Gianluca Rocchi is a member of Italian football’s Hall of Fame. His biography explains why. The Italian Football Federation (FIGC) describes him as “one of the most prominent referees in our game in recent years”.

The 52-year-old Florentine was the fourth official at the 2013 Champions League final. He took charge of the 2017 European Super Cup and oversaw the 2019 Europa League final. When he hung up his whistle and retired the following year only Concetto Lo Bello, the Pierluigi Collina before Pierluigi Collina, counted more top-flight games in Serie A than him.

The send-off Rocchi received at the Allianz Stadium in 2020 moved him. “I’d like to thank Juventus and Roma for giving me such a wonderful and unforgettable experience at a time I thought would be a sad one,” he told Sky Italia. The players applauded him, showing their esteem. It meant a lot to Rocchi because “after all, they are the first and most important judges” of the work a referee does.

On Thursday, Rocchi must submit himself for questioning by prosecutors in Milan. He is accused, in his role as the referee designator of CAN (the National Referees’ Committee for Serie A and B), of committing fraud in sport. The story, first broken by the Agenzia Italia newswire, sent shockwaves through Italian football.

“Is it the new Calciopoli?” asked Tuttosport’s front page. It is the question on everybody’s lips. Calciopoli upended Serie A exactly 20 years ago. It was a scandal about the way power and influence was exerted on, among other things, the selection of referees in Italy’s top flight.

“I am certain I will emerge from this unscathed and stronger than before,” Rocchi said in a statement explaining “the painful and difficult” decision to place himself under suspension with immediate effect from his role with CAN. Andrea Gervasoni, the VAR supervisor for CAN, followed suit. Gervasoni also figures in the investigation by the Milan prosecutors’ office. “We don’t even understand why he is being accused,” his lawyer said.

This is a story with many, many layers. It is about the general exasperation with the standard of refereeing and VAR protocol in Italy. It is about a refereeing body seemingly at war with itself. It is about the future too. What’s at stake is not only the credibility of Italian football, already fragile and scarred by past scandals and declining performance, but, more crucially, the direction the game chooses after calcio was hit by what Gazzetta dello Sport called “another shock” to the football system less than a month after Italy’s failure to qualify for a third consecutive World Cup.

How did it come to this? Why are prosecutors in Milan looking into the goings-on at Italy’s equivalent of PGMOL and Stockley Park? Well, it all began with a tap on a window.

In March last year, Udinese played Parma at the Bluenergy stadium. Watching from their booth at the International Broadcast Centre in Lissone, on the outskirts of Milan, the VAR, Daniele Paterna, and his assistant, Simone Sozza, spotted a possible handball in the area by Parma’s then centre-back, Botond Balogh.

As is routine, they checked to see if Fabio Maresca, the referee on the day, made the correct decision to wave play on. Paterna thought Balogh’s arm was close to the body. Another angle reinforced his opinion. It wasn’t a penalty.

Somebody then tapped on the window of the VAR booth. Paterna turned, looking apparently at whoever was trying to get his attention and appeared to mouth: “Is it a penalty?” Maresca was then informed to bring play to a halt and carry out an on-field review. A penalty was awarded, Florian Thauvin scored and Udinese won 1-0 against a Parma side fighting, at the time, for survival. Autonomy of decision-making is enshrined in the protocol of the VAR’s role. The knock on the window and apparent change of decision broke it. The knock, allegedly, came from Rocchi.

The incident already sparked minor controversy at the end of last season. Audio of the dialogue and the audible knock found its way into Il Fatto Quotidiano, an Italian daily paper published in Rome. Paterna has not spoken publicly about the matter.

Around the same time, Giuseppe Chine, the FIGC’s federal prosecutor, received a complaint. It was from Domenico Rocca, a 42-year-old match official, disillusioned with how CAN was being run. Rocca didn’t understand why some of his peers got plumb matches so soon after bad performances. He wanted an explanation for his own evaluations. What was the criteria CAN used to grade its referees? Jaded by his experience, Rocca listed his grievances which included what he claimed to see at Lissone on the day of Udinese-Parma when, in his telling, Rocchi allegedly overstepped the mark and knocked on the booth window.

The FIGC immediately opened a case. They interviewed the parties involved and came to their own conclusions. “No conduct warranting sporting disciplinary action has been found against any member of the Italian Refereeing Association (AIA),” Chine told Gazzetta.

Rarely given to public statements, Chine felt obliged to speak, as since the Milan prosecutor’s office placed Rocchi under investigation, the adequacy of the FIGC’s own probe has come under scrutiny. The FIGC’s investigation, Chine claimed, was more limited in scope, focusing only on what is alleged to have happened at Lissone during Udinese-Parma. The one overseen by the Milan prosecutor’s office is broader.

If parallels with Calciopoli are being drawn, it is because Rocchi is accused of colluding, on April 2, 2025, with several other individuals at San Siro to designate referees in such a way that was to Inter’s liking. It was the night of the first leg of the Coppa Italia semi-final against AC Milan. Prosecutors allege it was agreed that Daniele Doveri, an official supposedly disapproved of by the Inter hierarchy, would be given the second leg if it meant he wouldn’t then referee the final or Inter’s remaining games of the season. Inter, as it turned out, didn’t even make the final.

On the same night, it was allegedly decided Andrea Colombo, a referee apparently rated by Inter, would take charge of their upcoming league game with Bologna. Inter lost that game 1-0 and, some felt, Riccardo Orsolini’s late winner should have been a disallowed for a perceived foul throw. Regardless of the result, in cases of sporting fraud the mere attempt, if proven, to manipulate the designation of a referee constitutes an offence.

The league leaders are not under investigation, nor is anyone connected with the club and it is unclear with whom Rocchi is alleged to have colluded. “These are allegations that are difficult to understand,” his lawyer Antonio D’Avirro, said. “Because they suggest that several people were involved, yet these other people are not named. I have never seen a case where the other party to the alleged agreement in a sporting fraud case has not been named.”

Colombo taking charge of Inter against Bologna (Photo: Emmanuele Ciancaglini/Ciancaphoto Studio/Getty Images)

Inter’s president Beppe Marotta had hoped to be celebrating another league title on Sunday. Mathematically that became impossible when Napoli began the weekend with a 4-0 win against Cremonese. If the Scudetto could wait another week, questions about Inter’s appearance in the Milan prosecutor’s investigation into Rocchi and Gervasoni could not.

“We learned about this from reading about it in the press,” Marotta told DAZN. “We were surprised by them. We don’t have a list of referees we like and dislike. Absolutely not.”

He pointed to decisions that went against Inter last season, notably a penalty they were not awarded in a 1-0 defeat to Roma last April, that if given and converted would perhaps have been the difference between winning the league and losing it on the final day to Napoli.

Beppe Marotta said Inter “have acted with the utmost integrity” (Photo: Tiziano Ballabio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Rocchi later publicly called the decision not to award Yann Bisseck and Inter a penalty a mistake in an episode of Open VAR, the weekly show broadcast by DAZN, in which the designator or a match official talks through some, but not all, of the decisions from the weekend’s game.

“We know we have acted with the utmost integrity, and that is the most important thing, which should put everyone’s mind at ease,” Marotta continued on Sky Italia. “I’m not worried; we have no part (in this matter) and won’t have part in it in the future.”

So what happens now? The Italian Referees Association (AIA), the body to which the National Referees’ Committee (CAN) answers, is in disarray and has been for years. In 2022, its president Alfredo Trentalange, resigned after the AIA’s own federal prosecutor, Rosario D’Onofio, was arrested and sentenced to five years and eight months as part of an investigation into an alleged large-scale international drug-trafficking operation.

Trentalange’s successor Antonio Zappi has been banned from holding office for 13 months after allegedly pressuring the referee designator for Serie C, Maurizio Ciampi, and Serie D, Alessandro Pizzi, to resign in order to pave the way for Daniele Orsato and Stefano Braschi to replace them. On Tuesday, a decision will be taken by the Sports Appeals Board over whether or not to definitively uphold Zappi’s ban. “Ah, the coincidences,” Corriere dello Sport editor, Ivan Zazzaroni, wrote, alluding to how Italy’s refereeing bodies are allegedly riven by internal feuding and “Rocchi wasn’t in the good books of Zappi and the Zappatores”.

Practically, it means the AIA is without a president and Serie A and B is without a referee designator. In a post on X, Italy’s Minister for Sport and Youth, Andrea Abodi, observed: “The most serious aspect that emerges is the way in which the complaint itself was handled within the football system.”

It suggested dissatisfaction with the FIGC’s handling of Rocca’s complaint. Chine explained why the FIGC closed its own investigation into knock-knock gate, however, not everyone accepted it. “If the sporting justice system turns a blind eye, it means the antibodies are not working and the system is too sick to heal itself,” Tuttosport editor Guido Vaciago argued. “A commissioner isn’t necessarily the right remedy, but — if all the circumstances are confirmed — the FIGC’s handling of this situation appears to be inadequate.”

The commissioner of which he speaks would be an appointee in the event of intervention by the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI), Italy’s supreme governing body in sport.

Ever since Italy’s defeat on penalties to Bosnia and Herzegovina last month, this extreme measure has been tentatively floated. It already happened in 2018, when, in the aftermath of Italy’s first of three consecutive failures to qualify for the World Cup, the FIGC found itself deadlocked and unable to elect a new president.

Italy’s players reacting to missing out on the World Cup (Photo: Image Photo Agency/Getty Images)

The threshold for intervention by CONI is high. The regulations provide for this only in cases of serious mismanagement, breaches of sporting regulations, the inability of governing bodies to function, or the failure to launch national competitions. The decision to intervene or not would rest with the president of CONI, Luciano Buonfiglio. He has been unmoved so far, even though Abodi is reported to be in favour. What about now?

All of this matters in the power struggle currently taking place to shape the future of Italian football. Elections for the new FIGC president are scheduled to be held on June 22.

Prospective candidates Massimo Malago, who delivered the Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics, and Giancarlo Abete, the current chair of non-league football in Italy, have been canvassing for support before deciding whether they’re going to run. The pair of them met other stakeholders before seeking Abodi’s endorsement. He appeared put out by this.

“It didn’t annoy me. But it would have been a fitting gesture of respect,” Abodi told ANSA. If CONI does now find a pretext to go in and stage an intervention, those elections will not be necessary and Malago and Abete will have wasted their time.

In the meantime, Ezio Maria Simonelli, the president of Serie A, called for calm. He said: “Hasty judgements or conclusions of any kind are out of place, whilst we await the outcome of the investigation to establish the truth.”

The 68-year-old did not believe the case should “call into question the intellectual honesty and work of an entire system”. He vowed: “If it should transpire that someone has acted wrongly, it will be right that they face the consequences. But under no circumstances is it permissible to cast doubt on the credibility of the system and the integrity of the league.”

The case continues.