This is now the Official: Paolo Maldini Thread
- Seamus -
23/02/05
Made in Milan
By Kevin Buckley
IN 1984 Michel Platini won the European Championship with France, Kaká was just two years old, and Bob Geldof had never even thought of Live Aid.
Meanwhile in northern Italy, a carefree 15-year-old schoolboy with a shock of thick, dark hair was doing what thousands of other Milanese teenagers did, riding the metro with his school rucksack, going for a pizza, and shopping at Esselunga supermarket.
In January 1985, that teenager strode out onto the San Siro turf against Udinese and his life changed forever. Three years after first brushing shoulders with the likes of granite-faced Milan team-mate Franco Baresi, the precocious newcomer was already slipping on the irresistible blue of Italy's national team shirt.
Paolo Maldini would proudly wear that prestigious colour a record 126 times, gaining more caps than even his old tutor, Baresi, as well as lifting the very highest club honours in the red and black of Milan.
That Milanese teenager is now a 36-year-old father of two. Looking back at that debut, he reminisces: "At 15 I had a normal life. Suddenly, I went from Esselunga to the San Siro!"
He laughs. "Just after reaching 16 I was straight into the first team. It was all so quick I never even had time to think about it, how it happened."
It is a muggy autumn afternoon not far from the Swiss border. Faint sunshine struggles through an overcast sky at Milanello, AC Milan's inner sanctum.
Here players train, eat, often sleep, protected from the outside world behind electronic gates and uniformed armed guards. Maldini relaxes on the wooden bench overlooking the gentle hillside sloping down from the players' living quarters. The lank dark hair is freshly cropped.
The languid style suggests a lead singer between gigs, but the lean torso, tree-trunk thighs and three-inch horizontal scar just above the right knee say otherwise.
Reaching the top is one thing, but how on earth has 'il Capitano' stayed there for so long? "It's a series of things," he says with the modesty of those comfortable at the very top of their profession. "I was born in Milan. For a start, for a Milanese to play for Milan is an unusual thing."
Maldini has always lived in the city, his white stucco mansion on the west of Milan just a 15-minute drive from San Siro.
"My father had an important history with the club. I've won the Champions League, as captain, and my father too had won the European Cup, as captain. It's a story weaving inside the story. It's almost like a novel."
Having a famous footballing father was tough on the adolescent Maldini. "Oh yes, people's nastiness knows no bounds," he admits.
"I'd always try to block my ears. I knew my father was a footballer but at 10 years old I couldn't understand how big he had been. I used to play on the little pitches on the outskirts of Milan and I'd hear people insulting me, calling my father a so-and-so Milanista."
Paolo was Milan's youngest ever debutant. "I had to show straight away that I wasn't here because of the surname," he says. Debuts for the Italian under-21s at 17 and the senior side at just 18 were firmly on merit. "They criticised my father when he called me up for the under-21s.
"Sometimes the things they say aren't even very intelligent."
He has been coached by father Cesare at club and international level. Italian coaches are respectfully referred to as 'il Mister' a result of the English influence on the Italian game's founding fathers so when the Maldini career paths crossed, how did he address his father in training? "Papa. How could I call him 'Mister'?
"It's ridiculous," he says, dismissively. How do you handle having your father as coach? "By being fortunate enough to have a good relationship with your father.
"But also by not being afraid of what we had to do." Early on, there was some "sense of embarrassment, mainly on my part," he concedes, but adds, "if they choose him as national team coach and I am captain of the national team, reaching the World Cup, what should we be afraid of?"
Interestingly, family get-togethers with father and son never revolved around football. "No, no," he says. "We rarely talked about football, especially at home.
"We'd had enough football." In our conversations, 'switching off' from football is a recurring theme. He applies the same policy of not mentioning the game at dinners in his house.
He may play for passion rather than profit "after 20 years I don't need to, financially" but he is also the consummate company man, acutely aware of his role as the public face of one of the biggest brands in sport.
The corporate antennae are rarely switched off and the flashing telegenic smile well practiced. But dealing with the media is not his favourite pastime.
"I haven't read La Gazzetta [dello Sport] for about 15 years," he says. But as he warms to our conversation, something different to "the standard interview when there is not really much to say", the characteristic, soft, staccato laugh becomes more genuine.
The ups and downs in his career are pretty well known. Winning European Cups and Scudettos galore, losing the World Cup on penalties, missing the European Championship by 43 seconds. But has football ever made him cry?
"Hmm," he says, turning away and looking into the distance. Five, long, silent seconds later he announces, "No, as a professional, no." Then he admits, "I did once. I was eight. My mum was furious!" he says. "Because I'd cried just because I'd lost."
Signora Maldini's scolding must have been withering. Her son's bottom lip never trembled again, even though Italy's hardman, Franco Baresi, famously wept after the 1994 World Cup final penalty shoot-out defeat to Brazil.
"They're horrible moments for anyone. But my character makes it almost easier for me to handle such a negative emotion in that I know I've given everything, so I can complain about the result, but not that I could have done more. It's as though it's harder for me to talk about a victory than it is a defeat."
Neither triumph nor disaster seems to affect Maldini's appetite for the game or for work. Milan's tireless midfielder Gennaro Gattuso, tipped as eventual heir to the captain's armband, says: "The thing that amazes me is when I see Paolo in training. After 20 years with Milan, at this level, he still has the same passion.
"I envy him. You know, sometimes you don't want to go to training, you don't feel so good. Maybe you are tempted to invent a cold or a niggle or something. But Paolo? No, never. He is a true leader. Not by raising his voice or shouting at people. Off the pitch too, he never seems angry."
Maldini's on-field persona the unsmiling arch competitor totally absorbed in his task can easily appear arrogant. But in private he isn't. What he is, is a professional, aware of what he has achieved, proud of it, but always ready to credit his team-mates and his club.
"No, absolutely, he isn't arrogant," agrees friend Demetrio Albertini, a team-mate for club and country, now at Atalanta. The adjective most frequently used is 'equilibrato'. Balanced. Not always easy to achieve in the frenetic world of Italian football. "It is his way of living," says Gattuso, simply.
Maldini says, "It depends a lot upon you yourself. I'm a household name despite myself. If it were up to me, off the pitch I wouldn't even be seen." Indeed, one-to-one interviews such as this are as rare as a Maldini red card only three in a Serie A career approaching 550 appearances.
"The two or three TV appearances I've done, I did, I don't know, five years ago," he says. "Once training is over, the match is finished, I think of my family, my things."
He is married to Adriana, a Venezuelan former model, with whom he has two children, Christian, eight, and three-year-old Daniel. "It's a way of making things last longer.
"If you go home and you only think of football it consumes you much more quickly."
Handling the modern football lifestyle opens a discussion of the recent antics of Roma's troubled stars, Francesco Totti, banned for spitting at Euro 2004, and 'enfant terrible' Antonio Cassano, who has clashed with coaches and officials.
"It's easier for a player who is too pampered, who is allowed to do anything, to make mistakes. It's more likely he starts living outside reality, the whole environment," says Maldini, careful to underline the fact that he is speaking generally.
But don't the public and media exert intolerable pressure on a player? "No, it's not intolerable. There arrives a certain point in life where a player can't continue always being regarded as a lad of 18. For me, it's a question of responsibility. It's a question of growing up. I'm speaking of life, not just football."
From a Serie A diplomat like Maldini, this is as close as it gets to scathing criticism.
"About Roma I'm speaking as an outsider. I've never experienced it personally. But it's very difficult there. I know players who've played there. Here for them it's paradise, not just in football, but also in life. Alessandro Nesta [who used to play at Lazio] couldn't go out to a restaurant because there'd always be some Roma fan.