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Faculty members of the department of International Relations use their academic and professional expertise to report to international media and analyze current events. Professor Simon Martin is one of them. This week he commented upon and contextualised the current corruption scandal in Italian football on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The World Tonight’ and CNN’s ‘World Sport Live’.
In the interviews, Martin argues that calcio corruption scandals continue to occur due to the nature of Italian football, society and the legal system that fails to punitively punish the guilty and deter future speculators: Italy appears to never learn. He cites Paolo Rossi as a prime example: banned from football for two years following his involvement in the 1980 Totonero match-fixing scandal, his sentence was reduced just in time for the 1982 World Cup finals where his six goals took Italy to the title and the scandal was quickly forgotten.
