Di Canio, Paolo

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Fullname: Paolo Di Canio
Height: 5.09
Weight: 11.09
Born: 9 July 1968
Birthplace: Rome, Italy
Signed: 31 May 1996 (£1m from AC Milan)
Left: 6 Aug 1997 (£3m to Sheffield Wed)
Position: Forward, Winger
Debut: […]
Internationals: none

Biog

Paolo Di Canio only played one season in the Hoops but his impact both on and off the pitch was huge and even controversial.

He was brought to Celtic by then manager Tommy Burns in a £1m move from AC Milan in the summer of 1996. The signing was typical of Burns, a man never afraid to look further afield to uncover exciting attacking talent.

When Di Canio arrived at Celtic he joined a cosmopolitan squad that already boasted the considerable talents of Dutch striker Pierre Van Hoijdonk, German international Andreas Thom and Portugal’s Jorge Cadette. Together with Pierre & Jorge, the three were mockingly labelled as the ‘Three Amigos‘ by chairman Fergus McCann.

The arrival of the gifted but highly temperamental Italian not only provided Celtic with an abundance of riches in attack but sent out a clear signal of how Tommy Burns wanted his rebuilt Celtic to play. The fans were licking their lips in anticipation.

In some ways the supporters were not to be disappointed. Celtic were sensational at times that season and in pure football terms could look streets ahead of any of their domestic rivals. But while their attacking forays were often a joy to watch the team was all too frequently undone by a defence too prone to making elementary and costly mistakes.

For his part Di Canio was a sensation. An outrageously gifted player, the skillful Italian rapidly became the darling of the fans. His flair was coupled with a real cutting edge which meant that more often than not his audacious ability not only entertained but produced that vital end product.

As is so often the case with players of Di Canio’s talent there was a real arrogance to his play and demeanour. That arrogance could make for great viewing as he teased the opposition but it didn’t always warm him to his team mates.

In one of his early training sessions at Celtic, in a hissy fit Di Canio stormed off the practice ground vowing never to return. The catalyst of this tantrum was the ability of his own team-mates – or rather lack of ability. After one stray pass too many Di Canio had enough. He stormed off the pitch and let Tommy Burns know in no uncertain terms that he thought the calibre of player he was asked to work with was beneath him. He may have had a certain point but it was still uncalled for.

There can be few players who have ever been as animated on the football field as Di Canio but these regular displays of emotion only endeared him further to a support desperate for a hero to finally bring an end the dominance of an all conquering Rangers just one championship away from equalling Celtic’s record of nine titles in a row.

But even with Di Canio – either up front or out wide – Celtic far too often slipped up when it came to the crunch. The First Team lost all four league encounters that season with Rangers, and although the Italian scored a penalty in a 2-0 Scottish Cup quarter-final win over the Ibrox club the side crashed out of the tournament after a replayed semi-final, embarrassingly losing out 1-0 to First Division Falkirk.

For all his talent and fight, when it came to these crucial encounters it has to be said that Di Canio did not produce when it mattered most.

That Falkirk match signalled the end of Tommy Burns as Celtic manager and was the beginning of the end of Di Canio as a Bhoy.

The Italian – who prior to Milan had played for Terrana, Lazio and Juventus – came to Glasgow with a reputation as a hot head. It was a reputation he lived up to and his discipline on the pitch was poor, too often finding himself in confrontation with opponents and referees. He was labelled ‘fiery’ by the tabloids and there could be little argument with such a description.

Despite the tags, Di Canio enjoyed a good relationship with Tommy Burns but when the manager was sacked he saw an opportunity to engineer his own departure from the club. Di Canio was vocal in his disappointment in the axing of Tommy Burns and when the following pre-season came around he remained in Rome rather than return to Glasgow. He stated that a “little problem” had emerged regarding his contract with the club. On the one hand, he says that the club promised to revise his contract upwards if he had a good first season whilst the chairman says there was no such agreement.

A cat and mouse game thus ensued between the club and the player with accusation and counter-accusation flying to and thro. Celtic vowed that Di Canio had signed a contract and would not be sold.

Just days after stating Di Canio was not for sale, the player – in the infamous words of Celtic’s then Director of Football Jock Brown – was ‘traded’ in a £4.5 million deal with Premiership side Sheffield Wednesday which saw Dutch winger Regi Blinker coming to Parkhead. A very poor trade as it was to prove in time. Jock Brown even tried to use it as vindication of his ability in his position but all it did was make us laugh and/or cringe.

Di Canio’s acrimonious departure from Celtic undoubtedly split the support. Many were furious that the club did not do more to keep such a uniquely gifted player. Chairman and majority shareholder Fergus McCann took the bulk of the flak. But the man who rescued the Hoops from the disastrous regime of the old board’s White/Kelly axis was not one to take such matters lying down.

He launched a blistering attack on Di Canio, Van Hoijdonk and Cadette – all who departed under a cloud of financial wrangling – branding them ‘The Three Amigos‘ and blasting what he viewed as their money grabbing antics. While the initial sympathy of some may have been with Di Canio, the passing of time has seen the vast majority of the support firmly in McCann’s camp.

Consequently, for all his wonderful skill, the nature of Di Canio’s departure means that memories of him in the Hoops now leave a rather bitter taste in the mouth for many.

Post-Celtic
The Italian went on to make a major impact in the English Premiership firstly with Sheffield Wednesday and then West Ham, and to a much lesser extent Charlton. He of course enhanced his image as a hot head further while in Sheffield with his infamous but comical push on referee Paul Allcock.

But it says everything about Di Canio’s ability that despite that notorious incident he will be remembered in England foremost as a truly gifted player. Despite being supposedly linked by the rumour mills with Manchester United on a number of occasions, Di Canio’s career down south was restricted to the English Premiership’s more mediocre outfits. Consequently his only honour was a Goal of the Season award while with the Hammers.

He returned to Italy and Lazio – his beloved boyhood team – in 2004 at the age of 36. Now home in Rome, another ugly side to his nature was to rear its head.

While in England, Di Canio revealed in his autobiography that like many Lazio fans he had far-right-wing views and admitted his admiration for wartime Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Now at Lazio, Di Canio saw fit to express these political feelings by giving a fascist salute to the Rome club’s notorious far-right-wing supporters on a number of occasions, sparking outrage around the football world. Bafflingly, he claimed that he’s a fascist but not a racist! In many ways, it showed that he just followed and jumped on any bangwagon, and his politics were simply very crude and populist, although in this case he’d fallen for a very nasty strand.

These antics and the player’s subsequent defence of his actions have made Di Canio a bit of a darling of the neo-fascist movement in his home land. Had his political leanings been known during his time in Glasgow it is likely his relationship with the Celtic support would have deteriorated rather rapidly, and he would have been a persona non grata and punted. If his views were clear before he even signed, Celtic would have steered well clear of him.

These despicable shows of support of fascism have further isolated Di Canio from a Celtic support which for a very short time worshipped him. Now he is a figure loathed almost universally by the Celtic fans.

In total, Di Canio scored 15 goals in 38 appearances for Celtic. He will always be remembered as a wonderfully gifted (albeit greedy) footballer but alas also as a rather pathetic person with diabolical political sympathies.

In 2014, he tried to put his name forward for the Celtic managerial role, but thankfully he was never in the running or even considered. It was just another PR stunt by Di Canio for attention to keep his name in the papers. In later seasons, he was very controversially hired as manager of Sunderland & Swindon. Both were very poor spells, and there was a serious backlash from many on his appointment in those roles.

In 2016, he was removed from Sky Sports Italia after showing off a fascist tattoo of Mussolini that he had covering his back. It was quite despicable, and pathetic. Many found it offensive. Ironically, he had previously stated in 2011:

“I don’t vote, I haven’t voted for 14 years. Italian politicians—all of them—think only about themselves, and making money.” 

A curious & ironic admission as many would say similar about him as he had said about Italian politicians.

Playing Career

BEAUTIFUL BHOY Former Celtic star Paolo di Canio used to love looking at himself in a mirror, says former Hibs boss Alan Stubbs

The Italian was a popular figure during his short Parkhead stay and Stubbs says he would also host karaoke evenings in his home, 2018
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/sport/football/2177496/celtic-paolo-di-canio-alan-stubbs/
By Scott MacArthur

ALAN STUBBS has revealed that Paolo di Canio used to stand in front of a mirror and say his mother had made a beautiful baby.
The Italian was a popular figure among the Celtic squad during his short stay at Parkhead between 1996 and 1997.

And Stubbs has revealed how he would spend ages in front of the mirror, combing his hair and going on about his looks.

He told Open Goal: “He would always come out the shower and be in front of the mirror and it was basically Paolo’s mirror, you could never get him out of there.

“And as his English started to get better he would say, ‘My mother, she give birth to a beautiful baby,’ while combing his hair.

“And that was Paolo. He was great.

“He picked up the language really quickly and he was a fantastic character.

“He loved his karaoke, he had a karaoke machine in his house and sometimes we’d all go back and Paolo would want centre stage.

“He loved it, he was a showman. He loved the attention”

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Paolo Di Canio’s personal view of fascism must be set in historical context

Simon Martin
The Sunderland manager’s politics can’t be tackled without an understanding of his origins, in divided and violent postwar Italy
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/07/paolo-di-canio-fascism-historical-context
Sun 7 Apr 2013 12.02 BST
First published on Sun 7 Apr 2013 12.02 BST

Paolo Di Canio’s Roman upbringing may not excuse any fascistic beliefs he once held but it does help to contextualise them. Born in 1968, Di Canio grew up in a country that was violent and divided, as it had been since Mussolini’s rise to power. The 1945 liberation had failed to stimulate the national unity that fascism had claimed it would build and a vicious settling of scores left around 15,000 Italians dead in the three months that followed. There were no trials, no coming to terms with the past and, consequently, no definitive end to the ideological conflict in Italian society.

After students revolted in 1968, northern factory workers joined the fray in the “hot autumn” of 1969, car industry operatives pitched battles with the forces of order on the streets of Turin. Tacitly supported by the police, secret services and more openly by conservative society, rightwing violence erupted in response. The 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan left 16 dead and more than 80 wounded. Hastily blamed on anarchists, it was eventually traced to a neo-fascist group based in the Veneto region.

The politicisation of the piazzas transferred to the terraces and, in the midst of these tensions, Lazio won its first league title in 1974. Di Canio was six, an age at which many of us imprint our first football memories, and the team was full of “Paolinos”: mavericks, or fascists, with passions for parachuting, militarism, violence and the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI).
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Hated across the country for its political leanings, that Lazio team also loved firearms. Holding up a Roman jewellery shop as a prank in 1977, the midfielder Luciano Re Cecconi was shot dead. Rightwing and leftwing terrorists were financing their political activities with armed robberies, and Rome was understandably edgy.

Growing up in the working-class district of Quarticciolo, Di Canio’s allegiance would logically have been to AS Roma. Instead, he chose to fight as the underdog and, even as a member of Lazio’s youth team he continued to run with the Irriducibili ultras. For them, beyond the team itself, loyalty, community and a romanticised glorification of the past are the ties that bind. As an almost textbook fascist community, that past is very much Roman.

The Roman past appealed to Mussolini too, who assumed the title of Duce: the Latin word DUX, which translates as “leader”, is tattooed on Di Canio’s bicep. The Roman salute became a part of daily life. Made compulsory prior to all sporting events, it was this snarling gesture, during the Rome derby, that dogs Di Canio. “An ancient historical practice” and “different to the Nazi salute” it might be, but these are issues that he would have done well to explain ahead of his first match as a Premier League manager on Sunday. He brought them to the table after all.

But there is more to this than simply football and Sunderland’s risky survival strategy. There is the fact that here in Italy there is a growing tide of support for many of the ideas and thoughts that Di Canio espouses.

Mussolini initially opposed ideas of Nordic racial purity, insisting that culture was the main determining factor in race. But his scientists eventually “discovered” that Italians were, in fact, Aryans of part-Nordic descent which led in 1938 to racist policies officially being adopted. As such, Italy’s splintered neo-fascist parties do not always conform to British concepts of neo-Nazism, such as the BNP, which seems to be what Di Canio was driving at in previous explanations.

One such neo-fascist group that has grown considerably in Rome since its formation in 2003 is CasaPound. Describing itself as a social association, it criticises Marxist and capitalist economics, promotes sports, popular culture and has used Bobby Sands and Che Guevara among its eclectic campaign images. While semi-respectable members do charitable works, its more maverick elements like to meet and march.

And nowhere more so than in Mussolini’s birth and resting town, Emilia-Romagna. Rebuilt in honour of the Duce, the annual “March on Predappio”, to celebrate his rise to power, ensures fully-booked hotels, a brisk trade in the fascist souvenir shops and a queue to sign the book of condolence in front of the former leader’s tomb.

Back in Lazio, last August the small town of Affile unveiled a monument to Rodolfo Graziani, war criminal indicted by the United Nations for atrocities committed in Abyssinia (Ethiopia). It was paid for with €130,000 (£110,000) of Lazio regional government money.

Di Canio’s appointment may be a matter for Sunderland, and Di Canio may be speaking the truth when he says that he has no racist leanings. But the argument that fascism was nothing more than “National Socialism light” or that Mussolini was a misunderstood and principled individual who made some mistakes needs to be tackled head-on.

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