Gigi Riva: l’un des plus grands joueurs de l’histoire du football italien décède à l’âge de 79 ans

“Italy mourns the death of a national monument, Gigi Riva embodied the myth of the free man and the extraordinary footballer,” said Italian Football Federation president Gabriele Gravina in a statement. “He will be sorely missed in our calcio,” said Lorenzo Casini, president of the Italian League.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni also praised “a great athlete who left his mark on the history of Italian football and our national team.”

While they were playing the Italian Super Cup final in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Monday, Inter Milan and Naples players observed a minute of silence before the start of the second half.

Clubs in the Italian league, starting with Cagliari – his lifelong club – paid tribute to the top scorer in the history of the Italian national team, “an Italian legend,” according to AS Rome.

A minute’s silence will be observed on all football fields in the country before each game from Tuesday to Sunday, the FIGC said.

He was nicknamed “Rombo di Tuono” (“thunderclap”) because of his exceptional shooting power and left his mark on Italian football. With 35 goals in 42 appearances, he is the top scorer in the history of the Nazionale, with whom he won the European Championship in 1968.

But it was during the 1970 World Cup in Mexico that he wrote the most beautiful pages of his career and world football. The striker, alongside Gianni Rivera, was a key figure in the semi-final won 4-3 by Italy against Germany, considered one of the greatest matches in the competition’s history. Riva scored one of the five goals in an incredible extra time that sent Italy to the final, where it lost to Pelé’s Brazil (4-1).

Born on November 7, 1944 in Northern Italy, in Lombardy, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, Riva made a name for himself in Sardinia by scoring 164 goals in 315 matches in all competitions and winning the Serie A top scorer trophy three times (1967, 1969, 1970).

While he could have joined more prestigious Serie A teams, Riva always remained loyal to Cagliari, to whom he gave his only Italian championship title in 1970, one of the most resounding and unexpected in history, before breaking his leg the following season.

After his playing career, Riva briefly became a coach, and then briefly president of a club, always in Cagliari. He then returned from 1990 to his other beloved team, the Nazionale, this time with the title of general manager, in five editions of the European Championship and as many World Cups, including the victorious one in Germany in 2006, before retiring a year later.