Paolo Di Canio was a fantastic footballer, is a proud Italian, an ex-Celt and a colourful character.
Yeah, but he played for cellic so that makes everything alright
He’s just resigned as Swindon manager.
Paolo Di Canio is also a man of principle.
[SIZE=6]Paolo Di Canio snuck into Swindon Town’s offices after resigning to steal some pictures[/SIZE]
No part of Paolo Di Canio’s all too brief reign at Swindon Town was quiet and conventional, so it should come as no surprise that his departure wasn’t either. He won the League Two title and League Two Manager of the Year in his first year with the club last season and has the club atop League One so far this season. But [U]Di Canio quit on Monday[/U], citing “a number of broken promises” in the midst of a takeover of the club that he supported.
Since this is Paolo Di Canio we’re talking about – a man who said "[U]I do what I want!" after getting sent off[/U][/URL] and just last month [URL=‘http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/soccer-dirty-tackle/paolo-di-canio-wants-own-money-keep-players-230039928–sow.html’][U]wanted to use his own money to keep several players on loan[/U][/URL] – that would’ve been far too understated. So, according to the Swindon Advertiser, [URL=‘http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/sport/10245110.Di_Canio_returns_to_County_Ground_to_collect_mementos____at_1am/’][U]Di Canio snuck in to his old office two nights later[/U] to swipe some pictures that belonged to the club.
[INDENT]The Italian, who left the club on Monday, still had a set of keys to get into the stadium and is believed to have been caught on CCTV returning to his office at around 1am on Thursday.
The Adver has learnt that Di Canio removed pictures from the walls of his office which documented his success at the club.[/INDENT]
The Daily Mail adds that Swindon caught on to Di Canio’s picture heist when they viewed the CCTV footage on Thursday and subsequently [U]changed the security codes at the County Ground and replaced the door locks[/U] at their offices. Di Canio says the club has yet to accept his resignation, but this might’ve helped push them towards doing so.
In late August, days before the Europa League group-stage draw which matched up Celtic and Lazio, Glasgow’s Hilton Hotel cancelled their Q&A event with former Celtic and Lazio player Paolo Di Canio.
The organisers, Events 105, claimed the cancellation was down to “unforeseen circumstances”. It was said ticket sales had been good and “that the issues that led to cancellation of the show were not linked to Paolo himself and certainly were not the fault of his in any way either”.
The backlash which had greeted the initial announcement of the £75 event had been extensive, with fans on Twitter bemoaning the acrimony with which Di Canio initially left Celtic in 1997 and, far more pointedly, his fascist politics. The Q&A was sponsored by the Tommy Burns Skin Cancer Trust, the charity foundation named after one of the most beloved and benevolent figures in Celtic’s history, and this left a particularly bitter taste in the mouths of some fans.
Though Events 105 distanced Di Canio from the cancellation and did not respond to The Athletic’s request for comment, it felt like some sections of the fanbase didn’t want anything to do with the Italian.
Signed from AC Milan, Di Canio was at Celtic for one season, scoring 15 goals. He was volatile and inconsistent, but technically gifted and an excellent finisher. Manager Burns called him “the best player I’ve ever managed and possibly the best I ever will manage”. Di Canio won the SFA Player’s Player of the Year in 1997.
Like the other “Three Amigos” of 1996-97 — Pierre van Hooijdonk and Jorge Cadete — he left Celtic abruptly, agitating at first for a wage increase and then a swift transfer. After Di Canio’s £4.5 million move to then top-flight Sheffield Wednesday, his advisor Favio Parisi claimed the player “always saw joining Celtic as a stepping stone in his career”.
Celtic fans were angered by Di Canio’s apparent belief that he was bigger than the club and deserving of a higher salary than Celtic could offer. But his political inclinations never came to light, particularly in a pre-internet age where such information was far less readily available.
It was after Di Canio’s time in Britain, he also had spells with West Ham United and Charlton Athletic, than the can of fascist worms was opened and a more entrenched animosity towards him began to spread.
Having returned to Italy with his boyhood club in 2004, Di Canio renewed his rapport with the collection of Lazio ultras groups, predominantly the largest group Irriducibili which populated the Stadio Olimpico’s Curva Nord. This is the same stand that will be closed for Celtic’s visit next month in the Europa League, as a punishment for racist chanting.
In 2005, Di Canio performed the straight arm salute three times, including once in the Rome derby. He was fined and suspended by the Italian FA for one game, while FIFA president Sepp Blatter threatened a lifetime ban that never came to pass.
The then-37-year-old Di Canio told Italian news agency Ansa: “I am a fascist, not a racist.”
He added: “The salute is aimed at my people. With the straight arm I don’t want to incite violence and certainly not racial hatred.”
In his autobiography, first published in 2001, Di Canio described Benito Mussolini as “basically a very principled, ethical individual” who was “deeply misunderstood”. Lazio was the team Mussolini supported, and the dictator’s granddaughter Alessandra was in the stadium when Di Canio flashed his salute against Roma. Afterwards, she said: “What a delightful Roman salute! I was deeply moved… I will write him a thank you note.”
Recently, Di Canio has veered between evasiveness and candour when confronted about his fascism. After he was appointed Sunderland manager in 2013, former Labour foreign secretary David Miliband resigned from the Sunderland board in protest at his views. Di Canio refused to answer any questions about his politics in one of his first press conferences as Sunderland boss.
He has a tattoo on his arm, “dux”, a Latin reference to “Il Duce”, the moniker of Mussolini. In 2016, he was suspended as a Sky Italia pundit for showing this tattoo live on air.
Over the past decade, articles have appeared in The Guardian and GQ seeking to contextualise Di Canio’s fascism; that as a working-class kid growing up a Lazio fan in Quarticciolo, a district of the Italian capital mostly inhabited by Roma fans, he rebelled against his peers by entwining his identity with Lazio’s fascist past and present.
The defence of Di Canio is based on him being a product of his environment. But the idea that fans should waste their precious time scrambling for nuance in a character so straightforwardly problematic seems self-defeating. They shouldn’t be held accountable for coming to some contrived understanding about a troubled past. Some public figures simply aren’t worth overcomplicating.
Di Canio is now 51, so can’t be excused as a naive teenager enchanted by ultras culture and indoctrinated by fascism.
He apologised for pushing referee Paul Alcock in 1998 in a Wednesday win over Arsenal. He apologised to Charlton after leaving for Lazio six years later having already agreed a contract extension with the London club. He apologised to Sunderland supporters on numerous occasions for the comprehensive defeats he oversaw as their manager.
But he hasn’t apologised for the salutes, or his tattoo, or his comments about Mussolini and Italy’s fascist history.
He has played with and managed players of diverse backgrounds, but he hasn’t renounced an ideology which preaches they are inferior. This is Di Canio, unrepentant.
Celtic fans were right to backlash so strongly against his Glasgow Q&A. His beliefs are in direct opposition to “a club open to all”, the inclusive maxim that both the club and its fanbase enjoy applying to Celtic. It also contradicts Celtic’s founding ethos: to raise money to help the starving and the impoverished, the vulnerable and the marginalised — in other words, the demographics historically demonised by fascist governments.
The club has a proud history of socialist fans, players and managers, embodied by the friendship between former coalminer and European Cup-winning manager Jock Stein and Liverpool icon Bill Shankly. Their respective teams played with a collectivism and unity inspired by their managers’ ideology, Shankly describing their football as “a form of socialism — without the politics”.
That legacy continues today with various Celtic fan groups conveying their socialist, anti-fascist and anti-racist politics through displays inside Celtic Park, and through campaigning outside it — including raising more than £130,000 for two Palestinian charities in 2016.
No club is infallible in upholding the values they claim to profess, but the disowning of Di Canio’s Q&A by some Celtic fans is a small but worthy action. The club too, to its credit, hasn’t invited him back for a public event such as a charity dinner or legends’ match since his ignominious departure.
It is the easiest thing in the world to have nothing to do with him ever again.
The cancellation had nothing to do with PdC or his views. The rest of the piece is a cheap shot and based on the authors opinion. A man is allowed have political views outside of Soccer or is he not?
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Di Canio is an alright sort and is entitled to hold his views.
That Di Canio fellow sounds like a real nasty piece of work.
He taught the English football the art of sportsmanship.
He might have taught you spelling har har har har
Isn’t a journalist allowed to have an opinion too? Or is that right restricted to soccer players?
Of course- He’s not allowed assume over an entire piece however that the event was cancelled because of his own righteous opinion, when its clearly stated it wasn’t the case.
I don’t think he ever even hints that the event was cancelled because of his own opinion. There were lots of objections to that event from Celtic fan groups. He’s writing about that and the reasons why people might object. I’m sure he would have written about the event whether it was going ahead or not.
Fergus was fond of saying no
Fergus was a greedy little bastard.
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“I also used to study geography, so Britain and Scotland used to be a land I wanted to visit.”
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