The General Football Thread

[Fulham Broadway 16,829]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/football/47148498

[Vesper 28,767]

8 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/av/football/47148498

Marseillais are some of the craziest motherfuckers in Europe, not just France, and not just about footie. It really is a unique and bonkers city. Highly recco all to visit, if you have never been.

great band from there

Massilia Sound System

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,829]

1 hour ago, Vesper said:

Marseillais are some of the craziest motherfuckers in Europe, not just France, and not just about footie. It really is a unique and bonkers city. Highly recco all to visit, if you have never been.

great band from there

Massilia Sound System

 

Yes. Went there in 2010, Mental parts of it, but brilliantly French

 

[Vesper 28,767]

37 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Yes. Went there in 2010, Mental parts of it, but brilliantly French

 

The Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan and sub Saharan African influence is massive too. 

[robsblubot 3,502]

stumbled upon this video of Ronaldo #9 from when he still had knees: 

 

Highlights from one game... hard to believe.

He was still pretty good at real, after losing his knees, but nothing like the above.

[OhhEnnEmm 3]

https://www.wheresthematch.com/

Lest we forget the violence of the 2018 World Cup 

Wonder if we'll be seeing any repeats during the Euros?

[Fulham Broadway 16,829]

That one is blocked ^

More concerned about Dirty Leeds 

 

[Laylabelle 9,351]

5 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

That one is blocked ^

More concerned about Dirty Leeds 

 

Right decision! Glad sense was seen

All a moment of madness. Know gotta play to whistle but they looked like they were going to put it out! Then suddenly goal! Then when gave villa chance to score and that bloke thought nope sod that.. Lucky they didn't miss lol that been awk as open goal and all. 

 

[RoyalBlues 4,050]

BREAKING: Former Arsenal and Sevilla forward Jose Antonio Reyes killed in car accident.

https://mobile.twitter.com/SkySportsNews/status/1134781752822706176

RIP

[Vesper 28,767]

4 hours ago, RoyalBlues said:

BREAKING: Former Arsenal and Sevilla forward Jose Antonio Reyes killed in car accident.

https://mobile.twitter.com/SkySportsNews/status/1134781752822706176

RIP

oh wow, so so sad! I remember when he came into the Invincibles Arse team on winter break. Was a really good player.

RIP

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/48483157

Former Arsenal midfielder Cesc Fabregas called Reyes his "first great friend in the world of professional football", and added: "My room-mate, who always wanted to sleep with the air conditioning even at -10 degrees.

"A humble guy who always had a smile on his face, great footballer and great person. I could not wake up today in a worse way.

"I will never forget when you and your family welcomed me at your home in my first Christmas in England when I was alone and was 16 years old. I will never forget our tennis football matches in the gym before and after workouts.

"Our connection in the field was also special.

"I always say that you have been one of the greatest talents in our football and I know that I am not wrong.

"Two days ago I was talking about you in an interview, it might be a sign, who knows, to remember you, my great friend.

"I will never forget you, we will never forget you. Always in our hearts. Rest in peace Jose Antonio Reyes. Love you very much. Cesc."

 

 

[Laylabelle 9,351]

So sad. 

I doubt what he said was received well and probably the wrong time.. But if the stories are true.. 120mph..

Ex-Valencia and Real Madrid goalkeeper Canizares tweeted: 'Driving at high speed shows a reprehensible attitude. In the accident there have been victims in addition to the driver.

'Reyes does not deserve a tribute like a hero.

'But that does not mean that I regret what happened and that I pray for their souls.' 

[NikkiCFC 7,942]

Guys we should chill out a little bit...

[Vesper 28,767]

“The ref said: ‘what the hell are you wearing?’” – the weirdest boots ever made

https://theathletic.com/1740304/2020/04/13/football-boots-serafino-4th-edge-toe-poke/

“What the fuck are those?”

January 2016. A casual afternoon game of five-a-side in central London grinds to a momentary halt when something catches an immediately sceptical eye.

I am wearing the collective brainchild of an octogenarian fashion designer, a macadamia nut millionaire, a former Chelsea academy player and Harry Redknapp. I am wearing quite possibly the most ridiculous football boots of all time. I am wearing the Serafino 4th Edge.

---

“Well, I am a very unlikely fellow…”

Mel Braham’s journey to the outer limits of the billion-pound football boot market had been a long one, from making his fortune with a nut plantation in Dunoon, New South Wales — “the macadamia capital of Australia” — to London, where he built a cosmetic surgery empire.

“I met John Serafino in Sydney,” Braham tells The Athletic. “We’ve been friends for 50 years now. John was a very well-known couturier and fashion designer in Sydney, so he was a very well-known character in Australia.”

Among Serafino’s alternative ideas was the first ever drip-dry suit, made entirely from polyester, which he himself demonstrated for local TV news cameras by jumping fully-clothed into Sydney’s Darling Harbour.

Braham had moved to London to open the Harley Medical Group but would make regular visits home over the next 30 years. “During one trip back to Australia (in 2013),” he recalls, “John told me about this boot project and invited me to a park in Sydney and said, ‘I’d like to show you this boot. I’ve got the captain of the Australian Socceroos and two Brazilian internationals.’

The players were demonstrating Serafino’s early prototype of what would become the 4th Edge, a regular-looking football boot but with one fundamental twist: a flat-fronted, snout-like extension at the front, made of rubber. Resembling an unholy alliance between a winklepicker and a police truncheon, its promise was three-fold: improved kicking accuracy, enhanced shooting power and greater protection.

“They kicked it back and forth to each other and thought the concept was fantastic but it was very uncomfortable. John asked me, ‘Would you please step in here and help? (The project) is too big for me.’

“He kept on nagging at me. So I said to him, in the end, ‘If I take this on, I want 51 per cent. I have to have control’ and he agreed to that.”

https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2020/04/11210908/Serafino-launch-les-murray-3.mp4?_=1

The Serafino boot had encountered the first of its many obstacles. The footballing stigma of toe-poking is not a universal one — what has been dismissed for decades in British school playgrounds as rudimentary inelegance has been historically embraced as goalscoring opportunism in Brazil — but it was clear that this boot had the challenge of bridging a sizeable cultural gap. “It goes like a rocket,” claimed Les Murray, Australia’s most well-known football commentator and once a member of FIFA’s Ethics Committee, who decided to invest in Serafino’s project.

“John is a designer and he actually conceived and then initially tried the toe-end to stick on the end of a traditional pair of boots,” reveals Brian Hardie, who in 2015, took up the role as project director for the Serafino’s UK operation, Boot Technologies. “It was a functional solution to a problem. As a product designer, he identified a problem and came up with a potential solution which, after multiple iterations, then led to something that was really interesting.

“The feeling was, the feedback was, if you were a young kid who’d never kicked a ball in your life, you’d normally kick a ball as you might kick a stone, the first time you kick anything, with the tip of your shoe.”

---

A browse of Google’s database of football boot patents, a superhighway of shattered dreams stretching back nearly a century, reveals a number of attempts to make use of the underexploited potential of the toe punt. As early as 1926, German inventor Eugen Stahl submitted a patent application for a “Football Boot or the like” which featured a rubber toe-cap sewn on top of the leather.

Fifty years later, Zdenko Riederer proposed a boot with a slightly concave toe portion, featuring “closely packed burrs or knobs which are directed slightly inwards”. In the UK, inventor Norman Buckley drew up plans for an entirely flat-topped boot in 1980, the point at which things were clearly starting to get out of hand.

“Patents were taken out at different stages,” Hardie confirms, “and the validity and protection ability of those patents was called into question — a boot is a boot is a boot — but actually, his toe-end was something that could be protected. They were pending by the time the boot came to launch.

A basic design patent was submitted in 2008, followed three years later by a more developed blueprint, which clarified its most revolutionary feature: “a concave portion (with) a radius of around 11cm, which substantially corresponds to that of a standard football/soccer ball.”

With Braham on board, the project began to gather pace. “John selected a manufacturer in China, who made seven or eight prototypes with a view to making the boot more comfortable,” Braham says. “They gave up on us and said they couldn’t keep making more prototypes, so I had to go to China and find a reliable manufacturer — but I couldn’t get any of them to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

“Eventually, we started to produce more, and it took us more than 30 prototypes to find the perfect boot. I ended up sending someone who worked for me at Harley Medical Group, who was an ex-footballer himself and had played for the Chelsea academy when he was a young fellow.”

That man was Daniel Johns, who took on the role of “sports advisor” with Boot Technologies and whose nascent football career had been ended by a serious ankle injury while playing for Millwall’s youth team.

“I noticed this boot and said to Mel, ‘What’s this?’ I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” Johns tells The Athletic. “I went out to China and I thought, ‘While I’m here, why don’t I come up with something that’s going to save a lot of people’s metatarsals?” Braham had observed that “boots today have become lighter and lighter” and, with Johns’ guidance, incorporated triple padding into the top of the boot to offer protection against an injury that had somehow become almost fashionable during the 2000s, afflicting David Beckham, Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney all in the months leading up to major international tournaments.

By the mid-2010s, Johns was playing non-League football and began to wear one of the prototype designs in matches but the boot didn’t go unnoticed there. “A ref stopped me and basically said, ‘What the bloody hell are you wearing?’

Braham, noting the official’s concerns over the concave toe-end, arranged a meeting to check if the boot was even legal within the Laws of the Game. “I went to see the president of the Referees’ Association. He banged the boot against his hand and said, ‘You might hurt a player with this.’

Product testing company Intertek was swiftly commissioned to conduct some laboratory analysis of the boot’s primary feature, the USP upon which the whole concept was founded, and Braham was worried about the possible results — particularly since some previous consumer testing had yielded some promising early feedback.

“I commissioned, in the summer of 2015, a study by Leeds University sports scientists that looked into the power and accuracy versus competitors’ boots,” says Hardie. “In the end, anecdotally, the players trialling the boots did state they got more power and accuracy when kicking the ball with that part of the boot than they could possibly get with a standard boot. But the study was inconclusive from a verifiable and statistical perspective to support that claim.”

Braham waited patiently for the outcome of the industrial testing. “Two and a half weeks went by,” he recalls. “This chap rang me and said, ‘Hi, we’ve conducted the tests. Mel… are you sitting down?’

“I thought ‘Oh god’, you know, ‘all these years of hard work are going to go up in smoke.’”

The testing consisted of the toe section of the Serafino boot — and two high-end branded boots — being cut off and attached to a mechanism, which was dropped on to a flat plate that recorded the transmitted force of the impact. The average impact force of the size-9 Serafino boots was recorded as 5.19 kilonewtons.

“Then he said, ‘Well, we’ve tested your boot against the others and your boot was 249 per cent safer.’

The rival boots had transmitted an impact force of 13.27 kilonewtons.

Braham’s relief was understandable. “The whole development of this boot had taken so long. I’d spent a huge amount of money on it. The other two boots I had chosen for them to test were Adidas and Nike. I’ve never, ever made that public.”

---

Already convinced they were on to something, and now emboldened by proof of at least one advantage over the established competition, Braham — with Hardie’s consultation — began to establish the marketing game plan.

“The 4th Edge was a brand name I devised,” Hardie reveals. “It gave you the edge but it gave you the fourth edge. You could kick the ball with your instep, the laces, with the outside of your foot and now, also, the toe as well.”

https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2020/04/11205727/serafino-4th-edge.mp4?_=2

A crowdfunding drive to generate nearly £100,000 towards the rising costs of delivering the boot to the market failed to get out of the blocks, despite one vox-pop sales pitch of “if you took those boots off me now, I’d say: ‘give them back’”.

Undeterred, the Serafino team began to ramp up the marketing rhetoric. In a corner of the football industry where near-nonsensical pseudoscience has increasingly become the lingua franca between manufacturers and customers, though, their assertions felt quaintly unaggressive.

“This unique patented device gives the player a 33 per cent advantage in terms of the number of kicking zones,” Hardie declares in one promotional video, a roundabout way of saying that three viable ways to kick a ball had become four. The Serafino 4th Edge was becoming more and more about its standout feature, given the sheer impossibility of being able to compete with Nike and Adidas in the long term. The landscape-shuddering Adidas Predator was first advertised as being “100% Legal, 0% Fair” while the 4th Edge was simply given the tagline “Conventionally Radical”.

“We had a couple of conversations with football boot designers,” says Hardie, “and they were intrigued but equally aware that the major manufacturers would not tolerate an upstart coming in like this. They were very sceptical about the ability of anybody to make a substantial impact, even on a niche basis, because the cost of entry was way above and beyond what Mel was willing or able to do.

In the absence of a limitless marketing budget, let alone the experience of launching a football boot into a stiflingly crowded market, Boot Technologies chipped away at getting the public’s attention, led by Hardie’s efforts.

“We had loads of people mobilised, involved and committed to help make this concept, this boot, into a reality.

“Ex-pros were lending their presence, if not necessarily their name to the whole process. We also created a YouTube video which ended up, thanks to some amazing media coverage, getting about 100,000 views. We realised that the media interest and potential demand was something we could not, at that time, fulfil because we had about 10,000 pairs of boots coming from China and we couldn’t get them in the country fast enough.”

Hardie presided over a launch night at Planet Hollywood in London. “We got (veteran football journalist) Harry Harris involved and then, all of a sudden, he opened his black book of contacts and got a whole load of ex-pros excited.

“We had a back room with a goal set up. The pros had a penalty competition. We had a big lunch where we all got pissed… absolutely pissed, 30 of them.

 

“In retrospect, we should have deferred the Planet Hollywood event until we had boots in the country. The boots didn’t arrive until six weeks later but things had got into a head of steam and we probably lost control of the media coverage.”

Jem Maidment, a former Sky News journalist, was brought on board to handle the press side and had to set aside his own early scepticism about the boot.

“I thought it was nuts. I thought, ‘God, this is gonna get slaughtered!’” he tells The Athletic. “But I would say the majority of media reporting on it was neutral at worst and, actually, there was a significant amount of positive coverage and not really anything negative. That really surprised me. I had one very, very, very, very well-known guy, who was a manager, who came up to me and said, ‘Do you know what, between you and me, I’d have worn them’. I said, ‘Really!?’. ‘Well, it’s the most comfortable boot I’ve ever worn’.”

Braham began to make some bolder claims. “I believe it has the opportunity to be even bigger than the Predator,” he told Australian news agency AAP. “I think it will change the game permanently.”

The 4th Edge now had some heavyweight promotional backing, although the enthusiasm levels of Harry Redknapp and Glenn Hoddle could politely be described as “businesslike”. Redknapp managed to avoid using the brand name completely as he ‘Arry-ed through the motions in one interview, while Hoddle just about kept the lid on his excitement.

The sum total of all this effort, from John Serafino having a kickabout with some Brazilians in a Sydney park to Ray Parlour getting the complimentary pints in at Planet Hollywood?

“We sold about a thousand in the end,” says Hardie (Braham says it is nearer to 1,200, and the boot is still available to buy, at a price of £130). “The investment required to really establish an alternative, innovative, unique football boot was a lot more than Mel was prepared to make.”

Braham sighs. “Basically, we ran out of money. I’ve invested well west of £250,000. I was very optimistic because I didn’t know enough about football, the traditions, ‘You must not kick with the toe’ — but I didn’t know it was so entrenched.

“I didn’t foresee how sceptical the UK market would be. If you open a new restaurant in the UK, nobody wants to be the first person to go into that restaurant. Open a new restaurant in America, you get absolutely flooded on the first night. They like new things, they like to try new technology.”

Curiosity, though, would only get the 4th Edge so far. Endorsement from current players — or, rather, the lack of it — proved to be a nail in its coffin. As Johns sagely points out, “If Ronaldo puts them on, you’ll be one of the biggest brands tomorrow morning.”

“Budgets were tight,” Maidment confirms, “but we had to try because a lot of money had already gone into it. One thing I really was keen on was getting a player to wear it in a game. The closest we got was Eastleigh’s second-choice goalkeeper putting them on for an FA Cup game (against Bolton in January 2016)… but he didn’t come on.”

If Lewis Noice’s career never amounts to anything, he can always rest assured that he is — probably — the most famous active player ever to wear the Serafino 4th Edge.

“Nobody gave Brian or Mel the chance to really talk about the other aspects of it,” says Johns. “It was, ‘This is the ugliest boot, it’s never going to take off’ or it’s in ‘the top 10 craziest boots in the world’ or whatever.

Braham is asked by The Athletic if, given the overwhelming challenge of breaking into this impenetrable market all over again, he would do anything differently.

“If I had my time all over again, I would have started off with a boot for young children, taking it into academies and schools. Once you wear this boot, you don’t want to wear anything else. Seriously, once you’ve got used to wearing this boot and having this fourth option, you don’t want to go backwards.”

While there’s stock left in the warehouse, the evangelising apparently won’t stop. In its inner circle, at least, the cult of the Serafino 4th Edge is still going strong.

 

[Vesper 28,767]

A tribute to Piero Gratton: The genius behind Roma’s wolf badge and plenty more

https://theathletic.com/1746633/2020/04/16/piero-gratton-roma-badge-designer-artist-wolf/

When I moved to Rome, one of the ways I learned Italian was to head over to the newspaper kiosk across the street from our apartment and pick up the sports dailies. I would read the papers from front to back, the ink smudging my fingers, and more often than not get suckered into buying the bric-a-brac you see jumbling up the kiosks. One man’s Hoarders is another’s Aladdin’s cave.

For six months in what must have been 2007, La Gazzetta dello Sport released a DVD every week about a season in Italian football history. It was Premier League Years for Serie A and the satisfaction I still get from completing that box set is immense; not least because when all the spines align in order they depict a sort of evolution of football from Gianni Rivera to Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Whenever I hear Oscar Prudente’s theme tune introducing the big stories of that particular year, I’m transported straight back to the sofa of my flat in Monteverde Vecchio where I watched Verona, Sampdoria and Roma all win the Scudetto.

What I didn’t know at the time was the music came from Domenica Sprint — the Sunday sport show for RAI, Italy’s state broadcaster. Nor was I aware Piero Gratton designed the psychedelic graphics for its title sequence. Gratton passed away last week, aged 81, and his work has always had a profound effect on me.

When I first started going to the Stadio Olimpico, it didn’t matter who was playing, Roma or Lazio, you’d see his mark on T-shirts, scarves and bobble hats. On trips to Palermo, I couldn’t help but notice his creations reproduced in spray paint on garage shutters and stencilled on paint-chipped walls. When I think about Bari and Antonio Cassano talking about his unforgettable first goal in Serie A — you know the one, the exhilarating solo run against Inter — Gratton’s work is right there, skipping inside Laurent Blanc and Christian Panucci on the way to blasting a shot past Angelo Peruzzi.

Gratton managed to weave himself into the very fabric of football. When he wasn’t making the idents for RAI, he was designing the most iconic and beloved football crests in the history of the Italian game: Bari’s red-crested cockerel; Palermo’s pink-collared bird; Pescara’s diving dolphin; the eagle with whom Lazio soared into the 1980s; and, most famously of all, the Lupetto — Roma’s “little wolf”.

---

The Carabinieri, Italy’s military police, stood waiting for Gratton as he brought his pedalo into shore. His son Michelangelo remembers it as if it were yesterday. “We were on holiday in Sabaudia to the south of Rome, near Mount Circeo,” he tells The Athletic. “It was August 14.” The Carabinieri hadn’t come to arrest Gratton under the baking hot summer sun. It turned out his government needed him.

Amintore Fanfani, five-time Prime Minister of Italy — “a small but tough guy,” Michelangelo recalls — had decided it was time for RAI to move from black and white to colour TV. Gratton had been with the broadcaster for years. He joined in 1960, fresh out of art college, just as RAI went on a hiring spree in preparation for Rome hosting the Olympics. Gratton had a creative role. It was his duty to come up with the graphics and visuals to help the channel’s news bulletins connect with audiences at home.

“The first big job he did was when Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the moon,” Michelangelo explains. Still, every now and again, RAI would send him on reporting jobs, such as one particularly memorable trip to Madrid. “My father went to Spain for a story where he got to know and interviewed Santiago Bernabeu as well as some of Real’s best players: Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas, legends of the game. After he left there were articles in the Spanish papers saying he was a spy for Juve (Madrid’s next opponents in the 1962 European Cup).”

The introduction of colour TV meant all of RAI’s programming required new idents and title sequences. Eager to make the transition as soon as the technology allowed, Gratton was informed his vacation had come to a premature end. “He tried to tell the Carabinieri he was on holiday, but they were having none of it,” Michelangelo says. “Given my father had travelled around Europe and knew a lot about TV programming, he was thought of as an expert in his field, at the very cutting edge. But the truth is he didn’t know much about colour TV and it was Ferragosto, a public holiday. There wasn’t anywhere to develop colour film in Rome because everywhere was shut. But within a day or two, RAI’s new opening titles came out in colour.”

Gratton’s first major commission in sport was the 1974 World Athletics Championships in Rome. The mascot and all the medals were his inventions. The orders kept coming in. His work became unavoidable. When RAI decided to launch TeleGiornale 2 and a series of alternative programming, the “little Walt Disney of TV” was the man entrusted to design its own unique look.

“The sport shows Domenica Sprint, Dribbling and Eurogol, which came later, were all made in more or less the same style,” Michelangelo explains. “He was responsible for some of the most famous title sequences ever made.

“The biggest one was Odeon, the first programme to talk about entertainment in a different way. There were interviews with rock stars, stories from the Crazy Horse cabaret in Paris. The first time a pair of breasts appeared on Italian TV was on Odeon.”

Gratton’s role in launching TeleGiornale 2 brought him a measure of fame. “He hit the big time with that work,” Michelangelo says, “The meeting with AS Roma came not much longer after that. And that’s how it all started with the Lupetto.”

Gratton, right, with Roma player Giancarlo De Sisti after a Rome derby against Lazio (Photo: Piero Gratton/Roma)

It must have been a dream come true for Gratton. “He was a Romanista, an obsessive,” Michelangelo reveals. “If Roma lost, he wouldn’t turn on the TV or radio for two days. It consumed him. Whenever we were away travelling, he always wanted to know how they were getting on.”

---

Matthew Wolff came across Gratton when he started designing Nike apparel pieces and World Cup kits for France and Nigeria. He worked on the PSG and Jordan brand collaboration and launched the visual identities of NYCFC and LAFC. Gratton’s oeuvre is a perennial source of fascination and one to which he regularly returns for inspiration.

“Kits, they come and go,” Wolff explains. “They’re kind of timely, often dictated by trend and fashion. But crests are intended to last forever.” Over time they become infused with memory and emotion, civic pride and our innate need to belong to something. The best badges should do so much more than simply identify a team.

“Supporters see their crests as reflections of themselves,” Wolff says. “Which is why people get tattoos of them.” It also helps us understand the reason fans are so up in arms when a rebrand misses the mark. “They think you’ve tampered with their identity.” Gratton’s rebrands never sparked protests, only gratitude for capturing the essence of who they were: Romanisti, Palermitani or Barese. He kept his designs clean and simple, breaking with the tradition of chintzy and ornate coats of arms, choosing instead to declutter old crests almost always in favour of one totemic figure.

“The theme I’ve noticed in his work is wildlife,” Wolff says, “and it’s clever because animals do have a way of eliciting emotion from us.” From the desire to be as free as a bird or a lone wolf to the leader of a pack or a flock.

“Gratton was ahead of his time in the simplicity of his work,” Wolff continues. “It’s almost like he knew we would head towards a more digital world where cleaner and simpler graphics would be king and the social media avatar was only going to be 20 pixels by 20 pixels.

“Gratton famously said he wanted it to fit on the side of a pencil. And this is the other element no one seemed to see in his time: the merchandising of the simplistic marks. You should be able to recognise the mark from down the street, the other side of the pitch. It should be clear to you what you are seeing, what club you’re representing from afar. And the ultimate expression of that is that lollipop kit with the Lupetto crest.”

---

In the 1970s, Roma did not have a lot of money. The club’s owner Gaetano Anzalone wanted to invest in the team and make it more competitive, but he needed to increase revenues. Research trips to America were organised to see if anything could be learned from the way baseball and NFL teams operated as businesses. The existing logo quickly became identified as a problem. For starters, the club didn’t own the copyright and couldn’t use it to sell merchandise.

Gilberto Viti, a Roma director, also happened to have been a delegate on the organising committee for the World Athletics Championships in Rome that had hired Gratton. Viti introduced him to Anzalone and a groundbreaking collaboration began. “Anzalone was the father of modern football,” Michelangelo says. “When they started commercialising the crest in 1978, Roma were pioneers. People thought they were crazy, but history shows they were right.”

It started with the season tickets. “They were like tram tickets,” Gratton said, “When you stamped them, you obliterated them.” A booklet was created with bespoke artwork and space for sponsors to advertise. They are now collectors’ items.

As for the ghiacciolo — “lollipop” — shirt, Michelangelo can’t be sure, but thinks it might be an idea Gratton brought back with him from an expedition to the US. “I think it was inspired by a baseball team from Houston.” The resemblance with the Astros uniform from that time is uncanny.

The piece de resistance, though, is the Lupetto. “The wolf head is just fucking cool, isn’t it?” Wolff exclaims.

---

Encircled by orange and porphyry rings, Gratton painted the wolf black on a white background so it would stand out on TV and in print. It was a considerable departure from what went before. There’s nothing maternal about it. Rather than suckling Romulus and Remus, the red eye and jagged teeth scream predator.

“My father imposed a new logo on a city that already had a strong identity, already had a name, already had an icon for more than 2,000 years,” Michelangelo says. “His greatness lies in establishing the Lupetto as another icon the city came to love, one people put on the same level as the she-wolf and the name Rome. For me, that’s just extraordinary.”

When news of Gratton’s death broke, Michelangelo’s phone rang off the hook. “There are so many stories and the best ones were the messages we got from fans. They were extraordinary. From an emotional point of view, the gratitude they showed for making something they carry with them on their skin or in the blood is quite beautiful. You know, the Lupetto may be modern but it’s a moment in time, too. Lots of people have got the tattoo or a pendant. It’s a part of people’s lives, a connection to some of the big moments you go through: weddings, communions, the school days when you’d draw it in your textbooks.”

Gratton cried when he learned there were children’ graves in Rome’s Prima Porta cemetery with flags bearing the Lupetto draped over the headstones. Michelangelo discovered this while interviewing his father for a documentary about his life. “He was very moved,” Michelangelo recalls. “He went to pay his respects to a colleague’s daughter who died of cancer. She was three years old. A tragedy no one can ever accept. It shocked him. At the end of the documentary I asked him quite provocatively: ‘What future do you imagine for yourself?’ He said: ‘When I go, I’d like for whoever walks past my grave to see a trumpet where the children have the Lupetto.'”

Gratton was deeply passionate about music — as anyone who has listened to his title sequences can attest — and Michelangelo says: “He loved music and collected instruments from all over the world, from marimbas to the charango, not to mention woodwind instruments from Buddhist monasteries. It was endless, it really was.”

As endless as the affection his work continues to inspire.

On the day Gratton’s death became public, Luca Di Bartolomei, the son of Roma’s legendary captain Agostino, tweeted: “Ciao Piero and thank you for giving us what is the most beautiful logo of the most beautiful team in the world.”

[NikkiCFC 7,942]

EL PIBE 

[Vesper 28,767]

53 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

EL PIBE 

the pure joy of the game!

it's like a little 7 year old child in a grown man's body 

[NikkiCFC 7,942]

2 hours ago, Vesper said:

the pure joy of the game!

it's like a little 7 year old child in a grown man's body 

He still is!

 

[Vesper 28,767]

11 minutes ago, NikkiCFC said:

He still is!