How Italian rich kid Gianluca Vialli brought the fizz to English football and gave the Prem some much-needed glamour
AS Gianluca Vialli prepared to lead out Chelsea for his first game as player manager, he ordered the Champagne to be uncorked.
The Blues were 2-1 down against Arsenal from the first leg of their 1998 League Cup semi-final.
Yet the Italian, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 58, said that as his team were “starting on a new adventure” it was cause for celebration.
“You should mark the occasion with a toast and some champagne,” he said afterwards.
“We wished each other all the best and said we must enjoy ourselves. Sometimes in modern football, it is hard to enjoy yourself.”
Vialli picked himself to play upfront and Chelsea duly turned the tie around with a 3-1 victory.
Cultured and flamboyant, he was a man who knew how to win — and also how to enjoy life.
The club went on to claim the trophy at Wembley and also lifted the Uefa Cup Winners’ Cup that season.
Stylish and charismatic, Vialli was among the vanguard of foreign talent who brought a cosmopolitan new glamour to our Premier League.
Arriving at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge in the summer of 1996, the club — then owned by eccentric Ken Bates — was emerging from the doldrums.
‘A gorgeous soul’
The team hadn’t won a title since 1955 and had been in the old Second Division just seven years before Vialli’s arrival.
Like London rivals Tottenham and Arsenal — who had signed Jürgen Klinsmann and Dennis Bergkamp respectively — Chelsea recruited abroad.
Bates had brought in Dutch superstar Ruud Gullit as player manager in 1995 and Vialli’s arrival a year later helped transform the club into one of the biggest names in world football.
At 32, Vialli was one of the best forwards in Europe and had just won the Champions League with Italy’s Juventus.
Joined at Stamford Bridge by countrymen Roberto Di Matteo and Gianfranco Zola, Vialli was Chelsea’s top scorer that season as the club lifted the FA Cup.
It was Chelsea’s first trophy in a quarter of a century.
Vialli’s was far from the usual rags-to-riches footballing story.
The youngest of five children, his self-made millionaire dad owned a construction firm and young Luca was brought up in a castle in Cremona, Lombardy.
At 16 he made his debut for local team Cremonese, then in the third tier.
The boy from a wealthy background made sure he always worked hard because: “I never wanted anyone to question my attitude on the football pitch.”
In 1984 he moved to Italian side Sampdoria, where he played alongside ex-Liverpool great Graeme Souness.
On one occasion Souness got one up on renowned practical joker Vialli — dressed in club blazer and tie — by pushing him into a lake.
Vialli later responded by cutting the legs off Souness’s favourite trousers, putting shaving foam in his shoes and itching powder in his pants.
Vialli spoke good English but mangled phrases. In a press conference he said “when the fish are down”, not “the chips”. English football was hard to get used to, too. A Leeds game was “like playing rugby”
The Italian would later joke: “I never saw him move so quickly.”
Souness today broke down in tears as he described his friend as a “special person” and a “gorgeous soul” in a TV tribute.
Vialli left Sampdoria for Juventus in 1992 for £12.5million — then a world record.
He would win the Uefa Cup and European Cup for the Turin club before London came calling.
Suave Vialli loved the capital, living in splendour in a luxury flat in exclusive Eaton Square, Belgravia.
There were trips to the theatre and meals at Knightsbridge’s San Lorenzo, his favourite Italian restaurant.
The Italian superstar said: “Here I can walk down the street with my girlfriend, I can go shopping, sit in a pub or go out to dinner and nobody asks me for an autograph.
“That’s a dream. After 15 years of worrying, I’m finally a free man.”
On match days Vialli would speed away from Stamford Bridge on a Piaggio scooter to avoid the traffic.
The striker, who scored 16 goals in 59 games for the Italian national side, soon became proficient in English but sometimes mangled turns of phrase.
Once, during a press conference he remarked “when the fish are down”, rather than chips.
English football also took a bit of getting used to.
He described a game against Leeds as “like playing rugby”.
While swerving the then heavy drinking culture in the English game, he did like a cigarette — even while sitting on the substitute’s bench.
Despite a successful first season with Chelsea, a lack of minutes on the pitch — including a short run out as the clock ticked down in the 1997 FA Cup final — soured his relationship with Gullit.
Then, with Chelsea second in the table in 1998, the club sensationally sacked Gullit and replaced him as manager with Vialli.
Just 33 and still a player, he was the first Italian to manage in the Premier League and guided the Blues to victory over Real Madrid to win the Uefa Super Cup.
Chelsea came third in the Premier League that year — their highest finish since 1970.
In 2000 Vialli led Chelsea to FA Cup glory and a quarter-final in the Champions League.
The practical joker sometimes found the transition to stern boss difficult, saying of his players: “They wanted me to be Luca, having a laugh all the time.”
After falling out with senior players, Chelsea sacked him in September 2000.
‘Sense of shame’
He stayed in Britain to take his coaching badges and improve his golf.
Then, in 2001, Watford offered him a route back into management.
A year later he was dating interior designer Cathryn White-Cooper.
The couple married in 2003 and they had two daughters, Olivia and Sofia.
“I never wanted to move back to Italy,” Viall said in 2002.
“My girlfriend is English, I love London.”
Watford sacked Vialli after a season but he remained in London and worked as a commentator for Sky Sports Italia.
Then the football world was left reeling in November 2018 after he revealed he had suffered pancreatic cancer for almost a year.
He initially tried to hide weight loss by wearing a sweater under his shirt as he underwent eight months of chemotherapy and six weeks of radiotherapy.
“I knew it was hard to have to tell others, to tell my family,” Vialli said.
“You would never want to hurt the people who love you, my parents, my brothers and my sister, my wife Cathryn, our little girls.
“It gives you a sense of shame, as if it is your fault.
“I would wear a sweater under my shirt so others did not notice anything, that I would still be the Vialli they knew.”
The tumour returned in March 2019, requiring nine months of chemotherapy, when he lost the hair from his beard and eyebrows.
At first he tried to draw them back on himself, adding: “Then my daughters helped, and I got my wife advising which make-up looks better.
“We laughed. You have to laugh. You need to find the funny side if you can.
“I hear people say ‘fight with cancer’. It’s not a battle for me.
“It’s more like a journey. I see it as a journey with an unwanted travel companion.”
In 2020 he revealed he had been given the all clear from the disease after 17 months of chemotherapy.
He admitted: “It was difficult, even for someone as tough as me, both physically and mentally.”
In 2019 he was appointed as new delegation chief of Italy’s national football team under head coach and great friend and teammate from his Sampdoria days Roberto Mancini.
“Being on the bus, the music pumping, hugging the players before the match, the national anthem, the joy afterwards — I was missing football and I didn’t realise how much,” he said.
He had to step away from the role on December 14 last year due to the aggressive return of cancer.
In his final public statement he said he hoped his absence from the national team was “temporary”.
His death in a London hospital, with his family at his side, was announced today.
Before his passing, he and great friend Mancini had enjoyed a final sweet triumph with Italy’s Euro 2020 win over England.
Before the final at Wembley, Vialli read Theodore Roosevelt’s rousing “Man in the Arena” passage to the Azzurri players.
The speech includes the lines that “credit belongs to the man” who “at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
“So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
It stands as something of an epitaph for a man loved both in his birth nation and his adopted homeland.