Andy Townsend sent me a message this morning, after the news had broken. “Lovely man,” he said. It was all that needed to be said, because the beauty of Gianluca Vialli was first and foremost about his qualities as a person.
A lovely man is how he should be remembered. He was a fantastic player, but everyone who had the privilege of knowing him will always talk about what a pleasure it was to share moments with him, as the brilliance of him as a person supersedes even his great football talent.
The late Ray Wilkins loved Vialli too. He always spoke in glowing terms of him as a person — not just as a footballer. That is the key thing to remember about him. He was humble, and that was a side of him that he shared with everyone. It’s why Chelsea fans love him. He was a gentleman who had time for everybody, fans included.
He was never on the front page. Whenever he was in the newspapers, it was always on the back pages — about his football.
He was a brilliant striker, but unlike other greats of the time, he did not have an element to his game that nobody else had. He was so good because he was so well-rounded.
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He was not as technically gifted as Gianfranco Zola, not as quick as Thierry Henry, nor as good in the air as Ruud Gullit. But he was a nine out of ten in every department of his game, and that’s what made him such a talented and impressive striker.
And tying that all together was an unbelievable desire to chase everything and run everywhere; he was a selfless team player. Games never passed him by and he was never on the fringes. He always seemed like he was making an impact.
In some ways, Vialli was the very beginning of Chelsea becoming a global club. When I was there, between 1992 and 1994, Ken Bates was trying to make the club the best in London. But Arsenal and Tottenham were so good at the time, it was hard to believe that. But he joined – as a European Cup winner from Juventus – at the start of those changes to the club which began to raise the club’s status.
I didn’t get the chance to play with him, sadly. I did get his shirt though, briefly. In the quarter-finals of Italia 90, we were playing Italy. Before the tournament, Vialli was a certainty to start, but he lost his place to Salvatore Schillaci, who turned out to be the surprise of the tournament.
After the game we traded shirts, and I remember thinking, ‘That’s the best shirt I’ve got,’ and I had Frank Rijkaard and Terry Butcher’s shirts from that tournament too. When I got back home, I found out that the bag with those shirts in had been stolen. I was gutted.
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But Vialli was more than a footballer, and his shirt only told a small part of his story. He meant so much to so many people. It’s why everyone speaks so highly of him.
I will never forget Luca’s first game as our player-manager at Chelsea. I’d sacked Ruud Gullit and put Luca in charge, and we were playing Arsenal, a team that won the Premier League in that 1998 season, in the second leg of a League Cup semi-final, 2-1 down.
Luca called all the players into the dressing room before the game and poured everyone a glass of champagne. “I want us to toast the success we have enjoyed to this point,” he told them. “But from here we look forward.” They went out and won the game 3-1.
The man had such class and it was the first of many great triumphs we enjoyed under Luca; an important period in the development of Chelsea prior to the takeover of Roman Abramovich.
We won the League Cup and the Cup Winners’ Cup that season, and followed that double with a 1-0 defeat of Real Madrid in the Uefa Super Cup here in Monaco. This was an era when you still won trophies, rather than simply bought them, and I still have the letter I received from the president of Uefa, welcoming Chelsea to Europe’s elite.
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Today my wife Suzannah and I are simply heartbroken. He was Chelsea’s Pelé, so central to the progress we made at that time, and such a lovely man. He was never servile or bumptious. He was just Luca, an absolute gentleman.
We enjoyed our meetings with him every Sunday morning. He would come to our penthouse at Stamford Bridge and we would drink champagne and eat smoked salmon sandwiches. We made a point of having this smoked salmon delivered from Ireland and Suzannah would present it to Luca every time as a bit of fun. They were great times.
He arrived at the club on a free transfer from Juventus in 1996, signed by Gullit. And I liked him immediately. He was a great striker but also a terrific person.
We quickly became friends, and when I eventually sacked Gullit after a meeting at the Chelsea Harbour Hotel I knew he was the right man for the job. He was just 33 but he commanded a level of respect in the dressing room that convinced me he could manage the side.
He became the youngest manager to win a major European competition, and followed that up with that amazing defeat of Madrid. He will always be part of the Chelsea family.
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Gianluca Vialli leaves behind so many memories and one of the most poignant and uplifting, as anyone who ever met him will concur, is that he was invariably smiling. He took his hugely successful professional roles seriously, whether as a fabulous forward or thoughtful manager, but there was always a smile with his work.
I remember him smiling as he’d walk in to talk to the press at Chelsea, smiling as he’d pause at my desk in the press-room at a match, knowing he would find some chewing gum. Once he walked past en route to the managers’ press conference room at Old Trafford and he didn’t break his conversation with the Chelsea press officer, simply reached down, took a stick of chewing gum, and walked on. It almost felt a privilege to be his occasional matchday chewing-gum supplier.
Fans loved him. When he played in the Cup Winners’ Cup final of 1998, Chelsea fans had a bedsheet painted with “Vialli for Pope”. I wrote in my match report that it should really be “player-Pope” and still get messages from Chelsea fans about how he would have done in such a prestigious role. Probably brilliantly. And with a smile. In a sport where the fun seems in increasingly short supply, Vialli’s smile, as well as his skills, spread so much joy and the sport seems a far darker, sadder place without him.
I never met Gianluca Vialli. I never came close to meeting him. I once knew someone who had a partner who used to be Vialli’s driver and even that was quite exciting. But Ginaluca Vialli was a friend of mine. And when I heard of his death, I felt it as you feel the death of a friend.
In 1997, with two minutes to go in the FA Cup Final I turned to the Chelsea fan in the seat next to me and said, “We are actually going to win the FA Cup. We really are. It’s actually going to happen.”
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I’d waited a quarter of a century for us to win a major cup like that. I’d been eight years old when we’d last done so. Now I was 35. And when, after the whistle went, the new Chelsea song was played — Blue Day — it was an emotional moment. “We’ve got hope and a team, and suddenly it’s not a dream”.
I associate Vialli strongly with that moment, for all that he only played a few minutes in the final itself. It was a turning point. The beginning of the modern era. Something that he did much to consolidate as manager for our League Cup and Cup Winners’ Cup victories.
Chelsea had been the glamour team in the early 1970s and, with Vialli, Ruud Gullitt and Gianfranco Zola now we were again. We were an international club now, the pride of London, but a London that is a world city. A London, and a club, determined to be home to the very best in the world.
But it isn’t the football — great as it was — or the cups — welcome as they were — that makes me claim Vialli as a friend. Nor even the glamour, love it though I did. It was the joy.
His face when he scored, his smile when we won, the champagne in the dressing room before we won, the champagne in the dressing room after we won. All great sportsmen have personality, but his was a special kind of charisma, one that meant you admired him, viewed him with awe even, but also meant you could imagine being with him, sharing a drink with him, joking with him. Especially joking with him.
All this means he was a giant of Chelsea football club and destined to be remembered for as long as the blue flag flies high. Farewell, my friend.
