Fans wanted for Serie A club

You'd think Treviso's first ever win in the Serie A, last Wednesday night away to dreadful Reggina, might have caused a street party in this town of 80,000 fifteen miles north of Venice. It didn't.

It's not like no-one cared, but events in the last few days have proved what the rest of Italy already knew; Treviso is not losing its collective sleep over the local teams's inaugural Serie A season.

Many things come to mind if you mention Treviso to other Italians. You could think of the under-appreciated beauty of its centre, the narrow canals which give the city a distinctive although little known sweetness; the beautiful villas outside, many of them built in the style which everyone in Italy would define as 'veneto', from the name of the north-eastern region of the country of which Treviso is one of the most prosperous cities; or the dozens of companies which have gone on to make a name for themselves around the world.

Among them, clothes-makers and casual fashion icon Benetton is perhaps the best known.

Benetton wields a heavy influence on local sports, and in fact it's been the single major factor in broadening horizons and making local teams players in European and world sports. Sisley, the volleyball team sponsored by a brand of Benetton, Benetton Basket and Benetton Rugby have won a combined 23 Italian titles (plus 19 won by the women's rugby teams).

Benetton's sports branch ranks with the best anywhere in the world and the NBA and its teams regularly choose its sports center, La Ghirada, a jewel of a place with a clubhouse, apartments for out-of-town players, indoor gyms, outdoor basketball and volleyball courts and rugby pitches - most of them open to the public for free - as the location for a couple of summer camps that attract the best young players from around the world.

Benetton's general manager Maurizio Gherardini, a nice and knowledgeable man who seems unable to avoid inserting at least one word in English in whatever conversation he does, was last year the first foreign candidate to become general manager of an NBA franchise, the newly born Charlotte Bobcats, before he took himself out of consideration for family reasons.

Now, what about soccer? Benetton have never had an involvement with the sport, and Gilberto Benetton, one of the four brothers who founded the company, recently revealed why to newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport: 'There's always been a lot of pressure on us to do something but we resisted the temptation. I was a fan of Nereo Rocco's Padova teams and a season ticket holder of Lanerossi Vicenza when Paolo Rossi played there, but the football world has deteriorated... It's gotten away too much from my idea of sports.'

This rests the case, of course. So Football Club Treviso, founded in 1909 and now known as Treviso Football Club after reorganization following a brush with bankruptcy in 1993, have always had to go it alone in a place which can be called Italy's 'title city'.

They reached Serie B in 1997 after a 42-year absence, but had gotten no closer to Serie A than last year's play-offs loss to Perugia when, during the summer, Torino and Genoa were kicked out of the top flight for financial misdeeds and betting scandals and the next in line for promotion, Ascoli and Treviso, were called up, with less than two weeks to prepare for a season in the Serie A.

Both were granted a one-week extension to the transfer window in order to sign players, and both obliged, but it seems Ascoli have done a better job so far.

In addition to a squad that looked thin and talent-challenged, Treviso had a huge problem with their home ground, the ancient 'Tenni'. It was too small by Serie A standards, and it was too boxed-in among apartment buildings, not far from the city center, for the club to be able to build a second perimeter fence as requested by the new, stern rules passed by the Government to increase crowd control.

Treviso were forced to play their first three matches at Padova's Euganeo, 45 minutes west on a good traffic day, but the combination of Treviso's small following and the Euganeo's huge capacity (33,000) meant a complete lack of atmosphere at those matches, including the one against Milan.

Then, on October 5, a curious thing happened. During the debate over the new legislation against soccer violence, the Lega Nord, the Northern League, the political party who's been campaigning for more administrative independence for each region and who is part of the ruling coalition, proposed that rules be amended and that an expection be made to the 20,000-seat minimum rule for stadia located in a city with a population of less than 100,000, whose clubs have their offices in town and have been promoted to the Serie A for the first time in the last 20 years.

It ominously looked to everyone like the kind of law that is tailored to suit an individual person's or club's interest and makes a mockery of everyone else's, but it was passed a few days later so the Tenni would be welcoming its first ever Serie A match on October 23, last Sunday.

Those expecting a huge party were disappointed. Even taking into consideration that for security reasons the new amendment put a limit of 8,000 on tickets sold, and of 9,000 on total attendance, only 2,154 paid up at the gates, which added to the 2,749 season ticket holders made for a disappointing, albeit not entirely unexpected low crowds, and you can deduct the 200-300 Empoli fans on the away end from that total. Perhaps FC Treviso were not entirely happy that a few dozens of fans watched the game for free from the sky boxes.

And if you're wondering how a little provincial stadium can have skyboxes... the answer is it doesn't. See, with the Tenni boxed in among tall buildings, apartments on the higher floor had a great view of proceedings, and at least 12 people could be counted huddling on a balcony behind the away end.

I'd reached the stadium in a hurry after watching Benetton (Basket) win their noon live TV match and it was odd to see that only 2,000 more souls had decided to come out and watch football than those who'd gone to the PalaVerde (verde means green, of course Benetton's primary colour) a couple of hours earlier, and a few miles away.

Of course, with competition for the fans' money now fierce and a wide offer for entertainment locally, soccer was never going to be a huge success, but the shock of seeing an adaptation to the old cliche 'what if they staged a football match and nobody came?' put into effect was still strong.

This, of course, is not an indictment on some of the better sports-educated fans in Italy who reside in the town, but perhaps another sign of the crisis Italian football is going through as far as falling attendances are concerned.

Sitting in the Tenni stands, though, you had the long gone feeling of witnessing a genuine football match and not made-for-TV stuff, with evenly-matched teams playing out different tactical scenarios, and of feeling close to the action. I could actually smell the sweet, familiar scent of wet grass from the press box, and the players seemed to be running harder when seen from that close, perhaps because running hard was all they had to offer.

Oh, by the way, Empoli won 2-1, ruining Treviso's return to their stadium and putting paid to the notion that the proximity of the fans to the pitch would give the team - oh, boy - a 12th man.

But just as the rug was going to be pulled from under the feet of coach Ezio Rossi came the deserved win at Reggina, and despite a weekend loss to Siena with a trip to Cagliari coming up there's still a chance that doom will stay away for a while from those children of a lesser God of Treviso sports, the football team.

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