Giuseppe Meazza

Giuseppe Meazza (23 August 1910 – 21 August 1979) is a former Italian football player. He has played for Italy national team. He is regarded as one of the greatest footballers of all time. He began his career as all out striker, but showed his skill and ability by also becoming an accomplished midfielder, playing for more than half of his career as inside forward. He was a great leader with excellent shooting and intoxicating dribbling skill, an eye for the pass and, despite his middle height, an exceptional heading ability.

Meazza created many chances for his teammates and scored goals as well. His goals "a foglia morta", the "dead leaf technique", were also feared by goalkeepers. He was a brilliant passer, both-footed, had remarkable field vision and was noted for his turns and spins. Natural leader, confusing dribbler, specialist in volleys and blind passes, impressive heading game despite his size, Giuseppe Meazza appears to be the complete footballer par excellence.

Club career
Discarded by Milan because of his skinny physique, at the age of fourteen he joined Ambrosiana Inter playing in the boys' championship. It was Fulvio Bernardini who discovered him and insisted to the Nerazzurri coach, Árpád Weisz, that he include him in the first team: Bernardini – who would later become an important coach and would discover numerous other players, including another who would later become Inter's centre-forward himself, Alessandro Altobelli – stopped more and more often, at the end of training, to observe ecstatically, among the youth boys, that boy who with the ball at his feet did wonders. Bernardini, it is said, was so insistent and convincing that in the end Weisz wanted to see him personally. Weisz realized that Bernardini had not exaggerated: at sixteen the boy was aggregated to the first team, and a year later Meazza made his debut for Inter, in the Volta Cup.

It was on that occasion that he was given the nickname of "Balilla". When coach Weisz read the line-up in the locker room, announcing Meazza's presence in the team from the first minute, an elderly Inter player, Leopoldo Conti, exclaimed sarcastically: "Now let's play the table footballers too!"; The Opera Nazionale Balilla, which gathered all children from 8 to 14 years old, had been established in 1926 and so the joking "Poldo" came naturally to address the young rookie in that way. But he would soon change his mind: Meazza, in that match played against US Milanese, scored three goals, ensuring Inter's victory and making everyone understand that a star was born. "Peppìn", as he was called in Milanese dialect, continued to play in the role of center forward in the Ambrosiana - as Inter had been renamed in the fascist era, after the forced merger with Milanese -: he immediately began to be noticed with goals as well as for his superfine class, so much so that, not yet twenty, he led his team to victory in the newborn Serie A championship in the 1929-1930 season, also making the title of top scorer his own with 31 goals.

In 1935-1936 he was again top scorer, this time with 25 goals, a feat he repeated in 1937-1938 by leading Ambrosiana-Inter to the Scudetto for the second time.

he 1938-1939 season marked the beginning of Meazza's decline, due to an injury – the famous "frozen foot", an occlusion of the blood vessels in his left foot – which then kept him away from the pitch for over a year. In the autumn of 1940 he returned to football, this time with the Milan shirt – the name then adopted by the Rossoneri team for political reasons – but he was no longer the champion he had once been, undermined by the injury that occurred to him.

After two seasons in the Rossoneri, he then spent a year at Juventus with whom he returned one last time to good scoring levels, closing the 1942-1943 championship in double figures (10 goals in 27 games) and forming, together with Riza Lushta and Sentiments III, the most prolific attacking department in the tournament. Then followed the so-called 1943-1944 war championship played in the ranks of Varese (7 goals in 20 games) and a brief stay at Atalanta in 1945-1946, the year in which he also held the role of coach for a short period, before a last season played with the shirt of his career, that of Inter, scoring his last goal in the home match against Triestina on 13 April 1947. 

International career
He made his debut for the national team not yet twenty years old on 9 February 1930 in Rome in Italy-Switzerland ended 4-2 with his two goals. Three months later, on 11 May of the same year, on his fourth appearance in the Azzurri shirt, Meazza made his first international signing, on one of the most glorious days in Italian football. Three feats of Balilla paved the way for the national team led by Vittorio Pozzo towards the first great triumph in its young history: Italy overcame Hungary in Budapest with a clear 5-0, in what, in fact, was the final of the first International Cup. That was also the first Italian victory at the home of the Danubian masters, an away game that, until then, had returned memorable reverses, and the name of the nineteen-year-old champion of Porta Vittoria broke into the ranks of the great stars of continental football. The echo of the feat, in Italy, was enormous. The match, followed on the radio by an incredulous audience, represented a turning point for football, no longer a vassal of Central European schools, and, after that match, Meazza will be the hero of all Italian sportsmen.

His career in the Azzurri was of absolute importance: he led Italy to the conquest of its first world championship, in the home edition of 1934, scoring 4 goals, including 2 in the preliminary against Greece, one against the United States in the round of 16 and the fundamental one in the replay against Spain in the quarterfinals; the latter match was replayed because the day before it had ended in a draw after extra time (penalty shootouts were not scheduled at the time): Meazza is said to have been "unblocked" after the Spanish coach did not mysteriously deploy his bogeyman, the famous goalkeeper Ricardo Zamora, considered at the time among the best in the world in his role. During the competition, Meazza played, as was increasingly the case, the role of interior instead of that of center forward at the beginning of his career.

The first match with the world champion national team was the famous Battle of Highbury, so called because it was played in London's Highbury stadium, at the home of the alleged "Masters" of England (who did not play in the World Cup because they arrogated to themselves the title of "inventors of football"). The game started very badly for Italy, who conceded 3 goals in the first 12 minutes and lost the centre-half Luis Monti to injury, but in the second half it was Meazza who revived the Italian fortunes with a brace. However, the 3-2 defeat in numerical inferiority against the English, in a very tough and masculine match as never before, is still remembered certainly not as a disgrace.

On 9 December 1934, in a match against Hungary, he scored goal number 25 (in 29 games) with the blue shirt, joining Adolfo Baloncieri at the top of the national team's scorer rankings. In the following match against France, on February 17, 1935, he scored 2 more goals that allowed him to jump to the top of the standings alone.

In 1938, acting in the midfielder position, he was the captain of the Azzurri at the Rimet Cup held in France: the second, prestigious success that brought Italy to the top of world football and that allows us to remember that team as one of the strongest of all time. On 16 June, in Marseille, in the semi-final of the world championship tournament, he scored goal number 33 against Brazil, a decisive goal, the last of his career in the national team (which went down in history because due to the breaking of the elastic of his shorts he took a penalty kick while holding them with one hand); later he will play another 7 games in the blue jersey without scoring. His record in front of the net will be reached only by Gigi Riva on 9 June 1973, again against the Brazilians in a friendly, and then surpassed on 29 September of the same year against Sweden. As an Azzurri striker, Meazza boasts the second longest stay in first place: 38 years, 3 months and 23 days.

In total, Meazza played 9 matches at the World Cup, scoring 3 goals.

Coaching career and death
After the experiences as a player-coach gained in Bergamo and Milan in the immediate post-war period, as a coach he led Pro Patria, again Inter in various circumstances, while in the two-year period 1952-1953 he was part of the technical commission of the national team supporting, as athletic trainer, the coach Piercarlo Beretta; he was also the first Italian to lead a foreign team, Beşiktaş, remaining in Turkey for five months starting in January 1949. He later became head of Inter's youth sector. Meazza died in 1979, at the age of almost 69.

Club career statistics

|-
|1927/28||Internazionale Milano||Championship||33||11
|-
|1928/29||rowspan="3"|Ambrosiana||Championship||29||33
|-
|1929/30||rowspan="2"|Serie A||33||31
|-
|1930/31||34||24
|-
|1931/32||rowspan="9"|Ambrosiana-Inter||rowspan="9"|Serie A||28||21
|-
|1932/33||32||20
|-
|1933/34||32||21
|-
|1934/35||30||18
|-
|1935/36||29||25
|-
|1936/37||26||11
|-
|1937/38||26||20
|-
|1938/39||16||4
|-
|1939/40||0||0
|-
|1940/41||rowspan="2"|Milano||rowspan="2"|Serie A||14||6
|-
|1941/42||23||3
|-
|1942/43||Juventus||Serie A||27||10
|-
|1944||Varese||Campionato Alta||21||7
|-
|1944||Ambrosiana-Inter||Campionato Alta||15||1
|-
|1945/46||Atalanta||Serie A||14||2
|-
|1946/47||Internazionale Milano||Serie A||17||2
479||270
479||270
|}

International career statistics

|-
|1930||5||6
|-
|1931||6||5
|-
|1932||4||2
|-
|1933||5||5
|-
|1934||9||7
|-
|1935||3||2
|-
|1936||4||2
|-
|1937||5||1
|-
|1938||6||3
|-
|1939||6||0
|-
!Total||53||33
|}

Honours
 Player 
Inter Milan
Serie A: 1929–30, 1937–38, 1939–40
Coppa Italia: 1938–39

Italy
FIFA World Cup: 1934, 1938
Central European International Cup: 1927–30, 1933–35
Central European International Cup runner-up: 1931-32

 Manager 
Beşiktaş
 Istanbul Football League runner-up: 1948–49

Individual
Serie A top goalscorer: 1929–30, 1935–36, 1937–38
Mitropa Cup top goalscorer: 1930, 1933, 1936
 FIFA World Cup Golden Ball: 1934
FIFA World Cup All-Star Team: 1938
Inducted into the Italian Football Hall of Fame (posthumous honour, 2011)
Inducted into the Walk of Fame of Italian sport: 2015
Inter Milan Hall of Fame: 2019

References

Category:1910 births
Category:1979 deaths
Category:Footballers from Milan
Category:Italian football managers
Category:Beşiktaş J.K. managers
Category:1938 FIFA World Cup players