It all kicks off at Lazio

For a brief moment in the summer, fans of the Rome’s Lazio football club were united in declaring that in order for the club to survive, its owner, Claudio Lotito, must go. Lotito’s sin, according to supporters, was not using enough cash from his office-cleaning business to buy star players. So far, so normal, for top-flight football.

But it was a new low for Lazio, which has never had the same support as its Rome rival AS Roma but enjoyed a glorious era in the 1990s. It began with the arrival of Paul Gascoigne before the club won the Italian league title in 2000 under manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, the Swede who would go on to manage the England team.

The July protest offered a snapshot of how politics, show business, football, economics and sometimes criminals are linked in a city where it often feels like everyone knows everyone. As a result of the club’s malaise, and its owner’s alleged failure to spend cash, supporters have boycotted home games this year, giving the Olympic stadium a spectral feel.

Magistrates, meanwhile, alleged this month that a leading Roman banker and noted journalist, both Lazio fans, were working with supporters and concocting fake stories about the club being sold to force Lotito’s hand.

Lotito, 69, should have political clout. He managed to get himself elected as a senator in 2022 for the Forza Italia party which was founded by the late former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and is now a coalition partner in the Meloni government which has survived much longer than anyone anticipated.

His problem is that there are plenty of angry, anti-Lotito fans among Meloni’s MPs, and Rome’s regional governor Francesco Rocca — a Meloni appointee — also called for Lotito’s head and joined the demonstrators in July. “(Lotito) needs to understand that his time at Lazio appears to have come to an end in the eyes of a vast number of Lazio fans,” Rocca told The Times.

Lazio fans have figured they too have political power and threatened to stop voting for Forza Italia unless Lotito stepped down, sounding alarm bells in the government.   Fans meanwhile continue to stay away from home games in protest at Lotito’s tenure, despite the team starting the season in style with a string of wins and no defeats.

So far, the Lazio owner has appeared to thrive on the hostility, happy to be a throwback to a time when Italian club chairmen mixed football and politics, not least Berlusconi, who ran Italy while dictating tactics at AC Milan, the club he owned.

But since Berlusconi died in 2023, Italian football has changed as Chinese and American owners buy up clubs, leaving Lotito as a survivor from a different age — still firmly enmeshed in Rome’s nexus of board rooms, parliament and angry fans with questionable politics.

As Italian daily La Repubblica wrote about magistrates eavesdropping on the phone calls made by Bisignani and Masi: “That’s what Rome is like. The stadium, politics, newspapers and the world of business all seem far from each other. Until someone looks into a smartphone and sees what’s inside.”