From life in a monastery to team-mates taking a bribe, I’ve learned a lot
SAYS MASSIMO DONATI
IN football and in life, Massimo Donati abides by a basic rule of thumb. A motto he adopted when his former Bari team-mates were being huckled, one by one, for match-fixing.
‘From everything, you learn something,’ he says, his voice rising for emphasis. ‘If you do things right, your life goes well. If you do something wrong? You go down.’
It is, suggests Sportsmail, a high standard to stick to.
‘No, it’s not,’ snaps Donati. ‘It is easy.’
In his mind’s eye, the Hamilton midfielder can still see the day the secrets unravelled.
The farcical Andrea Masiello own goal of five years ago which sealed a 2-0 win for Lecce on a tense Serie A afternoon and confirmed Donati’s growing conviction his Bari colleagues were throwing games.
‘The day before games, you would see a lot of people hanging around the team hotel with lots of money. How could you stop them in a hotel? You couldn’t,’ he says.
‘Bari against Lecce was the equivalent of Celtic against Rangers in that area of southern Italy.
‘We lost 2-0 at home and one guy from our team (Massielo) scored this crazy own goal.
‘He’s back now — playing very well in Serie A for Atalanta. But, my God, that was a scandal. A big scandal.’
Massielo confessed in 2012 to accepting a bribe of £41,600 to turn the ball into his own net and received a 22-month suspended prison sentence.
Eight more Bari players — including goalkeeper Jean-Francois Gillet — were placed under further investigation.
Massielo’s own goal did Lecce little good either when they were relegated to Lega-Pro level for their part in the Calcio Scommesse (Football Bet) scandal.
Italian judge Giovanni Abbattista would later suggest that Bari’s team were ‘more or less on the market’. Mercenaries taking out some insurance against the threat of unpaid wages should they be relegated from Serie A.
Donati gives thanks that he is here now, untainted, to tell his tale in a Glasgow Italian restaurant festooned with the signed jerseys of footballers.
The Celtic shirt he wore in a memorable Champions League win over former club AC Milan is here.
The framed jerseys of James McArthur, Nir Bitton, James McCarthy hang on the wall and, already this week, larger-than-life proprietor Mimmo Rossi has hosted a family party for footballing brothers-in-law Darren O’Dea and Kyle Lafferty. When Donati was without a club, it was Rossi who mentioned his name to the Hamilton Accies hierarchy. He explains all this while lending his friend some help with explaining the intricacies of match-fixing in English.
‘There were only five players — including me — who didn’t get involved,’ says Donati. ‘The rest? They were all in it. Some of them were banned for six months, another one got three years.
‘It was the usual thing. People were promising money to players so long as they got the results they wanted. They were bribing them.
‘Did anyone ever approach me? No, I was lucky. Nobody approached me. Nobody ever came to my room. Nobody tried to involve me.
‘Others were not so lucky, because I know of players who were investigated just for being asked if they would take a bribe — even if they said no. It was very unfair on some people.’
Donati, now 35, is tall for a midfielder. An imposing figure with a strong moral code developed during five years in Atalanta’s famed youth system, he was schooled by Catholic priests from the age of 14. The shady practitioners of Italian corruption saw no point even asking the question.
‘For five years, I had to go to live in a monastery in Bergamo,’ he recalls. ‘We slept there, we ate there, we learned there.
‘A minibus took us to the Atalanta training ground and back.
‘The first year that I made it into the Atalanta first team I was still in the system.
‘I would play Serie A football for Atalanta — then go back to the club accommodation run by the priests.
‘If you are not with your family, it’s not easy; but you learn a lot.
‘There were older guys who bullied you. It felt like the army, you were on your own and you had to learn the hard way.
‘I would train in the morning, get the bus from the club base to school, come back, train and study then do my homework. And I got hassle for that. ‘My team-mates would be saying: “Ah, why are you doing all that stuff?”. They would tease me. Noone else was doing any homework. ‘But I was very conscientious, I concentrated. ‘Other guys bunked off. I never did that in my life because I was hungry to play football. It was really all that mattered to me. ‘And if Atalanta found out I was missing school, then they would have sent me home — and I would not have been able to play football for a living. ‘So I stuck at it. And you know what? I made it to the first team. The guys who teased me didn’t.’
The Atalanta system, which also reared Italian internationals Filippo Inzaghi, Roberto Donadoni and Riccardo Montolivo, taught Donati a great deal.
But there were no lessons in how to cope with a £10million move to AC Milan at the age of 20 in 2001. No textbooks telling him how to handle the expectation or his superstar team-mates.
‘Physically, I was fine,’ he recalls. ‘But it’s a huge club and I was so young to go somewhere like that. It was a lot to take in.
‘Playing in front of 80,000 fans and making a mistake at that age was not easy. I couldn’t really cope with it.
‘Milan sent me on loan to a lot of clubs after that first year.
‘Sampdoria, Parma, Messina, Atalanta again.
‘And at the end of every season, I said to myself: “Alright, I am ready now…”.
‘But they wouldn’t give me another opportunity.
‘Look at the midfield. They had (Andrea) Pirlo, (Clarence) Seedorf, (Massimo) Ambrosini, (Rino) Gattuso, Rui Costa — there were so many world-class players at Milan then.
‘I think football is 70 or 80-percent mental. You look at a guy like Gattuso. He is not an incredible football player — he is normal.
People were promising money to players for the right results
‘But he is a hard player and, mentally, he is fantastic. That is why he played so long at AC Milan.
‘At that club, a strong mind is everything.’
When the loans ran out, Donati quit Milan for Celtic in 2007. The price tag was a modest £3m, but the billboards prompted Parkhead supporters to expect a guy who cost Milan more than three times that sum.
In Glasgow, Donati’s career fell into a now familiar pattern. The first season was good, the second less so.
‘If I could turn the clock back, I would stay longer at Celtic,’ he admits now while reflecting on his move to Bari in 2009. ‘It was a mistake to leave when I did.
‘The winning goal in the last minute against Shakhtar Donetsk in the Champions League was a great moment.
‘And the night we won against AC Milan was also special. I had 20 friends from Italy in Glasgow and we went back to Mimmo’s restaurant and had a great night.
‘Listen, the second season at Celtic with the coach Gordon Strachan wasn’t very good.
‘I left when Tony Mowbray came in as manager (in 2009), although he wanted me to stay.
‘If I could go back in time, I might have made a different decision.
‘But my wife was homesick and I had not played so much in the second season.’
Donati left Celtic, but Celtic never left him. A cult figure, he returns to Glasgow’s east end as a player for the first time in seven years on Tuesday in the colours of Hamilton
‘I’ve been back to watch games a few times,’ he adds.
‘You move to a club like Bari and you realise how big Celtic is. It’s always the same, you only realise what you have when it is gone.’
It’s this recognition which prompts him to keep playing football. To carry on in Hamilton’s midfield as long as his legs allow.
Donati turns 36 in March, but has another two years to run on his New Douglas Park contract.
He knows what the next chapter in his career will hold, but remains coy on saying what it might be.
‘That’s for the next interview,’ he declares.
He coaches Hamilton’s Under-14, Under-15 and Under-16 kids and won’t rule out a long-term stay in Lanarkshire, where his children are slowly coming to terms with a harsh west of Scotland vernacular.
‘My family like it here. And I’m definitely not here for the money.
‘Hamilton are a good club run by good people with good coaches and I must thank them for bringing me here.
‘Life back in Scotland is good. It’s like my motto: From every experience you learn something…’