Italy’s legendary goalkeeper on getting used to retirement, the decline of Italian football and why he blames himself for Zidane’s World Cup final red card
“I
tear the gloves off my hands and my bare knuckles, reddened and soaked with sweat, shine in the neon light,” Gianluigi Buffon writes when he remembers leaving the pitch at half-time during the final game of his remarkable career, in May 2023. “I really feel dead inside. I am 45 years old, and around me many of my teammates walking in shorts towards the dressing room could easily be my children.”
The gripping and intimate tone of Buffon’s book, Saved, which opens with his last-ever game in a Serie B playoff for Parma, is matched by his warm and open character. The great goalkeeper played professionally for 28 years and his reflections are as moving as they are sombre. “Can you live without it, Gigi?” he asks. “No, I can’t … when you have outlived your youth, and the time when you feel strong and all-powerful has ended, and your muscles, joints and reflexes start to wear out, then it really is like dying.”
Today, in contrast, Buffon is full of life. He has a cigarette on the street in King’s Cross and then walks into the Guardian office like a cheerful force of good will, returning the embrace of a security officer who seems overwhelmed by Buffon’s presence. I am equally struck by the thoughtful way in which, during the next 80 minutes, Buffon considers every question as he moves from his retirement to being part of the management team which felt crushed in March when Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup for a third time in a row. He will compare those feelings with the elation of winning the World Cup in 2006, when his brilliant tournament was preceded by the bitter fallout from the infamous Calciopoli scandal in which he was implicated.
