Sandro Mazzola, the former Inter Milan and Italy forward who stood as one of the emblematic figures of the Nerazzurri’s golden age, has passed away at 83, the club confirmed on Saturday.
“Sandro Mazzola was among the finest footballers ever to play the game. Not just in the history of the Nerazzurri,” Inter stated in a release.
While at Inter, the team that ruled Italian football through the mid-1960s, Mazzola claimed four Serie A titles and lifted the European Cup in two consecutive years, 1964 and 1965.
In 565 outings for Inter, Mazzola found the net 158 times, and he delivered one of his finest displays in the 1964 European Cup final, scoring twice in a 3-1 win against Real Madrid.
That display won him praise from Hungarian icon Ferenc Puskas, who handed Mazzola his shirt once the match ended. “I played against your father. You are worthy of him,” Puskas remarked.
His father, Valentino Mazzola, was a Torino legend who lost his life in the 1949 Superga air disaster, which killed 31 people, among them 18 players and eight Italian internationals from the team celebrated as the “Grande Torino.”
For Italy, Mazzola scored 22 goals in 70 caps and helped secure the 1968 European Championship, with the Azzurri defeating Yugoslavia 2-0 in a replay in Rome.
He also featured in the 1970 World Cup final in Mexico, where Italy was beaten 4-1 by Pele’s outstanding Brazil team.
The next year, he placed second behind Johan Cruyff in the Ballon d’Or voting.
Following a 17-year professional career, Mazzola retired in 1977 and went on to hold an executive role at Inter before later working as sporting director of Torino.
“Today, another piece of the Nerazzurri legend leaves us. Sandro was Inter: he joined the club as a boy and chose to stay here forever, one shirt, seventeen seasons, an entire lifetime,” said Inter president Giuseppe Marotta.
“With (Helenio) Herrera’s Grande Inter, he wrote chapters that nobody will ever erase. Today, it is our duty to preserve his memory, because a club is only as great as its memory. And Sandro’s memory will remain with us forever.”
