Gianluca Vialli died yesterday in a London hospital at the age of 58, after a tough battle with pancreatic cancer that had been going on since 2018. His duties as selection director. He wanted to focus on the fight he was fighting, but less than a month later he left, leaving behind a life dedicated to football, which made him one of Italy’s most loved footballers in the 1980s and 1990s.
Together with his friend Roberto Mancini, he formed one of the most fearsome attacking duos in calcio. It so happened that both men led Sampdoria to an unprecedented title of champions in the 1990/91 season, at a time when the Italian league was notable for having the biggest stars in the world. Vialli was crowned top scorer in Serie A with 19 goals, in a team coached by Vujadin Boskov, which also included Pagliuca, Vierchwood, Katanec, Mykhaylichenko, Lombardo and veteran Toninho Cerezo.
But Vialli’s story began much earlier. The son of a real estate and construction entrepreneur, he was born and raised in the Castello di Belgioioso, a 60-room castle from the 15th century in Cremona, Lombardy. And it was on the adjacent lawns that he started kicking the ball, until at the age of nine his primary school teacher took him to the club he coached, Pizzighettone. It was the click he needed to wake up to football. At the age of 14, he moved to Cremonese, where he started in Serie C until reaching Serie A in 1984.
It was then that he moved to Genoa to represent Sampdoria where he found Mancini, his football soul mate. It was a partnership that lasted eight seasons, where they only failed to win the Champions League due to a Ronald Koeman free kick that saw Barcelona clinch their first European title. The Gémeos do Golo – as they became known – split up after that Wembley final, in 1992, as Vialli was signed by Juventus for €16.5 million, a record at the time. For Vecchia Signora he finally managed to win the Champions League in 1996, together with the Portuguese Paulo Sousa.
At the age of 32, he decided to emigrate to England, to represent a Chelsea that was far from being one of the Premier League’s greats. There were three seasons in which as a player-manager he helped win an FA Cup, a League Cup and the 1998 Cup Winners’ Cup. A year later, he hung up his boots and became the team’s full-time coach. However, the coaching career that seemed promising ended in 2002 under the management of Watford, in the English second tier.
Then he was a commentator and professional golfer until in November 2019 he was invited by his friend Mancini, then Italian coach, to become director of the selection. He then agreed to return to represent the Azzurri side, in which he ended up not being very happy as a player, as he scored 16 goals in 59 matches, having only scored one goal in a major competition (Euro 1988 ), in the 1986 and 1990 World Cups, he was ultimately left blank. But as leader, he helped the Azzurri to the European title in 2021, at Wembley, in the stadium where he lost the first Champions League. Interestingly, it will be in London where his funeral will take place, in a private ceremony at Vialli’s will.
Source: DN
