blight their game (this is not underestimating the death of the Sicilian policeman but there was the death of a supporter the previous weekend without the equivalent media uproar). But real changes are transitory as Italian football moves between two separate equilibrium states - the centre-left bifurcation and the fascist-right bifurcation. Italy merely oscillates between two partially corrupt structures.
Unfortunately in England, one needs a Hillsborough or a Heysel to force the English authorities to pretend to address the problems in the game. The reaction to everything else is just business as usual. When major upheavals do occur in English football, there is a power grab by the types of people that we really don't want in the game and the initial issues become warped to what spectacular society desires. These structural breakpoints represent a bonus to the psychopathic power people whose incremental machinations to gain influence continue in real time. England is allowing it's national sport to develop an ongoing permanent structure that is both undemocratic (ie we can't get rid of them) and corrupt. Absolute corruption is far more of an issue than cyclical corruption.
This is the basic difference between the corruption in football in the two countries.
