There isn’t much comfort to be found in the pages of Zlatan Ibrahimovic‘s autobiography if you’re a player or fan of Manchester City. But he does offer something relevant – a compelling account of how a dressing room reacts when the asteroid of an almighty scandal crashes into your building.
The confusion, denial, panic and acts of escapology are all written into chapter 14 of I Am Zlatan, detailing the sheer chaos at Juventus in July 2006 when the club was informed it would be relegated to Serie B and stripped of two league titles.
Like those players who might soon be contemplating similar at City, the cogs of Juve were blameless for the Calciopoli saga. They weren’t the ones found guilty of lobbying in the shadows to influence refereeing appointments. Nor were they trapped by an elaborate network of wiretaps. The bosses were.
But the players were central to the dramas of what came next – would the star names stick or twist? Asked a different way, how much do you actually love this club now that it is on fire? How do you feel about kissing a badge that has been dipped in poison? Well, Ibrahimovic got to the heart of those post-apocalyptic dilemmas when his book was published in 2013.
‘This world had been turned upside down,’ he wrote. ‘It wasn’t possible to take it all in. We’d won two titles in a row – were we going to lose everything?’
From there, he painted a picture of the day-by-day carnage that followed as La Vecchia Signora, The Old Lady, was defrocked, one item at a time. Fabio Capello, the manager, was the first to jump and he didn’t even wait for the finalities of a verdict – sensing which way the wind was blowing, he scarpered ten days before it landed. Then some of the suits left, too.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic was 25 when his ‘world had been turned upside down’ – as Juventus were relegated to Serie B and stripped of two league titles in the Calciopoli scandal
Manager Fabio Capello (right) was quickly out of the door – while star midfielder Pavel Nedved (left) stayed
Ibrahimovic left Juventus to join Inter that summer – and won the next three Serie A titles
Suddenly a confused mass of world-class players was being addressed by Alessio Secco, who had been granted a battlefield promotion to club director from his earlier brief as the guy who arranged the where-and-when of training.
‘Crazy,’ was the word Ibrahimovic used for Secco’s ascension, before he detailed the sort of conversations that might occur imminently around the Etihad Stadium, if it hasn’t already begun.
Ibrahimovic: ‘One after one the players got away, (Lilian) Thuram and (Gianluca) Zambrotta to Barcelona, (Fabio) Cannavaro and Emerson to Real Madrid, Patrick Vieira to Inter, and every one of us who were left called our agents: “Sell us, sell us.”
‘Uncertainty and desperation hung in the air. I was on my way up in my career. Was everything going to come crashing down? No way was I going to sacrifice a year in the second division. My best years were in danger of being wasted, I told Mino (Raiola, his agent), “Do whatever it takes just get me out of here”.’
Ibrahimovic was 25 when that all happened. And he got his wish – he joined Inter Milan a month after the verdict and won the next three Serie A titles. But not before the club pivoted to guilt-tripping.
Ibrahimovic would recall how Juve’s hierarchy started to ‘play off’ his desire to leave against the altruistic, loyal few who were willing to stay, such as Pavel Nedved, Gianluigi Buffon, Alessandro Del Piero, Giorgio Chiellini and David Trezeguet. It got ugly; the club’s fight against the authorities became one amongst themselves in a spectacular and sad unravelling.
I wonder how much of this portrait of doom will be found in Manchester City’s near future. If their guilt is upheld after the appeals, the common expectation in Premier League circles is of the kind of points deduction that would make at least one relegation a certainty.
Juventus goalkeeper and club legend Gianluigi Buffon was one of a few star names that stuck with the club
Alessandro del Piero, another Juve icon, lifts the Serie B trophy in June 2007 after the club were promoted back to the top flight at the first attempt
If Manchester City were relegated down the divisions, which of their players would follow in Del Piero and Buffon’s footsteps and stick around
It’s also my understanding that there are no relegation clauses in the City contracts, meaning the agents of the big names can’t dangle cut-price bargains in front of the market.
Ostensibly, that might work in City’s favour, but how could they possibly afford to keep those players while operating on Championship revenues, assuming anyone even wanted to stay?
There is no parachute big enough to hold up the weight of Erling Haaland’s £500,000-a-week contract. Haaland, at 26, is one year older than Ibrahimovic was when Juve imploded, and we would expect him and the vast majority of his team-mates to bolt if City go down. Nothing original in that prediction; nothing offensive about those decisions if they come in due course.
But let’s talk about love, because Buffon, Nedved, Del Piero, Chiellini and Trezeguet loved that Old Lady.
They all could have had their pick of options and they all stayed. With the exception of Trezeguet, they travelled to Rimini in September 2006 and opened their Serie B campaign with 1-1 in front of 10,000 people. A year later they were back in Serie A and loved by fans in deeper ways than before.
As Buffon later put it: ‘In football, you can send a message to the outside with loyalty. To the fans, you can say, “In difficult moments, I’ll be there”.
‘We play for fame, money, trophies and a lot of things, but we also play to feel a sense of belonging. I decided to stay at Juve because I believe in gratitude.’
If there was anything to love about the Juventus scandal, it was that single aspect from its aftermath. That irrefutable evidence of decency within individual components of a broken machine.
Will Erling Haaland want to head back to the likes of Kenilworth Road, if City are relegated?
So Ruben Dias, do you fancy another trip back to Swindon Town (left) or Bristol City (right)?
Boyhood City fan Phil Foden (right) might be more amenable to staying at the club down the divisions, but what about those with weaker loyalties?
Maybe Manchester City will eventually have heroes they can cast in a similar light. And possibly that will serve as a test of where City truly belong in the conversation about big clubs, because it is one thing for a player to love the Old Lady of Italian football, and perhaps harder to imagine an equal affection for the new-money face of Abu Dhabi.
From today’s vantage point, it is easy to see both as responsible for egregious acts of cheating. But it’s tricky to foresee a world where so many first-teamers choose to stick it out with City.
Phil Foden? He’s a lifelong fan. Ditto Rico Lewis and Nico O’Reilly. They’ve all been pictured kissing the badge at some point or other. But the rest will likely see the dilemma in far simpler terms if the harsher judgments come to pass.
The rest might find City too hard to love if they are no longer useful. The rest might already be on to their agents, plotting the same route to the door as Ibrahimovic once did. It would be hard to blame any of them.
