Gabriele Ambrosetti

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Ambrosetti was signed by Chelsea at the beginning of the 1999-00 season for £3.5m. Gianluca Vialli famously described the winger as the "Italian Ryan Giggs"; a description that heaped pressure on the newcomer. Ambrosetti made his debut against Aston Villa early in the season as a substitute, but despite occasionally impressing, including a confident strike in a memorable 5-0 away win against Galatasaray and a strong performance as a second half substitute against Coventry City at Stamford Bridge late in the season, he struggled to cope with the physicality of the English game. Ambrosetti was unable to hold down a regular place in the first team; many of the Italian's appearances came as a substitute, and when starting he would rarely finish a game. His last appearance for the Blues came as a substitute; replacing Gus Poyet against Derby County in the final league game of the season. The Italian wasn't involved at all in the 2000 FA Cup Final.

Ambrosetti's career at Chelsea was as good as over when Vialli was sacked five games into the following season, with new manager Claudio Ranieri sending his compatriot out on loan to Piacenza a short time later. A loan spell back at Vicenza in 2001 preceded another at Piacenza, for whom he would eventually sign permanently in 2003.

After Chelsea

Ambrosetti made 28 league appearances for Piacenza following his move, before signing for Serie C1 side Lombardy side Pro Patria, which would be his final club before retiring from the game in 2005.

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Gabriele Ambrosetti: After Vialli compared me to Ryan Giggs, I had no chance

https://theathletic.com/1851695/2020/06/04/chelsea-gabriele-ambrosetti-gianluca-vialli-ryan-giggs/

(Main image: Ambrosetti scoring his only goal for Chelsea. Photo: Jon Buckle/Empics via Getty Images)

It’s August 1999 and manager Gianluca Vialli has just given a quote to a packed press conference that has sparked great excitement among all Chelsea fans. With a big smile, he declared that the club had signed “the Italian Ryan Giggs”.

Sitting next to Chelsea’s head coach and looking rather bemused in front of all the cameras and tape recorders was the man in question, Gabriele Ambrosetti. He had just been bought from Serie A side Vicenza for £3.5 million.

The west London club brought an interpreter along to help him cope with the language barrier during his official unveiling, and the winger couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

As soon as the media briefing was over, he sought a word with Vialli. Ambrosetti tells The Athletic: “I said, ‘Thank you, but Giggs? He is different to me!’ Luca explained he did it to help me, to give me motivation. But I didn’t need motivation. I was 26 and at one of the biggest clubs in the world.”

Ambrosetti regarded Giggs, the man who had shone for Manchester United since making a professional debut in 1991, as an idol. One of his most prized possessions is a shirt belonging to the flying winger. It was given as a present by former Brescia team-mate Gheorghe Hagi, who had faced Giggs while playing for Romania in a World Cup qualifier against Wales in 1993.

Just a few months before the arrival of Chelsea’s latest acquisition, Giggs had helped Manchester United become the only English side to win the treble of Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup. Whether he meant the comparison literally or not, Vialli had inferred that Ambrosetti could bring similar skills — and results — to Stamford Bridge.

“To compare Gabriele Ambrosetti with Ryan Giggs is one of the biggest mistakes someone can do,” continues Ambrosetti. “I’m not saying I wasn’t a good player, but Ryan Giggs is an icon. The position we played was similar, but that’s it. Were we similar in other ways? No chance! I wasn’t the only one. I have never seen another player like him.

“Ryan was a great player and special to me. I was really surprised he never won a Ballon d’Or. Giggs is like George Best. He was one of the best players in the world. In his position, he was the best ever. No discussion. If you were to pick an all-time world XI, Giggs would be in it in the same way as Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

“Luca’s comments didn’t help me. They put a lot of pressure on me. Every mistake I made at Chelsea, people would say, ‘Oh no, Giggs wouldn’t do that’. Look, Luca trusted me but you can’t compare Giggs with anyone else back then or even now.

“I was under pressure all the time. The crowd had high expectations of me but they had expectations I was never going to be able to meet for sure.”

So why did Vialli give such a high appraisal of his new signing, who went on to make a total of 23 appearances for Chelsea? Well, it’s perhaps been forgotten now, but Ambrosetti was a rising star in his homeland during the 1990s.

He first made headlines of sorts in England by scoring the winner for Brescia against Notts County at Wembley in 1994 to claim the now-defunct Anglo-Italian Cup — a competition that was staged between teams from the second tiers of both countries.

But it was at unfashionable Vicenza where he came to the fore after joining in 1996. Playing in a city with a population of around 100,000 people, they were regarded as minnows when they were promoted to Serie A for the 1995-96 season.

Yet they confounded the experts. They finished ninth that season, then eighth in 1996-97. Even more remarkably, they defeated AC Milan and Napoli on the way to lifting the 1997 Italian Cup, the only major honour in their history.

“No other ‘small’ club has won the Italian Cup since we did it at Vicenza in 1997,” Ambrosetti says proudly. “Since then, it has been won by Lazio, Parma, Fiorentina, Inter, Roma, AC Milan, Napoli and Juventus.

“A lot of Italians wanted Vicenza to win it. We were a small club with unknown players. It was a really important moment for us. Not just our fans, people in general. Other small clubs thought if they can do it so can we.”

Significantly, it also meant they had qualified to play in a European competition for only the second time. Their first outing did not go well. Despite having a young Paolo Rossi, who would go on to be the hero of Italy’s World Cup triumph in 1982, they lost to Dukla Prague in the UEFA Cup first round in 1978.

Twenty years later, they were in the Cup Winners’ Cup. Legia Warsaw, Shakhtar Donetsk and Roda were easily despatched. It set up a two-legged semi-final against a club growing popular with Italians due to the presence of famous countrymen Gianfranco Zola, Roberto Di Matteo and player-coach Vialli: Chelsea.

The excitement for the home leg was palpable. “They closed the shops in town the day before,” says Ambrosetti. “It was all anyone was talking about. The players and the people were nervous, but at the same time, really, really happy. The dream was coming. Whatever was going to happen, no one imagined we’d be involved in anything like this. A first major European semi-final against such a big team.”

Few gave Vicenza a chance. However, Chelsea couldn’t cope with the energy of the home side, who were roared on by the majority of the 19,319 crowd. A neat finish by Lamberto Zauli gifted them a precious 1-0 victory.

“The Chelsea players told me how they were taken by surprise with the atmosphere in the first leg,” he says. “They didn’t expect that kind of support. The stadium wasn’t that big, but the stands were close to the pitch.”

Their more fancied opponents were still expected to comfortably turn things around a fortnight later only for Pasquale Luiso to silence the Chelsea supporters by getting a crucial away goal. It meant Vialli’s men had to score three times without reply to progress to the final and they had less than an hour to do so.

But in what is still regarded as one of the best Chelsea comebacks, strikes from Gus Poyet, Zola and Mark Hughes turned the tie around.

“The key was Poyet scoring so soon (within two minutes) after we had,” admits Ambrosetti. “Maybe the situation would have been different if we had got to half-time still 2-0 ahead. Chelsea played well in the second half, but can you imagine what it would have been like if they started after the break still 2-0 down? They would have had to play even more offensively and we were a counter-attacking team.”

Ambrosetti may have been on the losing side, but there was a positive consolation. The quality of his two displays had caught Vialli’s eye. Within days, he had a phone call from the former Italy centre-forward about a move to London.

“Luca didn’t say ‘please come’ — he just said ‘we are Chelsea’ and that was enough,” says Ambrosetti. “Luca is Italian, he is a hero to us. When I played against him at Juventus, I didn’t see a player, I saw a lion. He likes to fight. We saw that same fight as he’s overcome his health problems (pancreatic cancer) in recent years.

“AC Milan were also keen but my mind was made up. It took another year to go through — it was because Vicenza wouldn’t let me go. But Chelsea kept watching and calling me after every match. Even though other clubs came in for me in 1999, I’d given Chelsea my word and that was it.

“So one year after the semi-final, I was at Chelsea. As soon as I arrived in the dressing room, the players were saying to me, ‘Hey, hey, hey — we don’t accept you here!” I asked, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Because you ran a lot against us at Vicenza!’ It was a funny moment.”

But life at Chelsea was soon to be no laughing matter.

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Eight games gone, just 12 minutes played. Ambrosetti couldn’t believe it. He may have now been in the same league as Giggs, but their experiences were poles apart. After all the big build-up, Vialli simply didn’t select him.

It quickly removed the initial happiness he felt about moving to London. “As a man and a footballer, I didn’t have a good time in the first few months,” he says. “There was all this scrutiny on me because of what Luca said and I expected to play more. A lot was going on in my head.”

Team-mates such as Marcel Desailly, Graeme Le Saux and Celestine Babayaro, as well as the Italian contingent within the dressing room, provided welcome support.

When given the opportunity, there were flashes of the skill that was so often on display at Vicenza. A late cameo as a substitute in an impressive 5-0 Champions League win away at Galatasaray saw him drill a superb shot into the bottom corner. His arms were held aloft in defiant celebration. Nobody could have imagined that his first goal for Chelsea would be his last.

“I thought, ‘Now I will start to be the player I used to be’,” he says. “But I didn’t get the opportunity to show it. I scored against Galatasaray on a Wednesday and then four days later, I was not even on the bench against Arsenal. I was in the stands. I was regularly playing with the reserves.

“I spoke to Luca about it. There were only five subs on the bench back then, but it was not easy for me to understand why I wasn’t being used. I just got told there were a lot of players and competition. I had to accept that and I did. I just tried to fight more than the others. Maybe my skill wasn’t good enough, certainly compared to Gianfranco. But I knew that from back in Serie A.

“I had a bad experience, it helped me grow up. I trained very hard and I know everyone respected me. We reached the FA Cup final at the end of the season and I wasn’t in the squad. I was not disappointed because you have to respect the decision. It doesn’t mean you are weak to think that way, you are strong. I may not have understood it, but I accepted it.

“It was still amazing to be a part of it and see how the FA Cup compares to the Italian Cup. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. We won the game, I got a medal and afterwards had a big party. I drank a lot of wine!”

Any hope of better fortune for the 2000-01 campaign soon evaporated. Ambrosetti arranged a meeting with Vialli early in pre-season to explain how he was determined to turn things around. While the signal of intent was appreciated, it was ignored. After six matches, he had not been on the pitch once.

As it turned out, he wasn’t the only one having problems with Vialli’s style of man-management and the Italian was sacked. Although others would go on to benefit from Claudio Ranieri’s appointment, Ambrosetti’s fate was sealed.

Ambrosetti says: “Claudio sat me down after the first training session and said, ‘Gabi listen, you don’t play with me’. I was very frustrated. I wanted him to tell me why. I had another four years left on my contract. All he said was he had different ideas. He was really honest with me and I appreciated that at least.

“I was really upset. It was really strange. One of the clubs that had wanted me when I was at Vicenza was Fiorentina. Who was the manager then? Ranieri! We have met since, though, and shared a hug.”

Ambrosetti was loaned out to Piacenza but his confidence levels never recovered. His playing days petered out in further spells at Piacenza (loan and permanent), Vicenza (loan) and Pro Patria in Serie C before retiring in 2005.

His love for the game remained. After starting as a sporting director at the club where he began his career, Varese, he returned to the UK in January 2016 to act as assistant manager to Francesco Guidolin at Swansea. The latter was his coach when things were going so well at Vicenza.

The duo kept Swansea in the Premier League but were gone by October after a poor start to the following campaign. Again there were no hard feelings — Ambrosetti jokes that he is the only Italian who enjoyed living in Swansea with all the “wind and rain” and still keeps in touch with many of the people he met there.

Ambrosetti had a second spell in England working as part of Franciso Guidolin’s coaching staff at Swansea in 2016 (Photo: Matthew Ashton/AMA/Sports Photo Agency)

So does he blame Vialli for what went wrong and those comments about Giggs at the outset? Far from it. “I have to thank Luca,” Ambrosetti says. “He gave me a great opportunity to play in another league and another country. If things didn’t go right for me on the pitch, it’s not because of that press conference. It was down to other details.

“When he was sacked, I called him. I said, ‘I’m so sorry, so disappointed’. Our relationship was really good, it wasn’t harmed, even though I didn’t play. That experience made me better as a man.

“I am a football agent now with players in Italy, Portugal, Spain, France and Morocco. I use what I went through to help them. If they are going through something similar, I know what to say.”

As for Giggs, Ambrosetti is still waiting to have a proper chat with him. The 46-year-old didn’t get a chance when playing for Chelsea against Manchester United in 2000 nor during his brief spell at Swansea.

Giggs is still a great source of inspiration for Ambrosetti though, despite those 12 months spent living in his shadow.