The Italian footballer Sandro Mazzola, who has died aged 83, was a supremely gifted forward who won two European Cups and four Serie A titles during 17 years with his only club, Internazionale of Milan. With Italy’s national side he won the European Championship in 1968 and played in the 4-1 defeat by Pelé’s Brazil in the final of the 1970 World Cup. He was six years old when his father, Valentino Mazzola, the captain of an invincible Torino team and of Italy, died aged 30, along with the rest of the team, 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 they were known, traumatized the nation. When Sandro emerged from that tragedy to win his first European Cup in 1964, defeating the five-times champions Real Madrid 3-1 in the final, he scored two of Internazionale’s goals. In a recent 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.” A year later, during a visit by the Internazionale squad to the famous 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. Born in Turin, Sandro found his early life 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 Angelo Moratti, the owner, 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 as he became a key member of a team 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 (door-bolt) defensive formation as a platform for swift counterattacks, Internazionale were soon dominating Serie A and the European Cup, in which they followed the initial victory over Real Madrid with a win against Benfica 12 months later and a losing appearance in the 1967 final against Celtic. By then the team had become known as Il Grande Inter, and Mazzola had resisted approaches from Juventus’s president, Gianni Agnelli, the boss of Fiat, who offered to double his salary and give him a Fiat dealership. Mazzola’s name will forever be linked with that of his contemporary Gianni Rivera, who played a similar role with Inter’s local rivals, AC Milan.
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