MILAN. Carlo Tavecchio, former president of the Football Federation and current number 1 of the Lombardy regional committee of the National Amateur League, has died at the age of 79. His last public release two weeks ago precisely on the occasion of the assembly of the Lnd Lombardia, then some pulmonary problems and the sudden worsening of the conditions that led him to hospitalization in Erba last Wednesday. Death in the night.
“With dismay, the members of the Crl board of directors with all the collaborators and employees of the committee and of the delegations mourn the sudden disappearance of the president of the Lombardy regional committee, Carlo Tavecchio”. Thus the Lombardy Regional Committee of the National Amateur League for the death of Carlo Tavecchio. “Here we do not want to recall the prestigious and inimitable sporting curriculum of the president, former company manager and federal manager who left the Lombard Committee to land at the presidency of the National Amateur League, first, and of the Italian Football Federation, then, making himself available again of the Crl since 9 January 2021, but we want to keep the brilliant man imprinted in our minds and hearts, with a boundless spirit of service and combative in carrying forward all the requests in favor of the much loved world of volunteering and social work expressed by football amateur and youthful”, they write from the Committee, “dear president, you have raced at top speed all your life: now rest in peace. We send a thought of close sympathy to all the family members, Mrs. Eugenia, her daughter, not least the councilor Mario Tavecchio”.
Tavecchio goes down in the history of Italian football for thirty-nine months as president of the FIGC – from August 2014 to November 2017 – which he lived dangerously. He was born in 1943 in Ponte Lambro in the province of Como, a town where he was mayor for almost twenty years, where he lived and where his funeral will take place on Monday at 3pm. Politics was a great passion of him, but it is in football that he achieved his notoriety. Between gaffes, reforms, a good European and a historic lack of qualification for the 2018 World Cup, which cost him his resignation.
Those of the former number 1 of the Amateurs (League which he led continuously for fifteen years from 1999 to 2014), were not three easy years, who landed at the helm of football that counts. At first it was the slip about ‘Opti Poba’, then came the gaffe about the “Jews”. In between, however, a virtuous path of reforms, the revolutionary green light for the Var, up to the re-election of March 2017 which seemed to have sealed off the four-year mandate. But the World Cup without Italy, the first after 60 years, dealt the final blow to Tavecchio’s leadership in the FIGC.
His was an obstacle course, after picking up the pieces of a federation that was wiped out following the flop of the 2014 Brazilian World Cup. That Tavecchio’s era in the FIGC was born under the banner of controversy was immediately evident, with the empty passage of the former president of the Amateur League, shortly before taking the place of Abete at the Football Federation. That Opti ‘Poba who ate bananas in a speech against the growing number of foreign footballers and for which he apologized, leaving however critics and detractors a good argument to impeach him.
However, Tavecchio became president of the Football Federation and began the post-World Cup work with an unexpected blow: the hiring of Antonio Conte at the helm of the national team. Innovative contract, with image rights included, intervention by the sponsor. Italy restarts and qualifies in advance for the European Championships. Continental tournament in which Italy from work in progress manages to eliminate Spain and finish the race in the quarterfinals, but on penalties in front of the great Germany. Tavecchio’s FIGC comes out of the European Championship strengthened and works on regulatory changes: it launches the roof of roses with precise indications on the number of Italians and those coming from the nursery.
It is the first step of the reforms, which continues with the rules on financial fair play and the launch of the federal centres; but at the center is the mother of all reforms, the reduction of Serie A to 18 teams, launched but immediately stranded in the shallows of the League. But trouble is always around the corner and often comes from within: Felice Belloli, Tavecchio’s successor at the helm of the Amateurs, defines the female players as “4 lesbians” in the minutes of a board meeting. New storm and Tavecchio, still under pressure, comes out of it, pushing Belloli to leave.
Re-elected on March 6, after beating challenger Andrea Abodi, Tavecchio hoped he had put his worst troubles behind him. Those of the Leagues remained: the commissioner of that of A tried to overcome even the last obstacles. But the worst was yet to come: to avert it, he had defined the possibility that Italy did not go to the World Cup as an apocalypse. The nightmare instead becomes reality, through the tears of the accountant from Ponte Lambro who became king of Italian football.