“I have less time to be an example now that I know I won’t die of old age. » These words, Gianluca Vialli had slipped them with modesty to the presenter Alessandro Cattelan in the program “Una semplice domanda” (“a simple question”), broadcast since spring 2022 on the Netflix platform. The former Italian international, football legend in his country, died on the night of Thursday January 5 to Friday January 6, in London, from pancreatic cancer. He was 58 years old.
This “undesirable travel companion”as he called his illness on the RAI, accompanied him for five years. On December 14, 2022, he had forced him to withdraw from the Italian national team, of which the one nicknamed “Re Leone” (the “lion king”) had been the head of the delegation since 2019.
One of the last striking images of Gianluca Vialli on the ground will remain this embrace with Roberto Mancini, the coach of the Squadra Azzurra and longtime friend, on July 11, 2021, at Wembley Stadium, in the British capital. Italy has just beaten England on penalties in the Euro final. The native of Cremona (Lombardy) is in tears. Thirty years earlier, in this same enclosure, the duo had let slip the coronation in the European Cup of champion clubs, the ancestor of the Champions League. A nice nod to history.
59 selections in the national team
As a player, Gianluca Vialli wore the national jersey 59 times and scored 16 goals, but he never experienced the intoxication of a title with the Azzurri. No more than Roberto Mancini, with whom he had the good times of Sampdoria in Genoa in the 1980s. “I gemelli del gol” (“the twins of the goal”) nevertheless set the spans of the Luigi-Ferraris stadium on fire, leading their club to victory in the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1990, to the title of Italian champion in 1991, and to the final of the European Cup of champion clubs, therefore, in 1992.
That year, after 321 games and 141 goals with the Blucerchiati, he headed north. Direction Juventus of Turin. An operation of around 40 billion lire, a record at the time. With the “Old Lady”, Gianluca Vialli expands his record of a UEFA Cup (1993) and a Champions League (1996).
But doping charges will tarnish the luster of Juve. In 1998, Zdenek Zeman, then coach of AS Roma, denounced the abuse of drugs in the world of football and was publicly surprised at the“muscle burst” of some of the team’s players, including Vialli. In November 2004, the head doctor of the Piedmontese training was sentenced to one year and ten months in prison and a ban on exercising his profession for “sports fraud, abusive and dangerous use for the health of drugs without any justification therapy and systematic and intensive administration of erythropoietin” (EPO). He will be released a year later because of a formal defect: neither the use of drugs nor the administration of EPO were considered offenses at the time of the facts (1994-1998). Gianluca Vialli, he will recognize, in 2018, in an interview with the Corriere della Serataking creatine for a few months. ” Like everyone. Legally. »
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