With a slight bitterness that soon becomes social denunciation and a desire to unmask the intrigues that stifle Italy’s most beloved sport, the Sellerio detectives set out to prove themselves, each with character, method and their lives behind them, as readers who have followed them in the major novels know them.

In soccer, it is the minor divisions that preserve the most interesting human stories. So the criminal flashes and quick detective plots published here, starring some of the most compelling investigators of the new Italian giallo (this is the tenth anthology Sellerio has dedicated to themed crimes), all take place in that world. To discover that perhaps there is nothing left of sports there, except the memory of playing on the playground as children. With this, slight, bitterness that soon becomes social denunciation and a desire to unmask the intrigues that stifle the most beloved sport, the different detectives test themselves, each with character, method and their lives behind them, as readers who have followed them in the major novels know them. Inspector Petra Delicado of the Barcelona police, the protagonist of the famous series invented by Spain’s Alicia Giménez-Bartlett; electrician Enzo Baiamonte, whom Palermo’s Gian Mauro Costa takes to investigate in the diners and stores of his working-class neighborhood; the pensioner Consonni and the others of the Casa di Ringhiera whom this time author Francesco Recami confronts with a kind of violent thriller; the unemployed journalist Saverio Lamanna whom his creator Gaetano Savatteri often and willingly snatches, in order to follow his mysteries, from the obligatory retreat on the Sicilian sea of Màkari; the Vecchietti del BarLume, by mystery-humorist Marco Malvaldi, who stick their gossipy investigative noses into women’s soccer; the gloomy, murky, charming, tender Rocco Schiavone, a Romanaccio deputy detective whom author Antonio Manzini chastised in that of Aosta at the head of a dangerous team; the bookseller Kati Hirschel, by Turkish writer Esmahan Aykol, a German rooted in Istanbul on adventurous rides amid the crowds of the suggestive metropolis of choice. They are the ones who behind the amusement of the match must unveil the cynical design to be unmasked, the unscrupulous business dealings, the absurdity of the crime, or a despicable collective obsession.