Gianni De Felice, the editorial in the Gazzetta for Italy champion in 1982

Today Gianni De Felice, former co -director of the Gazzetta, left us. This is the comment on the front page that wrote on the rosy of 12 July 1982, when Italy became world champion for the third time.

We are world champions! A moment of disbelief makes hesitant in reading or writing this magical sentence. We are world champions: we repeat stunned with joy to convince ourselves that it is made, that it is really true, that it is not a dream or a mockery, that no one can take away the cup and the title conquered by the Azzurri last night in Madrid on an unforgettable night. And then, gradually, disbelief gives way to pride. We are world champions and we have become it in the clearer and exciting ways.

We became it by beating – with a company that has no precedents in the history of the football world championship – the Argentina holding the title and Brazil that boasted the most quoted candidacy to succeed them, eliminating the two giants of South American football with an “coupled” sensational. We became it coming to play, after the ugly and uncertain games of the first phase, a practical and intelligent football: a kick that has not completely repudiated the old Italian defensive tradition, but has been able to modernize it by combining it with the imaginative flair of accounts, the incursions of the full -back Cabrini, the direction of the best antognoni who remembers, at the offensive speed necessary to storm and make his own Efferrable Guizzi. We became elevating it by raising Paolo Rossi – the most popular of the Azzurri, together with the now mythical Zoff – at the top of the standings of the Cannonieri and therefore of the absolute world values: with the three goals inflicted on Brazil Rossi, he obscured the most anticipated stars of the great Spanish review, from Maradona to Zico, from Eder to Boniek, and in the plane of sympathy he also vested the fame of the most powerful Rummenigge.

We became it without having to blush for any help from the organizers or referees: we had to play on the small field of Barcelona and there they left us, we had to go on stage with the afternoon time and in a torrid heat we fought the most harsh battles; And if it is true that we were forgiven a penalty in the worst of our games (the one against Peru), it is also true that we were unjustly canceled a goal against Brazil and that the Poles have been allowed to attack us with unusual violence. Finally, we became an opponent in the last challenge – the European champion Germany – which was among the “favorites” for the conquest of the title, when Italy was listed 40 to 1.

Here, so we have become world champions. And the merits of the prodigious team adopted and strenuously defended by Bearzot are enhanced by the circumstances that have been the backdrop to his triumph. We have in fact conquered the third world title – after those of ’34 and ’38 – in one of the most gray and most embarrassing moments of the entire history of our football. Since 1970, that is, from the era of another world final of the Azzurri, Italian football had obtained only two statements internationally: that of the 1973 Cup Cup, torn from Milan to Leeds in Thessaloniki, and that of the UEFA Cup 1977, conquered by Juve in Bilbao. In recent years, the results of our clubs had been so modest, to induce the European Football Federation to downgrade the Italian participation from four to two teams in the UEFA Cup. The scarcity of talented footballers – concentrated in a couple of formations of our championship – had simultaneously induced the Italian Federation to reopen, after a long “autarchy”, the borders to foreign players. As if that were not enough, our best product of the last generation, Paolo Rossi, had been blocked for two years by a disqualification.

There is no contradiction between the splendid blue enterprise of the Spanish world championship and the negative situation that did it as a background: we know what this world title is fruit. But we must know that it now engages to us to be worthy of it, to exploit the enthusiasm and momentum for the solution of many old problems and for an evolution of mentality that cannot remain limited to the blues. The prowess of Bearzot’s men must not remain a happy parenthesis, open among the controversies and closed with the triumph of last night. It must be a seed. A gold seed for the future of our football and our sport.