Three years ago the Gazzetta presented Gianluca with the prize in memory of Giacinto Facchetti. And he thrilled the audience
“Gianluca, but what still excites you in football?”. Answer: “The young people who get noticed, the healthy supporters, the victories and also the defeats”. Resenting it today, it’s a message to the world: let’s not lose touch with the essence of the game, let’s find the time to get excited by watching a match. Gianluca Vialli answered this on February 25, 2019, when the Gazzetta awarded him the “Il bello del calcio” award in memory of Giacinto Facchetti. Motivation for the choice: “Vialli courageously said that champions are not only supermen but also fragile and perhaps for this reason even closer to us who admire them”. Let’s put it this way, it’s not one of those prizes that one regrets awarding.
90% OF LIFE
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Vialli that day, with a joke, spoke openly of his future as head of delegation of Mancini’s Italy, at the time only hypothetical: “It would be fantastic to be able to still take care of Roberto and the national team”. What remains of that day, however, is not news, it’s the atmosphere. Vialli spoke on stage for about twenty minutes, taking the audience on a roller coaster. He came to cry and then to laugh, he was moved and had fun in the space of 20 seconds. Gianluca spoke of everything, even of illness and death, without losing lightness, that touch of sensitivity and education which remains one of his distinctive traits. “I imagine the committee – he laughed -, one of them will have said ‘Let’s give the prize to Vialli that maybe next year it will be too late'”. And again: “I wanted to say that I’m fine and everything is going well. Life is 10% what happens and 90% how we respond to what happens. I’m preparing better than when I was playing. You’ll have to put up with me for a while longer.”
MANIFEST
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The declaration of love to football that day is a poster to hang in the bars of the football schools, the ones where the boys go to eat a sandwich after training. “I fell in love with football when I was very young, a ball passed and I hit it. Football gave me everything, it allowed me to buy a light sand metallic Golf convertible with which I went to look cool for Cremona. Thanks to the football I lost my virginity, I don’t think it would have happened otherwise Thanks to him I went to London, won a lot of trophies, met my wife and had two wonderful daughters, with whom I understood what love is unconditional”. Thank you Gianluca, thank you.
January 7 – 10:00
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