Fabio Cannavaro played for 60 minutes for Real Madrid on Tuesday night before he was substituted to make way for a younger alternative. From now on, he can probably count down in single figures the remaining games he will wear the all-white of Real. The captain of Italy looks very likely to be returning home from Spain next season. His probable destination in a rapidly developing exit strategy is Juventus. He has played there before. Cannavaro left Juve in the summer of 2006 and signed a three-year deal with the Spaniards, where he has won two league titles. As he becomes a free agent in July, and will turn 36 in September, no big transfer fee is at issue, and as to how much Real will miss him, well, he has had a mixed time in Spain and is hardly a fans' favourite at the Bernabeu.
But Cannavaro is not universally loved by Juve followers either. The possibility of his returning there is a sensitive matter for some supporters, which is why the club are not keeping negotiations secret in order to test reaction. Cannavaro quit Juventus soon after he led his country to the 2006 World Cup just as Juve were being demoted, a result of the Moggigate scandal, when some their directors had been found to have manipulated Serie A referees.
He, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Lilian Thuram, Gianluca Zambrotta, Patrick Vieira and Emerson were among the players who quit a sinking ship; Alex Del Piero, Pavel Nedved, Gianluigi Buffon and David Trezeguet stayed on board. Juve fans immediately identified the two groups as baddies and goodies; opportunists and loyalists; bravehearts and cowards. The episode has defined modern Juve: players like Ibrahimovic and Vieira are now used to hearing chants of "traitor" and jeers whenever they revisit Juventus wearing the colours of Inter Milan. "I can understand it," said Ibrahimovic, provocatively, at the weekend. "If you lose 'Ibra', you lose a star." Cannavaro is too experienced, too sensible a leader to say something so arrogant, but he has work to do to be welcomed back by Juve's faithful.
Inter, AC Milan and Juve may be great rivals, but footballers often transfer between the three and their previous attachments are all but forgotten. And all of Italy already knows Cannavaro to be open to pragmatism in his transfers. During the Moggigate scandal, so-called because the Juve board member Luciano Moggi was chief architect of systematically corrupting referees, transcripts of Moggi's phone calls were released by investigators. One day, the captain of Italy was surprised when a call between him and Moggi was published. The call was made in 2004, when Cannavaro played for Inter, and Moggi had decided to recruit him for Juve. Acting outside the rules on "tapping-up" - contacting players of a rival club - Moggi told Cannavaro to start agitating the Inter hierarchy for a move to Juve. The conversation reads like dialogue from the movie Goodfellas. "Let's make it happen today," Moggi urges Cannavaro, "Tell him [the Inter president, Massimo Moratti] 'The coach doesn't rate me'. That'll be enough. Go on, give him a bitch of a call!"
Luckily, Cannavaro says little in the transcript. But a few weeks later, he was indeed joining Juventus. Two years later he was telling a press conference during the victorious World Cup, as the Moggigate scandal broke, that Moggi "worked well". Cannavaro was obliged to hold another press conference to explain he did not mean he admired Moggi's modus operandi. A few days later, he was lifting the World Cup. Italy was in thrall to him. He will need some of that residual credit to win over Juventus fans with raw recent memories.
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