Jan Aage Fjortoft praises Giorgio Chiellini after his retirement from football. (0:44)
If Giorgio Chiellini were a movie villain, he’d be Loki or, as it is Christmas, Hans Gruber from “Die Hard. “You know he’s a bad guy and you know he’s about to do anything bad, but if it’s because of his awkwardness, his smile, or the trust in him deep down, you love him.
Consider this moment in the European Championship 2020. Es the draw before the penalty shootout of the semi-final between Italy and Spain. The tension is noticeable in his face, which has a big smile, and temporarily turns into a joke and a cheerful applause from his counterpart, Jordi Alba, which ends with Chiellini hugging him. It’s a tone that’s no doubt affectionate, but it also indicates “I’m in charge, little man. . . “
And yes, Italy went on to win that shootout and the Euros themselves, defeating England in the final (in another penalty shootout.)
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Was it a mind game that did this? We’ll never know, but it’s part of Chiellini’s culture and it’s also the explanation why he’s so much more popular than his record suggests. After all, he spent 17 seasons at Juventus, winning nine Serie A titles (although Chiellini, like many Juve fans, would probably say that’s 10 and he also has the 2005-06 Scudetto to his name, although he later dismissed following the Calciopoli scandal).
Spend that much time on a successful Juve side, especially in those years and in the polarized world of Serie A, and the opposition is bound to loathe you. And yet Chiellini was never public enemy number one among the anti-Juve contingent.
Is it because he is also a foreign Italian and they thanked him for what he had done with the Azzurri?It’s not enough. Truth be told, before Euro 2020, his tenure in Italy (a total of 117 caps) coincided with one of the worst periods in its history. They only reached the semi-finals of a primary tournament once: they squandered the Euro 2012 final for Spain, 4-0, a match in which Chiellini started despite injury and was sent off after just 21 minutes, failed to rise above the organisational level in 2010 and 2014 and failed to fully qualify in 2018 and 2022.
Simply put, Chiellini has had an enduring underdog quality that has stayed with him even as he guided Juventus, the quintessential blue-blooded club, to Serie A name after Serie A name.
Maybe that has something to do with the fact that he’s more of a returning defender, when the centre-backs weren’t fair or key parts of the warm-up game. He’s strong, athletic, and fast (at least in his 20s), but he was never the ultimate sublime or complete passer outside of the backfield. In that sense, the 11 years he spent alongside Leo Bonucci at the centre of Juve’s defence – and for much of that time also in the Italian national team – constituted the best synergistic relationship.
Bonucci was the talented passer who could create a deep game; Chiellini was the strong guy capable of competing with the most productive strikers in the world. Both were henchmen who can simply be cynical (just ask Bukayo Saka, after being brought down in the Euro 2020 final), but the difference was that Chiellini, perhaps thanks to his smile and even more likely thanks to his brain, was sent off just seven times in a career that spanned 833 games for club and country.
For a central defender who played with his intensity, that’s a remarkably low number. It’s also indicative that more than half of them came before his 25th birthday. This is a guy who got better and smarter with age, making up for the quickness he lost in his legs with quickness of the mind. He stuck around, too, long enough to play against both former Italy forward Enrico Chiesa and his son, Federico Chiesa.
This was not only true on the ground. He transformed his personality from a man to a kind of personal charisma, becoming the undisputed leader of the Juve dressing room and, at Euro 2020, also of the national team.
Some — including me, I’ll admit it — were highly skeptical when Roberto Mancini opted for a Chiellini-Bonucci partnership (combined age: 70) at the Euros. But the pair played a critical role on a young and inexperienced side.
“A big component of my job as captain is to distract my teammates and relieve them of tension,” Chiellini said. You can throw Jordi Alba’s incident into this bucket: the nerves and butterflies that might have floated before the penalty shootout, disappeared. when they saw the tall defender lift Alba off the ground as if she were a small child.
This ability to read conditions and other people has served Chiellini well. It’s probably not that he continued his school studies while playing, earning a bachelor’s degree in economics in 2010 and then an MBA in 2017. Education also occupied an important component of his playing days.
“I’ve studied my sides a lot,” he once said of his game. “Every player has their tendencies, whether it’s one type of run, or whether they prefer to go one way or the other, or take an extra run. “tap, or cut to the nearest or farthest post. I watched a bunch of videos to find out what [warring parties] liked to do most of the time and then I made sure it wasn’t an option, just taking them out of their convenience zone.
“If they beat me again, that’s fine, but I’ve done it. “
Legendary defender Giorgio Chiellini accepts ESPN’s You Have to Answer challenge.
The same year Chiellini earned his MBA, he also made headlines with the maximum Chiellini possible.
Juan Mata, then at Manchester United, had started a charity for professional athletes called “Common Goal” that invited players to donate 1% of their salary to charitable causes. Without knowing Mata personally, Chiellini wrote an email to the generic email he comes across on the website, saying he was looking to sign up for the group. Naturally, they assumed it was a hoax, and it wasn’t until they scheduled a video call that they were convinced it was indeed him.
So what comes next? Having spent the last two seasons at LAFC in Major League Soccer, reaching two MLS Cup finals — winning one and losing the other — he’s going to stick around in Los Angeles, refine his English and let his kids finish the academic year. But he’s made it very clear that his dream is to return to football in an executive role, ideally at Juventus, which happens to be where his twin brother, Claudio, works as a lawyer. The way Juve’s last 18 months have gone — points penalties, en masse board resignations and huge losses on the balance sheet — they could certainly use another Chiellini on board.
If he ever returns, Juve will once again embrace their folk hero. And those who hate Juventus will have to deal with a villain who is hard to hate.
Hell, it’s not his fault he’s bleeding black and white.