The politician behind the controversial Mulé Amendment insists it is ‘rubbish to suggest we are afraid of threats from FIFA and UEFA’ to exclude Serie A and Italian football from major tournaments and revoke EURO 2032 hosting rights.
The original wording of the amendment had created a potential global football earthquake, as FIFA and UEFA sent a letter to the FIGC (Italian Football Federation) warning that if it was passed in that form, it would breach the rules on government interference in sport.
This would include excluding clubs from major tournaments and even revoking Italy’s rights to co-host the EURO 2032 tournament with Turkey.
However, the final document was passed last night in a very different form, cutting out practically all the contentious elements, above all the independence from the FIGC and the ability to bypass the sporting justice system to appeal directly to the civil TAR tribunal.
However, Giorgio Mulé denies they chopped down the amendment out of fear for the repercussions.
“At the moment, we only included this amendment because it was urgent, but those relative to other areas have only been postponed,” he told Dire.
“It is rubbish to suggest we are afraid of threats from FIFA and UEFA. Seeing as the original amendment was deposited on June 23, I have to ask why the FIGC should notify us about the letter only two hours before we were to send it to the commission.
“If the FIGC had such a big problem, it could’ve told us earlier, as the Parliament has to be respected. I think they were trying to block changes because they want to retain the current system in a Medieval age for football.
“We did not change the wording following pressure, but the modifications arrived long before all that shouting and crying in the media with an organised campaign.”
What the amendment means for Serie A
Ultimately, the only thing the Mulé Amendment actually did was to ensure Serie A will have more members on the Federation board to better reflect the fact they represent most of the revenue.
Lega Serie A President Lorenzo Casini quoted the Boston Tea Party phrase to sum up the situation: “No taxation without representation.”
It is only the first step, as the ultimate plan is for Serie A to break away from the FIGC in the same way that the Premier League did from the English Football Association.
CONI (Italian Olympic Committee) President Giovanni Malagò advises everyone to wait and see after this amendment.
“When these things happen, there tend to be two outcomes. The first is that everyone is happy, that everyone got something out of it and realise it could’ve been a lot worse.
“The second is that everyone is unhappy, because the problems were not resolved and the compromise creates even more issues than it originally faced.”
The serie a has already suffered two decades of huge loss its time for Italian government and federation to relax the laws so that the league can grow in a better way more investors want to purchase the serie a clubs but the people at the higheracy are making things hard for them
i agree on that point when blatter ieft the stadium in 2006 we we the won the world cup we did nothing did not complain we were scared other countries would of got rid of him