Sandro Mazzola, Who Won Everything With Inter, Dies at 83

Sandro Mazzola, the Italian forward who spent seventeen years at Internazionale and won two European Cups and four Serie A titles there, has died at 83, according to an obituary published by the Guardian on Thursday. The Guardian describes him as a supremely gifted forward who played for his only club, and who also earned a World Cup runners-up medal with Italy.

The obituary places him in the great Inter side of the 1960s, the one that made the European Cup a domestic habit rather than an adventure. It also records the other half of his international career: a World Cup final reached and lost, which is how a generation of Italian players is remembered abroad — as finalists against Brazil in 1970.

For readers outside Italy, Mazzola belongs to the period when Serie A was the league the world watched, and the obituaries now arriving in the English-language press are written in that key. The Guardian's notice is a football life told through two clubs' worth of trophies and one national disappointment, which is the shape the foreign press gives Italian football of that era.