Sandro Mazzola, one of the outstanding forwards of Italian football’s golden post-war era, has died aged 83. He won two European Cups and four Serie A titles during 17 years with Internazionale of Milan, the only club of his playing career, and was a central figure in the Italy side that took the European Championship in 1968.
At international level he also played in the 1970 World Cup final, where Italy were beaten 4-1 by Pelé’s Brazil at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. He finished his career with 70 caps and 22 goals for the Azzurri.
Mazzola was six years old when his father, Valentino Mazzola, died aged 30 in the Superga air disaster. Valentino was the captain of an invincible Torino team and of Italy, and he was killed along with the rest of the side when their chartered plane, returning in bad weather from a friendly fixture in Lisbon in May 1949, crashed into the Superga hill overlooking Turin, killing everyone on board. The demise of Il Grande Torino, as the team were known, traumatized the nation.
Born in Turin, Mazzola’s early life was complicated by his father’s separation from his mother, Emilia (nee Rinaldi), three years before the fatal plane crash. After the tragedy he was kidnapped by Valentino’s new partner and kept in a barn before being found and returned to his mother and his younger brother, Ferruccio. The family moved to Milan, where a new life of comparative poverty was relieved when one of Valentino’s former teammates took the boys to Internazionale, where the owner, Angelo Moratti, made them club mascots. They sat near the dugout at every home game, wearing the club’s blue and black stripes, and were paid a match fee. Eventually the pair joined Internazionale’s academy.
Sandro was 18 when he made his first-team debut in 1961, a 9-1 defeat by Juventus after the Argentinian head coach, Helenio Herrera, had responded to perceived injustices by picking the club’s youth team en bloc. Mazzola scored Inter’s only goal, from the penalty spot, having taken school exams that morning. It was the first of 158 goals in 565 appearances.
His first European Cup arrived in 1964, when Internazionale defeated the five-times champions Real Madrid 3-1 in the final and Mazzola scored two of his side’s goals. In an interview he recalled that afterwards the veteran Argentinian forward Alfredo Di Stefano, the greatest of Madrid’s stars, gave him his shirt while telling him: “You are worthy of your father.” Inter followed that initial victory with a win against Benfica 12 months later, and reached the 1967 final, where they lost to Celtic. By then the team had become known as Il Grande Inter.
Mazzola was a key member of a side that also included the Spanish playmaker Luis Suárez, the Brazilian winger Jair, the sweeper Armando Picchi and the two long-serving full-backs, Giacinto Facchetti and Tarcisio Burgnich, who would become his colleagues in the national team. Using Herrera’s espousal of the catenaccio defensive formation as a platform for swift counterattacks, Internazionale dominated Serie A and the European Cup. Mazzola resisted approaches from Juventus’s president, Gianni Agnelli, the boss of Fiat, who offered to double his salary and give him a Fiat dealership.
A year after the 1964 final, during a visit by the Internazionale squad to the Capuchin friar Padre Pio at the monastery of San Giovanni Rotondo in south-east Italy, Mazzola stayed behind for a personal audience with the priest. He asked for an absolution, denied by his own parish priest, for the sin of having vowed during his youth that he was willing to die young, like his father, if he could also become a champion. It was promptly granted.
His name will forever be linked with that of his contemporary Gianni Rivera, who played a similar role with Inter’s local rivals, AC Milan. Italy’s manager, Ferruccio Valcareggi, believed the two playmakers could not be accommodated within the same national team. They had played together when Italy were eliminated in humiliating fashion by North Korea at the 1966 World Cup, when Valcareggi was Edmondo Fabbri’s assistant, and Rivera was absent with an injury two years later when the Azzurri, now with Valcareggi in control and inspired by Mazzola, beat Yugoslavia 2-0 to take the European title. Where Rivera was a stylishly creative presence on the pitch and a regular star on magazine covers, Mazzola, known as Il Baffo in acknowledgement of the moustache he always wore, was a more versatile, pragmatic and consistent operator who lived quietly with his young family.
To resolve the dilemma in time for the 1970 World Cup, Valcareggi came up with something called La staffetta – the relay. Mazzola would start the match, while Rivera would replace him at half-time. The much-discussed compromise saw Italy to the final but came unstuck against Brazil: Valcareggi delayed the switch and his team were already 3-1 down when, with only six minutes of the 90 remaining, Rivera was finally allowed to take Mazzola’s place, with no time to make an impact. Four years later Valcareggi put them both in the team for the World Cup in Germany, but appeared to prove his earlier reservations correct when the ageing Azzurri failed to make it beyond the group stage. Mazzola’s 70 caps and 22 goals compare with Rivera’s figures of 60 and 14, and it was generally assumed that the two could hardly be friends; but in an interview with the Gazzetta dello Sport a month before his death, Mazzola was emphatic in his description of “a healthy rivalry and immense respect” between them.
He retired as a player in 1977, having captained Internazionale for seven seasons, and became an executive at the club, responsible for signing stars such as the Brazilian striker Ronaldo and the Argentinian defender Javier Zanetti. From 2000 to 2003 he served as sporting director at Torino. He also worked as a broadcaster for RAI, the national TV network, commentating on Italy’s World Cup wins in 1982 and 2006.
He is survived by his wife, Graziella (nee Galante), and their children, Ilaria, Valentina, Sandro and Paolo.