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Perugia President wants Ljungberg
By Ian Chadband, Evening Standard Last updated at 00:00am on 24.09.03Everybody in Italian football has a favourite Luciano Gaucci story - and even if they're not all true, Luciano Gaucci would probably be able to persuade you they were.
Like the one where Gaucci, the Perugia president, gets into a punch-up with a fellow Italian football chairman in the directors' box, decides to fine himself £30,000 for bringing the game into disrepute and then gives it all to charity.
Or the one which Nikola Filipovic, the former Perugia youth team manager, tells. "He asked me why his boy Riccardo wasn't in the side and I said 'I'm sorry, Mr Gaucci, your son still needs to mature'. He just said 'No, Filipovic, I'm sorry. It's you who needs to mature'. Then he sacked me." Gaucci denies nothing. He's such a skilled self-publicist that he wouldn't care if he's painted as barking, despotic or visionary as long as he's thought of as one of football's great showmen.
In this 65-year-old's perfect and perfectly barmy world, he would be leading Perugia into UEFA Cup battle at Dundee's Dens Park tonight ideally with one woman as manager and another leading the attack.
"If everyone in life did everything the same, then it would be a very dull world, wouldn't it?" smiled Gaucci, when Standard Sport caught up with him and found him still swearing that come the New Year, a woman in red will be playing for Perugia.
He admitted the choice was between Swedish striker Hanna Ljungberg and Norwegian midfielder Solveig Gulbrandsen and reckoned he was glued to the Women's World Cup to monitor their progress.
Denying that it was a gimmick, he insisted that if the move was halted "women all over the world will revolt".
This is classic Gaucci. He can offer high-faluting stuff about supporting women's rights while also raving about green-eyed lovelies. Likewise, when he recently signed Colonel Gaddafi's son, Al-Saadi, it was partly because, as his mate Silvio Berlusconi told him, it would do so much to repair damaged relations with Libya.
Hmm. Cynics will note Gaddafi, supposedly laid up with a bad back, has not had a game yet. "Ah, but just you watch. He will," insisted Gaucci. And what if his eccentric coach Serse Cosmi didn't think the Colonel's lad was up to it? "Well I'd counsel Cosmi to select him," said Gaucci. Having dispensed with 14 other managers in his 12 years at Perugia, this may be worth heeding.
His innovative scouting and dealing has enabled a little club to keep notching up top-10 finishes on a shoestring. He not only employs fans to pore over hundreds of match videos sent into the club each week and write detailed reports, but he also studies many of them himself.
This unlikely system saw former Arsenal starlet Jay Bothroyd become the latest in a line of real steals. "My best acquisition," raved Gaucci. "You should have seen him run rings round (Milan's) Paolo Maldini at the weekend."
Gaucci is not universally loved but his man-ofthepeople approach strikes a chord with those who see him as a feisty defender of smaller clubs' rights and applaud his TV punditry about, say, players being overpaid.
Most of all, though, it's his flights of fancy that Italians can't resist. He once promised but failed to sign an ageing Maradona; there's still time, though, for him to snap up Madonna.
