Gaddafi’s dream

The Serie A career of Saadi Gaddafi.

Mar 13, 2023

On 1 September 1969, a charismatic young army officer pulled off a coup to seize control of Libya. The son of a camel herder, Muammar Gaddafi had formed a secret revolutionary group to oust the Western-backed King Idris, president since Libya declared independence in 1951. Now, at twenty-seven, Gaddafi claimed he had the trust of the people. The next decade he’d fall out with the West, pursue pan-Arab fellowship and bankroll foreign terrorist groups. What merited less of his time was football. In 1975 he published the Green Book, a tract on his vision for Libya and life, endorsing sport as an activity but not as a spectacle. “The thousands who crowd stadiums to view, applaud and laugh are foolish people who have failed to carry out the activity themselves,” he wrote. Only if it could score political points did Gaddafi bother with sports at all.

One such occasion was the Africa Cup of Nations, which Libya got to host in 1982. They had never done so, nor had the team ever qualified. As Gaddafi got ready to speak at the opening ceremony, many expected a few short words on the tournament. But Gaddafi launched a two-hour speech that was pure politics—Sudan, the French in Chad, American foreign policy—and having barely mentioned football at all, he is said to have signed off with the words, “All you stupid spectators, have your stupid game.”

None of this dissuaded others from enjoying the game. Backed by a fervent crowd, Libya stormed to the final, where they lost 7–6 on penalties to Ghana. That journey became part of a decade in which North Africa dominated football on the continent. In 1978 Tunisia had become the first African team to win a match at a World Cup; in 1982 Algeria won twice; and in 1986 Morocco made the quarters. Starting from 1980, North African teams—with better organisation and higher wages—would win the Champions League in nine of the next ten years.

1981 JS Kabylie (Algeria)
1982 Al-Ahly (Egypt)
1983 Asante Kotoko (Ghana)
1984 Zamalek (Egypt)
1985 Forces Armées Royales Rabat (Morocco)
1986 Zamalek (Egypt)
1987 Al-Ahly (Egypt)
1988 Entente Plasticiens Sétif (Algeria)
1989 Raja Casablanca (Morocco)
1990 JS Kabylie (Algeria)

Yet beyond 1982, Libya didn’t make the party. They never reached a World Cup and never won a major tournament. This was in part due to size—its population was only a few million—but Gaddafi also ruined whatever chances they had. In the qualifiers for the 1990 World Cup, Libya were a few games away from the golden ticket when they played Algeria in Tripoli. Gaddafi’s third son, Saadi, would later say his father had been angry that political opponents had found refuge in Algeria, who refused to send them back. Shortly before kickoff, Gaddafi ordered the Libyan team to forfeit the match. Algeria kicked off without opponents and Libya pulled out of the qualifiers.

The sporting conditions in Libya got even harder when Gaddafi was accused of backing the bombing of the Pan Am Flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. The disaster came after years of conflict between the US and Libya, especially in the Gulf of Sidra. The US, which said Gaddafi was sponsoring terrorist attacks against America, tried to kill him with an airstrike in 1986. When the Pan Am crashed, two hundred and seventy were killed, the majority US citizens. Gaddafi denied involvement, but the UN imposed sanctions on Libya in 1992, shoving Libya out in the cold.

This was the climate in which Saadi Gaddafi sought to revive football in Libya. What had given him such love for the sport is unclear, though according to David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round he was a big fan of Ronaldo and once got his autograph. In 2005, Saadi told The New York Times that he’d tried to change his father’s opinion on football. Whatever he said, it was enough, wrote the paper, to hand him the job as president of the Libyan football federation in 1996. Saadi aimed to build a semi-pro domestic league and hired a string of foreign coaches to the national team. The most famous was Carlos Bilardo, who rocked up in Tripoli in January 2000. He didn’t last long, nor did anyone else. There was a catch for any coach aiming to take Libya forward: They had to make room in the starting lineup for Saadi himself.

Saadi was in his late twenties at the time. From 2001 to 2003 records on Transfermarkt say he played eighteen times for Libya and scored two goals. On the domestic scene he was most famous for being the owner and captain of Al-Ittihad, one of the biggest clubs in the country. Teammates and journalists say he was nowhere near good enough for such a role. An attacking midfielder, he was technically decent but slow, and a club in the second division would have been more suitable. “He tried hard but he couldn’t play,” one former national team player is quoted by The Guardian. “But he was Gaddafi’s son. If he ran at you, you made sure not to tackle him.”

Yet Saadi could do as he pleased—and he did. He was the only player to have his name on the shirt. Commentators were ordered to refer to him by his name and everyone else by their numbers. Franco Scoglio, the Italian who coached Libya for a few months in 2002, claimed he was sacked after dropping Saadi. “As a footballer he’s useless,” Scoglio said, according to The Times. “With him in the squad we were losing. When he left, we won.”

Anyone who angered Saadi did so at their peril. The Gaddafi family had a tense relationship with the east of Libya, a part Gaddafi senior had been accused of neglecting. This included Benghazi, the second major city after Tripoli, and also its team, Al-Ahly Benghazi, which drew big crowds. Saadi was not a fan of the club. There was a dispute about which of the two big teams in Tripoli and Benghazi should be allowed to use the Al-Ahly name. Saadi did not intervene in that matter, but he pulled the strings in other areas, such as luring the stars from Benghazi to his team. Things came to a head in 2000, when Benghazi suffered a series of mysterious refereeing decisions. In a cup game at home, they were 1–0 up against Al-Ahly Tripoli when they got two penalties against them. Fed up, the players stormed off. They ran into Saadi’s armed forces, who ordered them to play on. Tripoli won 3–1.

In July that year, in the last game of the season, Benghazi needed a draw at home to Al-Akhdar to avoid the drop. They got another penalty against them. The call so enraged the fans that they stormed the pitch and halted the match. The protests spilled out onto the streets, where fans set fire to the local office of the football federation. Worse, they burnt photos of Gaddafi family members. Some even dressed a donkey in a football shirt with Saadi’s name—a grave insult in the Arab world. This was a rare show of protest against the ruling family, and it was surely not going to go unpunished; four years earlier, fans at a Tripoli derby had chanted against the older Gaddafi, triggering a police response that left eight people dead.

Saadi waited a few weeks for his revenge. On 1 September 2000, the same date as his dad’s revolution, an army battalion with bulldozers moved in to destroy Benghazi’s training ground and team offices. The club was relegated and suspended indefinitely. Thirty-two people were thrown in jail and three sentenced to death. Some of those sent to prison didn’t even know the charges. Luckily, the three men on death row were released after a few years. As a club Benghazi was only resurrected in the second tier in 2004, before moving back to the top division a year later. By that point Saadi was out of Libyan football. He was plotting a move to Serie A.

Given that Saadi had no means to survive in Calcio, the transfer can only be explained by the political context in which it occurred. In the early 2000s, Gaddafi senior sought to reconnect with the West. In 2003 alone he paid compensation to the families of the Lockerbie victims (although he didn’t accept blame for the bombing) and shut down Libya’s nuclear weapons program. The UN lifted its sanctions on Libya. As one of the world’s top producers of crude oil, Libya now had business to make, and one of the potential partners sat just across the Mediterranean.

Italy and Libya had a complicated past. The Italians took Libya from the Ottomans in 1911 and made it its first colony. When the Second World War broke out, about one hundred and ten thousand Italians were living in Libya, twelve percent of the population. The contingent dwindled until Gaddafi came to power in 1969 and kicked out the remaining twenty thousand the year after. This was such a big deal to Gaddafi that he declared the date a national holiday and called it ‘The Day of Revenge’. Yet in the early 2000s, as Libya opened up, the two countries forgot their differences. Italy wanted oil, Libya wanted to invest, and this opened doors for Saadi.

His influence appears to go beyond his own career. In 2002, the Libyan state bought a 5.31 stake in Juventus. That same year the Italian Super Cup between Juve and Parma was held in Tripoli. In 2005 Juve would also play in shirts sponsored by Tamoil, the Libyan state company. Some say Saadi wanted to play for Juve, and reports indicate that he did train with the team. But Marcello Lippi wouldn’t let him anywhere near the match squad, leaving Saadi to look for another team. He found it in Perugia.

Quite why Perugia signed Saadi remains disputed, but it took an unusual owner to get it done. Luciano Gaucci was well versed in controversy, as made clear by a story told by John Foot in his magnificent book Calcio: A History of Italian Football. In June 1993, Perugia had won promotion to Serie B. En route they had played a key game against Siracusa. Three days before the match, Gaucci had had dinner with Emanuele Senzacqua, a man interested in buying one of his race horses. Gaucci agreed to sell him a horse. As it happened, Senzacqua was also a referee. In fact, at the time of the dinner, he had been put in charge of Perugia vs Siracusa. The game ended 1–1, with Siracusa furious at the refereeing. Foot quotes one newspaper saying, “The biggest compliment that can be paid to the referee is that he was having a bad day.”

When the Italian football federation opened an inquiry, Gaucci claimed he had only talked with Senzacqua about horses. He was charged with trying to influence a referee. As the news came out that the promotion might get cancelled, more than a thousand fans blocked a highway, threw stones at the police, lit fireworks and destroyed roadsigns. A school gym was burnt to the ground. Foot writes that some fans even tried to hijack a basketball game shown live on TV to make their case. The protest lasted to the end of June, by which time parliamentarians had gotten involved. Perugia were sent back down to Serie C1, Gaucci was banned for three years, and the Senzacqua, banned for life, returned to his old job as a car mechanic.

But Gaucci struck back. By the end of the decade Perugia were in Serie A. Always outspoken, Gaucci hit out at teams and referees on TV. He bought and sold teams as if they were horses. He had a knack for PR stunts, such as when his Serie C1 club Viterbese hired Carolina Morace, the first woman in Italy to coach a pro men’s team. She resigned after two games, saying Gaucci interfered with the team selection. Gaucci signed unknown foreigners who made it big and were sold on for huge profit. One was Hidetoshi Nakata, who went to Roma, and Ahn Jung-hwan, the South Korean winger, signed on loan, although when he scored the goal that sent Italy out of the 2002 World Cup, Gaucci swore he’d cancel his contact. “I have no intention of paying a salary to one who was the ruin of Italian football,” he said. He withdrew the statement shortly after.

Why did Gaucci sign Saadi in the summer of 2003? There are some reports that Silvio Berlusconi told him to do it in order to build links with Libya. Berlusconi is supposed to have said, “If he plays badly … so be it.” There is no evidence to support this. In any case, Saadi was unveiled at the Torre Alfina, a medieval castle owned by Gaucci. He held up the No19 shirt with SAADI next to a beaming Gaucci. The coach, Serse Cosmi, vowed to treat him “just like any other footballer”. Saadi had signed a two-year deal. “The work in front of me isn’t easy,” he said according to the BBC. “But this is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”

The press asked him if he was good enough for Serie A.

“In Africa,” Saadi said, “We play some games that are maybe even tougher than the ones in Italy.”

If Gaucci wanted Saadi to draw attention, it worked. Hundreds turned up at the unveiling, and Al Jazeera camera crews showed up daily at the training ground. Saadi had shown he was serious about football. In 1999 he had hired the Canadian ex-sprinter Ben Johnson, who’d won gold at the hundred-metre sprint at the 1988 Olympics only to fail a doping test. Saadi had also paid Diego Maradona to be an advisor. Yet those who saw Saadi play knew that his level was some way off. Again his problem was the physical part. “He wasn’t the best,” Jay Bothroyd, who was signed by Perugia at the same time, told The Telegraph. “But he did it as a hobby. He’s a billionaire but it was something he wanted to do. He wanted to play football, to come in every day and train. And he did it, to be fair. He never expected any special treatment. But obviously there were his bodyguards around.”

The bodyguards were a permanent feature around Saadi. In this he was like his father, who lived in a fortified compound outside Tripoli and slept in a bulletproof tent when abroad. But where Muammar trusted his all-female Amazonian guard, Saadi had male bodyguards following him everywhere. When he was training, they’d patrol the perimeters. Their presence could intimidate players, as happened with the Australian goalkeeper Zeljko Kalac. Kalac told the story to the BBC:

“We were somewhere in the alps and we were doing pre-season, getting battered day in day out. Saadi was just sitting there. I must’ve been tired or grumpy and I said to him, ‘What are you doing here? Why are you getting treated like this?’ A couple hours later I got a knock on the door from his bodyguards saying, ‘Saadi wants to see you in his room.’ I thought that could be the end of my life—I could be dead here. I had a chat with him and he said it was the first time anyone had really spoken to him so honestly and openly. From there we just became really good mates.”

Some might have expected Saadi to raise hell in Umbria. In 2009, a US diplomatic cable described him as ‘notoriously ill-behaved’. But many of his teammates found him generous. He certainly had money to be generous with. There are stories where Saadi invites teammates onto his private plane for the weekend to go dancing in Milan or Sardinia. He got particularly close to Bothroyd, who said Saadi came to his wedding and paid for his honeymoon, which included five-star hotels in LA and Hawaii. Once, says Bothroyd, Saadi tok the team on his jet to Monte Carlo and rented them two hotel floors.

Saadi rarely took the cheap option. On another occasion, the striker Emanuele Berrettoni told The Bleacher Report, Saadi had a serous earache. He found the phone number of the best doctor in Italy, climbed into a helicopter the next morning, flew to Milan and got it sorted in half a day. That afternoon he was back in Perugia for training.

A similar story was told to the same site by the defender Salvatore Fresi, who said Saadi had been out in Rome when he got a bad stomach. Saadi needed to use the toilet, but he didn’t want to do it in a restaurant. So he went into a hotel, paid for a room, did his business and walked out.

Unfortunately for Saadi, his generosity won him no favours with Cosmi. For the first few months Gaucci encouraged his coach to play him, but Cosmi made excuses. Cosmi did put him on a bench for two games in October, but didn’t put him on. Then in November, Saadi tested positive for doping.

His urine sample had contained Nandrolone, an illegal substance. He was banned for three months. Gaucci argued that since Saadi knew he was not going to play anyway, it wouldn’t have made sense for him to cheat. “The player had back problems, and for months he has been going to Germany to be treated by a doctor there,” Gaucci said according to The Independent. “Basically the news is not a surprise. It’s not a secret that certain medicines contain substances that are forbidden for players. But he deserves a prize for all the work he has put in, and he wants to remain close to the team. He is not to blame at all, he is like an innocent in our society.”

The press was less impressed with Saadi. An article in la Repubblica said that, “Even at twice his current speed he would still be twice as slow as slow itself.”

In any case, Gaucci had other stuff to worry about. That season he was once more at war with the authorities. The previous seasons one of his clubs, Catania, had been relegated from Serie B, only for Gaucci to claim that Siena had used an ineligible player in a 1–1 draw that had contributed to the relegation. Gaucci wanted the points from this game. When the federation said no, Gaucci went to court. A series of trials ensued over summer, throwing the following season into uncertainty. The courts agreed with Gaucci, the federation reinstated Catania and Serie B was expanded to twenty-four teams for one season only.

But now Perugia were struggling, and Gaucci railed at a series of perceived injustices he meant were designed to punish him for Caso Catania. By mid-December, Perugia still hadn’t won in Serie A. When Lazio beat them 3–1 in an ill-tempered game, Gaucci lost it. “They are plotting against us!” he said. “The League want to relegate us, just because I sued them this summer.”

As the season drew to a close, Perugia were without a win in five and had to win their last three games to have a chance of survival. Two of the games were against Juventus and Roma.

Then the unthinkable happened. Not only did Perugia take the lead at home to Juve. With fifteen minutes to go Cosmi put on Gaddafi. The sub was a dream for Gaddafi, who got to play in Serie A against his beloved Juve. Even better, Perugia won 1–0. A week later they travelled to Rome and won 3–1. Finally they sank Ancona 1–0 at home. Somehow, Perugia were in the relegation playoff.

A flurry of conspiracies appeared after this run, according to Foot. Some pointed out that Gaddafi had strong ties with Roma, that Juventus had Gaddafi as a shareholder, and that Ancona was run by Gaucci’s former right-hand man. In any case, Perugia lost the playoff to Fiorentina and went down. This time there would be no court case or reinstatement.

In 2005 Perugia went bankrupt and were relegated to Serie B. The authorities issued an arrest warrant for Gaucci, with prosecutors alleging he had moved €40m from Perugia to his other businesses. He fled to a villa in the Dominican Republic, accusing Calcio of wrecking his clubs. He only returned to Italy four years later, having been offered a three-year suspended jail sentence.

Years later, The Bleacher Report spoke to one of his sons, Riccardo, who denied that anyone but his dad made the call to sign Saadi. “His principal motive was always this idea that any publicity is good publicity,” said Riccardo. “This story with Gaddafi brought publicity, and that could only be good publicity. It was in the papers every day; it was on TV every day. This, for my father, was the thing that made him happy.”

Saadi stayed with Perugia for a year in Serie B. According to Transfermarkt he did not play a single minute and made the bench twice. When his contract expired he stayed in Italy, hoping for another deal.

Cosmi might not have given Saadi many minutes at Perugia, but by summer 2005 he’d taken charge of Udinese, and his first signing was—for some reason—Saadi Gaddafi. Saadi checked in at hotel Là di Moret. What happened there would later be revealed—or claimed to be so—by Ivan Molinaro, the doorman, who published a book about the lives of the guests. Molinaro said Saadi had moved in with fifteen people: drivers, bodyguards, two secretaries—and his pet dog, the Doberman Dina. She was used by Saadi to detect explosives and always sniffed his Cadillac before he went in. Dina slept in her own hotel room, on her own bed. She had food ordered to her room. For his part Saadi drank Sassicaia wine and Cristal champagne. One morning, said Molinaro, he asked for three kilos of caviar.

Did Saadi get any better as a player at Udinese? The captain, Valerio Bertotto, sat next to him in the dressing room. “Saadi had a sense of how football works,” he told The Bleacher Report. “He knew how to look after the ball when he had it at his feet. And, you know, his left foot, it wasn’t really, really, really bad. If he had the ball on his own and he wanted to play a nice long pass, he could do that. But physically, he did not have the structure to play football. He did not have the strength. He did not have great endurance.”

Still, Saadi got to play for Udinese. The team finished eleventh that season and, in a dead-rubber match at home to Cagliari, he was given ten minutes. Udinese won 2–0, meaning Saadi had won both matches he’d played in Serie A. After the season he was once more a free agent, but not for long. Sampdoria gave him a six-month deal. The president of the club was Riccardo Garrone, the CEO of the oil company ERG.

This time Gaddafi did not play at all. But he did become noted for a six-week stay at another hotel for which he never paid. In July 2010, an Italian court would order him to fork out €392,000. Gaddafi had even left his Cadillac in front of the hotel. Nobody had the keys for it and in 2022, the car was still there. “We have to give it a clean every now and then,” the hotel director Aldo Werdin told MailOnline. “Having a dirty car outside the hotel wouldn’t be very good for guests.”

What memories did Werdin have of Saadi? “He was a bit of a character and quite a playboy,” he said. “He would have women visit him from London and Tripoli and the nights were always very loud and noisy when he was entertaining. There was loud music and he even set up a barbecue on the terrace where they would grill lamb at all hours of the day and night.”

The spell at Sampdoria was the end of Saadi’s stint in Italy. He was later voted the worst player to play in Serie A. He returned to Tripoli, but he was not done with the sport he loved.

For years Saadi had tried to invest oil money in football. In 2005 there were rumours that the Gaddafis would buy Manchester United, and in March that year the New York Times had reported that Saadi was hoping to buy the controlling shared in a ‘well-known British club’ for $300m. The investment banker Mehmet Dalman has said that the Gaddafis were ‘hours away’ from completing a deal. It would have been a bargain—ask the Glazers—but Saadi told the paper he was having difficulties. “It’s like the Anglican Church: they don’t want foreigners to take control,” he told the newspaper. “But it would help broaden Libya’s image.”

Gaddafi had also run for the CAF presidency. He had launched a bid for Libya to host the 2010 World Cup, aware that FIFA wanted to have it in Africa. Neither attempt had come off. “For me, the 2010 bid was a very bad experience,” Saadi told The New York Times in 2005, adding that he did not think he’d try again. “I’m still very upset.”

When the Libyan revolution broke out in early 2011, Saadi stepped in as commander of the special forces. In February he was sent to Benghazi on a mission to quell the revolt. He didn’t succeeded, but he was accused of ordering troops to open fire on unarmed civilians. As the rebels grew stronger, Saadi’s chief bodyguard, an Australian ex-soldier named Gary Peters, tried to sneak him out of Libya. The Mexican interior secretary would later reveal they had broken up a smuggling ring that had attempted to bring Saadi into Mexico under a false name. As it was, Peters got Saadi into Niger on humanitarian grounds. En route Peters and his crew were ambushed; according to him they responded by killing five people. Peters himself escaped with a gunshot wound.

In October that year, Muammar Gaddafi was captured and killed. One can only imagine what the revolution did to Saadi. He was also accused of killing the former Al-Ittihad coach Bashir Al-Riani, whose body had been found in 2005. Interpol issued a red notice asking member states to arrest Saadi. He stayed in Niger until 2014, when he was arrested and extradited back to Libya to face murder charges. Photos showed him in a blue prison garb having his head shaven. By that time Vice had interviewed Peters about what had happened during the civil war.

Did Gaddafi really open fire on those protesters?

“Saadi is anti-violence. He didn’t like us carrying guns.”

Did Peters and his crew really kill five people on the way to Niger?

“Yes. But everything was legal. We were in a war zone, we were permitted to carry weapons, and we just defended ourselves.”

Was Saadi really a playboy?

“Oh yeah.”

Peters added, “He is a fun guy to be around. Not just for the money. He is very humorous. He can show you a good time—a very good time.”

In 2018, Saadi was cleared of the Al-Riani murder charges. In September 2021 he was set free. Sources told Reuters that he jumped on a plane to Turkey. Not much has been reported about him since. But in parts of Italy he is fondly remembered. “It was unthinkable that Saadi could’ve committed the crimes he was accused of,” Riccardo Gaucci said when Gaddafi was freed, according to Football Italia. “He was always so respectful and humble. If Saadi wants, the doors are always open for him here in Umbria.”

A big thanks to Maher Mezahi for helping me understand the social and political background of this story. Follow him on Twitter here.

Profiles by Thore Haugstad

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