Well, let's judge the facts, first of all.
When Sergio Cragnotti has taken over, Lazio were a mid-table team with no ambition of even a place in the UEFA Cup. Then Cragnotti came in and the first championships were no different from the past years. The turning point was in the summer of 1992. In that summer, Cragnotti signed Lazio's first big buys: Beppe Signori, Paul Gascoigne and Aron Winter. Indeed Gazza was bought in 1991, the first player Cragnotti bought, but he got injured seriously and came to Lazio a year later.
Well, I think Cragnotti made a big mistake when he appointed Zdenek Zeman as Lazio coach. Zeman's style of football is great sometimes and those days Lazio got a few unforgettable wins. But it was also utterly too inconsistent to win the scudetto or any other trophy. In my opinion, this has been Cragnotti's biggest mistake. But he made up for it when he snapped up Sven Goran Eriksson. The Swedish coach was already on his way to Blackburn Rovers when Cragnotti proposed him to be Lazio new coach (1997). That's been the beginning of Lazio's winning era.
As for the transfers, I think that of all the players Cragnotti have bought, only few of them have been real failures. Surely Ivan De La Peña, maybe Igor Protti, perhaps Paul Okon, someone could say Gazza. But they are outnumbered by the good buys: Beppe, Winter, Roberto Di Matteo (he was no-one before joining Lazio, and then became an Italian international), Diego Fuser, Luca Marchegiani, and more recently Matias Almeyda, Pavel Nedved, Roberto Mancini, Giuseppe Pancaro, Vladimir Jugovic, Sinisha Mihajlovic, Cristian Vieri, Sergio Conceiçao, Marcelo Salas, Diego Simeone, Juan Sebastian Veròn. If you take a look at the transfer market of the other big teams, no-one (except Juventus, maybe) has such a positive proportion between good buys and failures, at least in the last six or seven years.
But it's also to be said that Cragnotti has always set an eye to the money. In his opinion football and money are on the same level of importance. We all know what's happened when he tried to sell Beppe Signori to Parma. He repeated that kind of move last summer when he sold Vieri to Inter. No riots this time, and admittingly the sale of Vieri to Inter was a wise move from Cragnotti. Loads of money poured in and part of them were used to buy Veròn and Simeone, who have been pretty decisive in this great season. Of course I'd like to see more Italian players in the Lazio squad, and hopefully the come-back of Roberto Baronio is just the beginning.
Also Lazio has been the first Italian club to be floating in the Stock Exchange (1998). This fact means that at the end of evry season Lazio must have at least a balance account, so that if you want to buy a player you have to sell another player currently in your squad. That's why Cragnotti is trying to swap players so that no money is involved, and also that's why he said that all the Lazio players can be sold if a very good offer comes. That's the negative side of being a public company. Your shareholders do expect you to make as much money as you can, no matter how you do it. It must be said that a good deal (most?) of Lazio shareholders have nothing (or little) to do with football, since the genuine fans couldn't afford to buy the shares when they were sold, because the minimum stock cost something like 3 thousands dollars.
It's very difficult to keep some balance between the two sides of Lazio, the football side and the financial one, but all in all I think that Cragnotti has done very well up to now. Again, don't forget what was Lazio before him. And what's now.
FORZA LAZIO
