Some time ago I said a soccer scandal would rock Italy. She’s coming down the right wing at high speed. Toot, toot!

The entire board of Juventus, the current Italian champions, the most decorated club in Italy, has just resigned. There are rumors of match fixing both in Italy and in the Champion’s League, which is the European club championship. The incentive is money. If a club does well in the Champion’s League the rewards run to tens of millions of euros and a successful club attracts world-class players that other clubs can’t sign. In the American NFL the number one draft pick goes to the worst team in the league but in European soccer the best players go to the team that makes the best financial offer that has the most prestige.

Jose Mourinho, who calls himself the "special one," is the manager of Chelsea, they have won the English championship two years in a row. He said on TV the other day that the Champions League is difficult to win as the referees are bent. He referred to a goal by the world-class Ukrainian striker Shevchenko in a match against Barcelona that was disallowed. I saw that game, the ball came in from the left, Shevchenko was not flagged offside; he played the ball down with his chest and slotted it into the goal. The ref, Markus Merk disallowed it to everyone’s dismay.

The Juventus manager’s phone was tapped two months ago talking to an important official about an up-coming game in Amsterdam, in which the caller told him that he had good news and that he’d made sure a certain referee was appointed to the game. Forty-five people are being investigated and the headquarters of the Italian Football Federation in Rome were raided. There are months of tapped phone call transcripts still to come out and several Italian referees are under suspicion. Italian journalists are calling it the granddaddy of all scandals; enditements will follow. Lazio, Fiorentina, AC Milan and Juventus are all in frame right now for match fixing and more clubs will follow no doubt.

This one it’s going to be massive, the Italian papers say that this season 29 out of 38 Juventus games were fixed. Juventus are just three points clear at the top of the Italian league with one game to go, so fixing 29 games would have helped them a whole bunch. It’s also alleged that Buffon, Juventus’ goalkeeper, who is considered the best goalie in the world, has been trapped in the sting for alleged illegal match betting. There’s talk of people wagering half a million euro a game.

To an Italian his mother comes first, soccer is second, and his car or motorbike is third. The rest of his life: church, money, life, death, sex, romance, children etc are well down the list. Soccer is religion in Italy. This is going to be a big shock, but if in the end it all gets cleaned up it, it will make the game more fair because dodgy refereeing decisions and match fixing spoil the world’s most popular game.

A while ago, I saw in the Mirror-World how bent the game is and how a very famous footballer had been paid a vast sum to throw a World Cup final. Maybe he’ll come out with the dirty laundry in this sting, ’should be good. Some really big names are going to get their finger cracked as the tray of the cash register slams shut, others may do time in the slammer before this thing pans out to the final whistle - fun, fun, fun.

© Stuart Wilde 2006 - www.stuartwilde.com

PS. 'Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA that controls soccer worldwide has recently been investigated for allegedly accepting a $400,000 bribe. Charming.