This was a fun 150 pages of war stories and anecdotes. Written informally and littered with average jokes, Pirlo clearly wants to give the impression he’s a laid back guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
He loves playing for Italy, taking the piss out of Rino Gattuso for being stupid and playing PlayStation against Alessandro Nesta. He complains about Simone Inzaghi’s infantile diet, plain spaghetti and baby biscuits, and his pre-match ritual of going for several shits and stinking out the dressing room. He’s still haunted by the 2005 Champions League final when AC Milan squandered a 3-0 lead and lost on penalties to Liverpool. He modelled his iconic free kick technique on the Brazilian Juninho Pernambucano and hoped to be the all time top scorer of freekicks in Serie A history. An internet search reveals he came up four short of Sinisa Mihajlovic’s record of 28. He’s a big fan of Antonio Conte, his coach at Juve, and is full of praise for the owners of the two clubs he played the most games for - Silvio Berlosconi (AC Milan) and Andrea Agnelli (Juventus).
Aside from some great stories and a lot of not-so-great jokes, Pirlo has a lot of opinions and presents himself as something of a thinker.
“I know how to think…Generally speaking, I reckon I’m a fairly switched on guy and I’m not ashamed to express it, defend it and, where necessary, shout it from the rooftops.” (p143)
On the basis of this book, I’d say the jury was still out! Among his better judgements is a prescient argument for introducing video technology, the omission of which he rightly claims is very unfair on referees. This book was published in 2013 and it was duly introduced in the biggest European leagues between 2017-19.
However, some sections make his thinking look confused. He complains about being man-marked and says it goes against the spirit of football, which seems somewhat self-interested, to say the least. He also makes the unsubstantiated claim that Deportivo La Coruna’s players might have been on drugs during the 2004 Champions League quarter final when they beat AC Milan 4-0 to overturn a 1-4 defeat in the first leg. Generally, he seems admirably anti-racist and goes out of his way to defend Mario Balotelli. However, he also gives a rather wooly exposition on how racist incidents should be handled when talking about Kevin-Prince Boateng’s decision to leave the pitch in the face of racist abuse.
“If one of my team-mates was a victim of intolerance and refused to carry on playing. I’d go along with his wishes and those of the rest of the team. It would be up to him to tell us how he felt and to take the final decision. I’d leave the field only if the whole team was in agreement, though. I think you’d have to actually experience something like that to know how you’d react. It’s too delicate a subject to plan your response in advance.” (p132)
This seems to me to raise more questions than it gives answers! So he would leave the pitch, but only if everyone agreed, which makes me wonder why players who haven’t been racially abused should have a say? It also strikes me that the more “delicate” a subject is, the more need there is to plan your response in advance, not vice versa!
Equally, Pirlo presents himself as above suspicion when it comes to fair play, doping and match fixing but also gives a half-hearted defence of Juve’s role in the “Calciopoli” scandal (p104). I don’t know about the scandal in detail, but it seems a bit rich for him to slag off cycling for doping when Italian football is fairly notorious for corruption. He also opines it would be a good thing if clubs could offer win bonuses to other clubs in the league to help motivate them, which doesn’t strike me as particularly thoroughly thought out. Perhaps the best evidence that Pirlo isn’t quite as “switched on” as he likes to think are his comments about his tattoos.
“I’ve got well-hidden tattoos: my son Niccolo’s name in Chinese letters on my neck.”
This brazenly ignores the fact that Chinese doesn’t have “letters” but uses logograms called “hanzi”. This makes “writing” a name like “Niccolo” impossible in any Western sense. Usually names are “translated” by using a few characters to approximate the sound of the name, even though the meaning will be completely different. So what Pirlo actually has tattooed on his neck are some random characters that might sound a bit like “Niccolo” but mean something completely different. It’s not the sort of stuff that makes you think he’s any more intelligent than your average footballer! Why on earth he wants a tattoo in a language he doesn’t even seem to understand, let alone speak is beyond me!
In fairness to Pirlo, some of these woolier parts of the book may come from either the ghost writer or translator. For example, the sentence “he was worn out and refused to speak to anyone apart from Daniele [Rossi] and I.” (p40) This uses the subject “I” when it should use the object “me”. This wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if it wasn’t for the fact that the book then goes on to mock Gattuso for getting his grammar wrong on pp 48-49! Obviously, I can’t tell if the error was Pirlo’s, the ghost writer’s or the translator’s, but if you’re going to mock other people for making grammatical mistakes, it’s probably best not to make your own a few pages before. The “Thanks” written at the end of the book by the ghost writer may give a clue as to why it isn’t the best written book though. Alciato, an Italian journalist, thanks everyone he can think of and then thanks his family finishing with the final sentences, “They’re always the first names on my teamsheet. All of them.” (pp 151-2) To me, this begs the question of why they aren’t the first names on the thank you list but maybe I’m being too pedantic! Whatever the case, I thought it was clunky and, generally speaking, I found the prose lost clarity and cohesion when tackling complicated ideas or subjects. It has a nice informal tone when dealing with funny stories though, which is a redeeming feature.
I would recommend this book to football lovers as it is very short, takes no time at all to read and contains some wonderful stories and insights. It has a light, jocular tone and even though some of the jokes are more likely to produce a groan than a laugh, it’s better than someone who takes themselves too seriously. It’s not very well written, can be sycophantic and is more confusing than enlightening on topics like racism in the game and the “calciopoli” scandal, in spite of Pirlo’s claims to being an insightful thinker!
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