The director who has been out since June: «I’m like a completely sketched out Two Horses. What adventures with footballers who drank too much like Maicon and Nainggolan. I have affection for Marotta but I don’t admire him: I’m not like him”
Walter Sabatini, the strongest memory of your childhood?
«The feeling of abandonment in the summer camp in Marotta, in the Marche region».
What kind of childhood did you have?
«Happy, but I still carry with me the sense of guilt for having refused the snack that my grandfather offered me in front of my friends».
Do feelings of guilt torment you?
«The image that encompasses everything is that of Aureliano Buendia in One Hundred Years of Solitude, my favorite book: the condemned man and the men of the firing squad have my face».
Does your son Santiago have a South American name due to his passion for that continent?
“Yes. I always tell him that to be a free man he must know things. He studies political science, he wants to be a director too.”
A person who admires extra football?
«Fausto Bertinotti: I have always been attracted by his competence, his culture and elegance. I am also very attracted to Jews, but with great regret today I am forced to say that I no longer have respect for Israel: Netanyahu is behaving like the worst Nazis.”
Have you ever felt like a prisoner of the character?
«To some extent yes. After all, in such standardized football it’s easy to become characters. I think of my friend Sinisa Mihajlovic: the death of the youngest saddens me more and more and makes me feel ashamed.”
The same thing you felt when Curi died?
“Yes. He is so alive that I can’t get through a day without thinking about Renato. Losing the poem I had written that night added to the pain. I had to drink a bottle of whiskey to write it. He talked about the fact that the world had to stop out of respect, but instead it went on as if nothing had happened.”
For you, football is “Pirandellian”: is it a literary way to cover up its quackery?
«Yes, but it means that football is above all a lie, a cheat: it gives a lot to a few and nothing to everyone, for fifty lucky people there are five million desperate people. And there is nothing worse than being able to grow up under the illusion of being a footballer.”
How is the pleasure of discovering a champion?
«It’s an intellectual pleasure, I feel it like a bottle breaking inside. I watch a match with the hope of being dazzled by the beauty of a play, football is true art.”
How is the battle with his body going?
«I am chronically ill with lungs and bronchi and I have two stents in my heart. My days are lazy, I can’t keep up a high pace. When I go out I do it with a wheelchair, because one of my vertebrae moved and after the cementing I had my head up and I slipped from the bed, fracturing my femur. I’m all broken up, but the real problem remains my breathing: to talk without getting tired I have to use oxygen.”
Death stared her in the face.
«Yes, in 2018. But what torments me is the pharmacological coma of about twenty days: I have met anyone under the effects of drugs. It seemed so real that it still haunts me. I also met God in disguise, but it was a bit disappointing because he treated me very disdainfully.”
Do you believe in an afterlife?
«I want to believe it. I was reading a theological treatise in search of the soul: to understand if it exists, if it derives biologically from the parents or if there is a universal soul of which each of us takes a small share. I have to believe it.”
What do you miss most about your job?
«The fear of defeat, which is a bad traveling companion but is the meaning of those who do this job. The joy of a victory will never have the same weight as the pain of a defeat.”
Do you ever think you might never get back on track again?
“Never. I’m not someone who will retreat: I have to die and that won’t happen either, not for now. My brain wouldn’t allow me to withdraw. I still expect something from football: I have to take and give. Even though football devastated me.”
“Smoking sex” is very Bukowski, don’t you think?
«I said some stupid things, I don’t deny it. But they were celebratory cigarettes. Others are consolatory. Because every cigarette has a meaning.”
Do active players smoke a lot?
“Many people smoke, more than one might think.”
Do they live in a bubble?
«My friend Paolo Sollier was already saying in the Seventies that football was a world in which Zac was always and only Zaccarelli and never Zaccagnini. I often tell my players to go among the people, to feel the mood, to go to the market: De Rossi certainly did it.”
Have you experienced any absurd moments with your players?
“Many. I hired a person to pick up a pair of them at 3 in the morning around Rome: the next morning, in Trigoria, he had to intercept them, take them to a separate changing room, make them take a shower and drink a coffee. It always happened with Maicon and Nainggolan, perhaps the strongest midfielder I’ve had, but with a strong head. remarkable: he had the obligation to call me at one in the morning, but he made fun of me big time. But he never missed a training session or a match.”
Are sexual adventures more difficult for footballers today than they once were?
“Ninth. Women have a fatal attraction to their wealth and charm. And they don’t hold back. Anyone who doesn’t have a sense of proportion, screws up. There are wonderful women around and that’s one of the reasons why I hate getting older: there’s too much beauty, it’s a gift to everyone.”
You write that charm has also become a parameter for selecting footballers.
«Beauty breaks down all doors and it is not a question of homosexuality. If someone is good and also beautiful, you push him more easily, because he is more admired by people, by the press, by TV. Calafiori is a striking example of this.”
Is it difficult to be a footballer?
«They are a category at very high risk, because at twenty they can happen to have everything that a thirty-year-old dreams of: beauty, wealth, fame. Many have got lost or have done much less than they could have: they become embittered and sad. And you can improve everything in footballers, except their character.”
Is it an autobiographical reference?
“I was a dickhead: a great footballer who didn’t understand football or didn’t want to understand it.”
Did the coaches or players you didn’t like understand it or was she able to hide what she thought?
«No, because it would have been a bad, wrong thing: you don’t play with people and I’ve always used sincerity. When I went to Salerno for the famous salvation with the 7% chance of making it, I showed a coach the list of the 10 additions I would have made and he told me that they were all former players: I replied that he was right and in fact he couldn’t train them. And I told him to stay at home.”
Did you argue more with Lotito or with Zamparini?
«With Lotito it was always about money. Zamparini was wonderful but he broke my back, he lived his tormented football. That Palermo played sublimely but he complained about everything, so I asked him what he was missing to be happy: “I miss you and the coach getting your shit together” he replied.”
Con Zeman will you clarify yourselves one day?
«I know he’s been sick and I send him a hug. But there isn’t much to clarify. It was a disappointment to realize that I was right: his famous silences are due to the fact that he doesn’t have much to say. I asked him questions about the tanks in Prague in 1968 to understand the state of mind of a country: zero. But as a coach, some of the things I’ve seen him do are at a high level. The results with him were mixed but we saw the clear improvement of the youngsters he had the courage to let play, building the basis for notable gains such as Lamela and Marquinhos.”
For you, is loneliness a condemnation or even a form of selfishness?
«Also a form of selfishness. I am a very generous man, I help people even when I can’t. But I can’t share my feelings. The thing that embarrasses me most is receiving birthday wishes.”
Did you see more loneliness or selfishness in Totti?
«There couldn’t help but be selfishness in him, because life led him down that path and left it to us. And he didn’t have the intellectual strength to free himself from a certain condition. He has never been able to reason with the “we”, but always with the “I”. The truth is that they didn’t allow him to live: in Rome he was a prisoner, already at the age of 17 he couldn’t leave the house. All his life he was the Captain, the Untouchable. The hysteria I saw towards him is unthinkable and he paid for it with loneliness. Even today he is a lonely boy, so much so that he has not managed to do the things he tried to do.”
When you say that Totti must return to football, do you mean it with conviction?
«Yes, because I am sure he has sensitivity and judgment. I can’t recognize in him the culture needed to live in the pack, but I think he deserves to be a manager of Roma, with a technical, not an administrative, slant. And not what Ibrahimovic does at Milan, which is too generic. They must give him a role as manager of the sports sector: jobs are learned. But these Americans from Roma are scoundrels, people who have not understood the city and the sense of ownership that people have towards the team: you have to know a fan base like that of Roma, you can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, because Romanism is a feeling that is too powerful, it is an illness.”
But if you think about returning, do you think about Roma?
«No, I don’t think I deserve it anymore. I have always kept the team at a highly competitive level in a delicate historical moment. But today Roma needs a perfect car, a Ferrari. I am a completely sketched Two Horses.” According to Allegri, our football lacks great managers. What do you think? «I think there have been very great ones, from Allodi to Arrica up to Galliani: they have had few heirs».
Don’t you mention Marotta because that name reminds you of the seaside colony?
(laughs) «No, I feel affection for him, because when I played in Varese he was a kid who trained with us and was good. But I’m not an admirer of his: I’m not like him.”
Do you mean that he is in government and she is in struggle?
«Yes, I am a provocateur, quarrelsome. He always fixes everything. I resigned about twenty times from the job I love, Marotta would never have done it. But I am a victim of myself, with my left brain and my right body.”
He repeats this often, along with the spotted cat tail maneuver: by the way, what does it mean?
“That if we want to get out of a difficult situation, we have to invent something.”
