The soccer life of Maurizio Zamparini

Maurizio Zamparini, one of the people who, for better or worse, has dominated Italian soccer for over twenty years, died tonight at the age of 80, after some complications related to a peritonitis operation. He leaves us one of the last romantic presidents of our championship, animated by an overwhelming passion that often has not been able to stop in time, destroying in one night the good things built in the day. In primis of the Pordenone Calcio, then left to attempt the climb to the Serie A with Venezia, caught in 1998 with Walter Novellino on the bench. Then the very long love story with Palermo, marked by extraordinary peaks as dramatic falls, ended in 2017 after the sale of the Rosanero club to Paul Baccaglini. 

They remained famous his exonerations, which happened at an uncontrolled pace, and that marked great each time great returns, in a merry-go-round on which each character seemed an actor of the commedia dell'arte. From Delio Rossi to Dario Ballardini, from Francesco Guidolin to Giuseppe Iachini, all orbiting for years like satellites around the volcanic president who had found his ideal dimension in Sicily. In total there will be 51 exoneri in less than fifteen seasons, a record that is unlikely to ever be approached. 

But Zamparini remains above all his pure, unfiltered and almost childish love for soccer. An obsession more than a passion, far removed from the idea of business that dominates in contemporary soccer, but that in its brightest peaks has managed to drag entire squares into a sort of collective hallucination. Like the two times that Palermo came close to qualifying for the Champions League, finishing fifth in the league in 2006, 2007 and 2010, just a handful of seasons after promotion to Serie A. Simply amazing results, created thanks to the energy and capital invested by Zamparini in the Rosanero club and his understanding with Walter Sabatini, who shared with his president the same taste for crystalline talent, refined and baroque like a Sicilian cathedral. 

It was the era of the South American strikers, of Amauri, Edinson Cavani and Javier Pastore, and which later became Abel Hernandez and Paulo Dybala. But also of Sabatini's great inventions like Josip Ilicic or El Mudo Vasquez, living symbols of a soccer made of pauses and sighs. The same that painted the most representative player of Zamparini's Venezia, Alvaro Recoba, who is still considered the equivalent of San Marco in the lagoon. Players who perhaps belonged to another era, made of sole touches and compressed rhythms, the same in which Maurizio Zamparini lived. Who treated the coaches as old lovers and the players as personal property. 

Just after having bought Palermo from Franco Sensi, he loaded 12 Venezia players on a minibus, at the time in a summer retreat in Pergine Valsugana, and took them to Longarone, where the Rosanero players were training. The least orthodox market operation in Italian soccer, one of the many initiatives between genius and madness that have defined the contours of one of the most controversial, but at the same time indispensable characters of a Serie A that will never return.