Azeglio Vicini did not have any particular words of wisdom for Salvatore Schillaci. He did not send him on to the field at the Stadio Olimpico, into the white heat of a home World Cup, weighed down by some complex tactical schema. Vicini was not that sort of coach. His instructions were simple: Entra, e fai gol. Go on, and score.
They would, as it turned out, be the last words anyone said to Salvatore Schillaci before he took the field late in Italy’s opening game at the 1990 World Cup. A few minutes later, the 25-year-old Schillaci had fulfilled Vicini’s request. His header had given Italy the lead against Austria. His celebration, eyes wide with shock and awe as the Stadio Olimpico melted around him, enraptured a nation; he would, from that moment on, only ever be Toto.
Soccer mourns its idols, these days, with unhappy regularity. On Tuesday, Aston Villa wore black armbands to commemorate Gary Shaw, one of the heroes of its glorious European Cup campaign in 1982. A few days earlier, Anfield stood to applaud Ron Yeats, captain of Bill Shankly’s first great Liverpool side. The funeral of Sven-Goran Eriksson, a former England manager, was held in Sweden this month.
This is, obviously, a function of time, of the unfortunate truth that even childhood heroes are not impervious to age. But it is a consequence of fame, too, a measure of soccer’s growth from weekend pastime to global sporting phenomenon. Gigi Riva and Franz Beckenbauer, who both died this year, formed part of the sport’s first generation of truly global icons, names that resonated beyond the bounds of the field.
Schillaci, who died this week from bowel cancer at 59, belongs in that category, too, though he would never have claimed to rank alongside the likes of Beckenbauer as a player. He was, by his own assessment, “useless” in the air. He once described himself as “mangy.”
For much of his career, Schillaci was a perfectly respectable but somewhat workaday striker: He had a couple of prolific seasons in Serie B, Italy’s second division, and a brief flourish in Serie A. For one month in the summer of 1990, though, he was something else: certainly the most beloved player in Italy, and undoubtedly one of the most famous players in the world.
The impact he had can be gauged by the grief that greeted the news of his death. Italy stood in mourning. In his hometown, Palermo, the city’s stadium was given over for fans to pay their respects. A swath of Italian soccer’s great and good lined up to offer eulogies.
Of all the obituaries, the most plangent may have come from Marco Gaetani in Ultimo Uomo, a tribute so poetic to Italy’s “burning and irresistible crush of a summer” that even Google Translate cannot undercut its poignancy.
It is not difficult to understand why Schillaci commanded such affection in his homeland. He had been such a late inclusion in Vicini’s squad for the 1990 World Cup that he does not feature in the official Panini sticker album for the tournament; he had won his place only after impressing in a tuneup game against Switzerland.
Even so, he did not expect to play much of a role. He had scored 15 goals in Serie A for Juventus the previous season, but Vicini had an embarrassment of riches in attack: Gianluca Vialli, Aldo Serena, Andrea Carnevale and, of course, the country’s great pony-tailed star, Roberto Baggio.
The summer, though, would belong to Schillaci. He scored against Austria, and then again in the final group game against Czechoslovakia. He helped Italy past Uruguay in the round of 16, and Ireland in the quarterfinals.
His celebrations became as imprinted on the national consciousness as the goals: those eyes, wide and delirious, as if he could not quite believe what he was seeing, what he was doing. It all felt, he would say during the tournament, “like a dream,” so feverish as to be infectious.
The competition’s official song, “Un’Estate Italiana,” had been written the previous year. “In your eyes, desire to win,” runs one line. “That dream you had as a child, the one that always seemed to get further away, is not a fairy tale,” goes another. Schillaci, the hero who seemed to have emerged from nowhere, fit them like a glove. “He embodied some verses so much that it made you think they had been written for him,” Gaetani wrote.
Italy was not alone, though, in falling for Schillaci. Italia ’90 was not, by most standards, a particularly attractive World Cup. The tournament’s opening game — Argentina’s defeat by Cameroon — was thrilling and surprising and uplifting, but it was also unapologetically brutal; Cameroon finished the game with nine players.
That established a tone that would last for the rest of the month. Frank Rijkaard spat at Rudi Völler. England hooligans tore up various scenic locations around Italy. The final, perhaps the ugliest in living memory, was a dour, intensely cynical game in which Argentina — completing the circle — had two players dismissed, West Germany scored a late penalty and everyone agreed the final whistle was a blessed relief.
And yet few tournaments are remembered as fondly, or proved so formative. Much of that was to do with the packaging: the music of the Three Tenors and New Order; the grandeur of the stadiums, the spectacular homes of what were then the greatest club teams in the world; the unhuman menace of the official mascot/logo, Ciao.
But those warm memories were related to the timing, too. There were several events that served both as signposts and nursemaids on soccer’s journey from the dark days of the 1980s to the bright, corporate vision of the sport that took root in the 1990s: the founding of the Premier League and the Champions League in 1992; the Hillsborough disaster; the start, in Europe, of satellite television.
Italia ’90, though, was one of them. It made soccer, for possibly the first time since the early 1970s, seem glamorous, and exotic, and sophisticated. In England, Paul Gascoigne’s tears — upon realizing that he would be suspended for a final the country did not, in fact, get to play — helped appeal to an audience that wanted human as much as sporting drama.
For those few weeks, Schillaci became the defining figure in this moment of great transformation: a player, or at least a phenomenon, who could not have existed either a few years before or after.
Italia ’90 was sufficiently global to turn him into a star overnight, but it was also a remnant of a previous age, one of the last tournaments played before wall-to-wall coverage and video games and then the internet rendered soccer fans immune to surprise, made everyone a household name, stripped the game of its last few wisps of mystery.
He went into Italia ’90 unknown to almost everyone outside Italy. He left it as the central character of that summer. He was not just, as Gaetani put it, “the epitome of a month of Italian history,” but something more: a name, just two syllables, that would come to a capture a moment for a whole generation. He would never just be Salvatore Schillaci. He would always be Toto.
Cosmetic Surgery
The motivations behind what we should probably call the “reimagining” of the Champions League group stage are not in question. The competition has been altered, purely and simply, to satisfy the insatiable greed of Europe’s major teams. The reason it looks, and feels, a little like a steppingstone toward some form of super league is because that is precisely what it is.
Still, it was just about possible to believe that change might come with some sort of silver lining. The old format had existed for 30 years; pretty much everyone agreed, more or less, that it felt stale.
More important, the new, somewhat convoluted “Swiss model” might have been designed to give the giants more meetings with the handful of teams they deem worthy of their precious time and attention, but it came with an unexpected side effect: for Europe’s middle class, the teams who had grown used to being the group stage’s cannon fodder, qualification for the knockout rounds suddenly seemed more attainable.
That sense — that perhaps this change might inadvertently benefit most the teams whose interests had been considered least — lasted roughly an hour into the tournament’s first match day, when Bayern Munich started running up the score against Dinamo Zagreb. What made the old Champions League a procession, it turns out, was not the format. It was the economic stratification of the game across Europe. And the new model, unfortunately, is going to make that worse.
Private Justice
Idea for a novel: the year is 2064. Britain, as a functioning country, has long since ceased to exist. Its economy was hollowed out by years of allowing major corporations not to pay the taxes they owed the state. Society has collapsed. Politicians are powerless. All that remains are 20 behemoth soccer teams, rich and fat on television revenues. It is a Premier League with a country attached.
Details of the plot are still in the workshopping stage, but after this week — the one that brought the start of a hearing to determine how we come to regard Manchester City’s achievements over the past decade — they will almost certainly include the idea that Premier League meetings will have replaced Parliament.
Updates from the first few days of the hearing have been scant, essentially limited to photographs of various lawyers arriving. This is because, frustrating though it may be, the hearing is happening in private. And that is because the Premier League is not a nation state, no matter how much it acts like one, and it is not running a public inquiry.
Instead, it is a club locked in a dispute with one of its members. As such, it has no obligation to wash its dirty linen in public. It is a measure of both the importance of the league to British civic life and of our absolute conviction as a society that everything must in some way become content that so many seem to find that unsatisfactory.
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