Help! I'm confused by a sentence in a book about football!

April 8, 2018 12:48 PM

I'm reading David Goldblatt's history of football The Ball is Round and in the chapter about Italian football in the 1980s he writes: "It was in an atmosphere of growing regional renaissance and self-assertiveness that Hellas Verona pulled off the miracle of 1985 – the last team outside the charmed circle of Milan, Rome, and Turin to win the scudetto," but a few pages later he writes about Napoli winning the title in 1987.

I checked the list of scudetto winners on Wikipedia and Napoli won it in 1987 and 1990, plus Sampdoria (based in Geona) won it in 1991. I thought it might mean the last northern team, but Genoa is in the north and Rome isn't. Am I missing something or is this a mistake? Are Naples and Genoa somehow part of the charmed circle of Milan, Rome and Turin?

posted by Chenko to Society & Culture (4 answers total)

I'm going with "just a mistake". You'd think he'd have remembered Napoli, given that Maradona was on those teams, though!
posted by asterix at 12:52 PM on April 8, 2018

Response by poster: That's what makes it so confusing -- he starts writing about Maradona's Napoli in the next paragraph!
posted by Chenko at 1:41 PM on April 8, 2018

Best answer: I think what he's trying to say is that Hellas Verona were an unfashionable, much smaller team. Napoli and Sampdoria were larger teams with bigger resources and a history of some success. Hellas winning the scudetto was similar to Leicester winning the premier league. But it's very poorly phrased and yes, incorrect as stated.
posted by el_presidente at 1:56 PM on April 8, 2018

Best answer: Mistake. However, it might be a mention that it was one of the few teams that were closer to the Adriatic coast than the Mediterranean industrial/commercial powerhouses axis from the Turin-Milan-Genoa triangle to Napoli. The previous team to do so (excluding Cagliari, in Sardinia) was Bologna, back in 64.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:08 PM on April 8, 2018