There are matches that are not just matches, regardless of the 22 who have to play them on the pitch and the two who face each other from their respective benches. Italy-Israel, valid for the Nations League, scheduled for 8.45pm on 14 October 2024 is one of these.
It falls at a very complicated moment: even if it is not true that “Italians go to the football match as if it were a war and to the war as if it were a football match”, a joke that is ascribed to Winston Churchill even if the attribution is controversial , it is certainly true that when flags are involved and when wars, conflict zones, world tensions are involved, sport is even reluctantly loaded with meanings that go beyond.
You can also feel this in the hours preceding the challenge to which Spalletti’s Italy is called, there is a stony guest at the match and it is the conflict in the Middle East, during which in recent days they have been hit in Lebanon by the army Israeli some bases of the Unifil mission, which are located in a conflict zone between the Israeli army and Hezbollah. The attack injured some people and sparked harsh criticism from the international community, including Italy, since UN mission personnel should never be hit in military action, wherever they are.
The climate can be felt in the coach’s words: «I think there are many Israelis who don’t want war and we always have to convince someone more that this is something that must stop. We go to play the match with the hope of always convincing someone more.” Words that immediately gave rise to internal tension: he was reminded that the national team belongs to everyone, that football is not expected to take sides, to say things that go beyond the lines of the pitch, a principle that did not prevent 30 years ago from stealing the words of cheering for the Italy of football in order to nominate a party that is still in government, without apparent contradiction on the part of those who say it today.
A few hours later Spalletti added: «I want to express all our closeness and solidarity to all the soldiers who are there and in particular to ours, who are many, who have been doing difficult work for many years in this possibility of a peacekeeping mission, which but it doesn’t seem to be taking root.”
Meanwhile, Udine welcomes the national team in an armored atmosphere, not with the celebration that would be natural, after 5 and a half years of absence of the Azzurri from the city: the numbers speak of 11,500 spectators, less than half the capacity of the stadium, 1,500 members of the team’s forces order, including bomb squads, armored vehicles, reinforced concrete jersey barriers, drones to monitornot to mention the invisible presence of Mossad agents, the Israeli secret service.
In the afternoon before the match, a Pro-Palestine procession is planned in the centre, which further raises the level of public order. The visiting team repeats that for two hours, the objective is to concentrate only on the pitch, but everyone knows that when sport becomes, even in spite of itself, a reason of state, the matches become difficult for everyone: for those who play, for those who watch, for those who must guarantee public order.
Also because historically sport stopped being just a party to become a security problem on a specific day, 5 September 1972, at the Munich Olympics, right on the fault line of this same conflict, when the attack by a Palestinian commando scarred the Olympic village by hitting the Israeli team: a day that has forever taken away the light-heartedness of sport and which has since then haunted all the competitions which, for some reason, are liable to be played with other weapons on other fronts .