In his time at the club Inter has managed to win just one UEFA Cup and a single, barely meaningful Italian Cup, while its neighbor Milan and rival Juventus have been adding to their lengthy list of honors.

Zanetti is, deservedly, known simply as 'Il Capitano' because there are few footballers who have been willing to take the responsibility for constant delusion of hopes in the way the Argentine has.

Whenever Inter has entered one of their periodic 'crises', it is always the skipper who comes to face the press and present the public face of the team - even when on occasions his coach has been too cowered to deal with the questions of a hostile press.

So if there were one player who Inter Milan fans should have spared from their abuse and protest following the club's Champions League exit at the hands of Spain's Villarreal then it was 'Il Capitano'.

Yet early on Sunday morning Zanetti, along with Italian team mate and namesake Cristiano Zanetti, faced kicks and punches from Inter fans as he headed towards the car park at Malpensa airport.

Passions are often high in Italian football and protests against teams - at stadiums, training grounds and airports - are not at all unusual and nor, sadly, is violence.

As Sergio Campana, head of the Italian player's union noted, the only thing unusual about this incident was that it involved top players.

"We're talking about it now because the victims are footballers at Inter, but the outbreaks of violence are frequent, above all in Serie C (Italy's third division) and, I'm sorry to say it, on the pitches in the center-south of Italy," Campana said.

"Attacks outside the stadiums, in the dressing rooms, buses stopped as they come back from away matches, cars vandalized, threatening telephone calls at home. And we shouldn't make the mistake of blaming it all on a minority of fans," he noted.

Stupid violence

"This was an episode of barbarity, intolerance and stupid violence fueled by the hysteria that surrounds football in Italy. We need a cultural revolution - we need to learn to lose gracefully. But I believe it will take a generation."

That may be optimistic - a cultural revolution in Italian football does indeed require tackling that hysteria but that also means challenging the whole status of the game in the country and putting football in it's place.

The exaggerated importance of football is created, in part at least, by a hyperbolic media: there are three daily sports papers with pages to fill and there are the loud and crude television shows where players and officials are put on 'trial'.

In Italy football exists almost as an alternative world to politics and the economy and a significant part of the population live in a 'calcio bubble' where the daily debates, created by the media and fought out over coffee in sports bars across the country, are almost exclusively about the game.

Added to that, the local patriotism that creates the enthusiasm of so many for the game, places many clubs in the position of being symbols of a city - refereeing decisions are taken as plots against the city, decisions of presidents, coaches and players viewed as betrayals.

It is not a view that is uncommon elsewhere in the world - in Africa and South America violence and threats against players and officials are far from unusual as Inter defender Pierre Wome can testify to after missing a penalty for Cameroon in a vital World Cup qualifier against Egypt in October.

In Europe such extreme reaction is more rare but even then one has to wonder about the kind of people who, faces contorted, scream abuse at referees and players.

Football is a game that arouses more passion than any other in the world and it wouldn't be the same if fans stopped caring deeply about the results.

The upcoming World Cup finals in Germany will lead millions of people to re-organize their lives throughout June in order to follow the fortunes of their national teams and in bars and homes across the globe there will be cheers and tears.

But it really is just a game - cheers and tears are part of the sport but kicks and punches come from people who have lost any sense of perspective about what sport is all about.