Sandro Mazzola, 83, and the Football the South Watched on Television

Sandro Mazzola, the Italian forward who won two European Cups and four Serie A titles in seventeen years with Internazionale, his only club, has died aged 83, according to an obituary published by the Guardian. He also won a World Cup runners-up medal with Italy. The Guardian describes him as a supremely gifted forward and notes that Inter was the only club of his career.

The obituary sets Mazzola in the great Inter side of the 1960s, the team that made Italian defensive organisation a subject of argument across Europe. For readers in the south, that team arrived mostly as a flicker on a black-and-white screen, in an era when the national league was a northern affair and the Mezzogiorno supplied the audience rather than the payroll.

The Guardian's account is of a player whose entire working life belonged to one institution, a shape of career that has almost disappeared from the modern game. That fact alone gives the obituary a documentary weight beyond the trophies.