Football, one of the largest cultural
phenomena in existence and among the most widespread forms of entertainment in
the world, has stopped everywhere due to the spread of the coronavirus. We
still don't know for sure how long it will take to review a Serie A or Premier
League match, or an eighth final of the UEFA
Champions League: certainly not less than a month, in the best case; maybe
more.
There are big questions open on the economic and managerial
level: football teams are also companies, and like any other company they have
seen their revenues greatly decrease with consequences that will lead to
re-discuss contracts, sponsorships and shared rules such as those of the
so-called Financial Fair Play.
But in addition to upsetting the calendars of the current season,
such a long and homogeneous suspension can also have long-term repercussions in
the evolution of the game. This is what happened in fact over seventy years
ago, when the Second World War stopped football all over Europe. In those
years, the ideas underlying the successes of teams that made the history of
football, and that brought him into modernity, spread.
Together with the states of Danubian Europe, Italy was one of
the protagonist countries of this development in the mid-twentieth century. The
"Grande Torino" of the 1940s was in fact the first modern and winning
team in the Italian championship. Thanks to the work of President Ferruccio
Novo, technical commissioner Vittorio Pozzo and Hungarian coach Ernő Erbstein -
the latter died in Superga with the rest of the team - that Turin gave impetus
to the evolution of European football and became one of the bases for
subsequent football "revolutions".