Professor Vanda Wilcox Interviewed on Italian Football Betting Scandal
JCU Professor of History Vanda Wilcox was recently interviewed by Vatican Radio on the topic the latest scandals that have hit the Italian football world. With just days before the start of the 2012 European Championships, a number of players, including some who are part of the Italian national team, have been involved in criminal investigations over illegal betting activities, alleged to have taken place over the past years.
In the interview, Professor Wilcox noted how the scandal differs from the one that made headlines in 2006 in that, while the former “was about match-fixing simply in order to win, this is a betting-based scandal”, which mostly involves players in the second or third level of the championship, but then spread into Serie A, Italy’s top national league.
Professor Wilcox, who has a D.Phil. in History from Oxford University with a thesis on morale and discipline in the Italian army during the First World War, also works as a freelance journalist writing on Italian football. As JCU, she recently taught HS 378 – Sport, Politics and Society in the Modern World, in which students interested in sports can gain a fascinating new perspective on history, while non-fans can learn to appreciate the serious side of sport. She says “Sports aren’t just a passion or a pastime but an important window onto different cultures and periods of history. There’s more to calcio than just entertainment: studying football can offer a unique insight into Italy’s society and politics, just as exploring the history of baseball’s color line can illuminate US race relations, or cricket can help explain the history of the British Empire.”
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To read the article and listen to the audio interview, click here.
Professor Wilcox’s comments were also featured on sportpulse.net – read the interview here.
