Whippings and some caresses. This could be the perfect epitaph to remember Aldo Agroppi, someone who, despite his humble origins, also knew how to play with words, thanks to a polemic vis paradigmatic of his character and his being, a Tuscan football man, in a inseparable and incendiary mixture. A polemicist when polemicists were yet to be born, an anti-Juventus supporter when it was not yet a well-paid profession, a midfielder in the soul before on the pitch, certainly coherent, at least from what can be said.

Piombino, his hometown, Ternana, Potenza, Turin and Perugia the teams he played with. Pescara, Pisa, Perugia, Padua, Fiorentina, Como and Ascoli are the ones he coached, some more times. In his palmares there is a Viareggio Tournament with Genoa, without ever making his first team debut, and two Italian cups with Torino, one in 1968 and the other in 1971, the club with which he became Aldo Agroppi who we later learned about: he entered Philadelphia as a Juventus fan, thanks to Omar Sivori, and left those walls ‘Vecchio Cuore Granata’, as the verb goes Turinist. Between 1972 and 1973 he wore the national team shirt 5 times.

Against the building, paying out of his own pocket

A non-trivial career which, as for other borderline characters, risks, in memory, being buried by controversy, in defense of transparency – from his point of view – and of a certain type of football that no longer exists for some time. For those who have collected ten thousand vinyl records, the song “Non, je ne regrette rien” by Édith Piaf would seem perfect, but it’s a shame that on the occasion of her eightieth birthday she wanted to change her mind about the referees, apologizing for having attacked them several times and considering them, in the end , the only category that keeps football alive, surrounded by spoiled and overpaid players. A ‘lapse in style’ for those who have always been too intelligent not to understand that the attacks of the past were going to taint an already too tense environment, where those metaphorical punches, never given at random and well aimed, hit the direct ones with force interested. On the other hand, it must be said that he has always paid for his ideas and words personally. To be clear: while Maurizio Sarri entered the ‘Palazzo’ through the main door, Agroppi always attacked him.

Love-hate with Florence

With Florence and Fiorentina, the city and the team of Tuscany so represented in his life and speech, he had a relationship of love and hate: from the ferocious aggression by some hooligans disguised as Viola fans – who considered him responsible for the exclusion of Antognoni – in his first experience on the Giglia bench, in the 1985-86 season, to the disaster in 1992-93, when he took charge of the club after Gigi’s dismissal Root – with Fiorentina second in the standings – and brings them to the brink of relegation, certified by Chiarugi and Antognoni at the end of the championship. Yet this enormous distance between facts and words did not prevent him from becoming the sought-after and feared commentator on historic radio and television broadcasts.

The Cyrano de Bergerac of Italian football

«I believe I have always been a responsible and serious person. That is: I continue on my way, working and, when I left, I did it for a question of morality and correctness. Today we live in a world where everyone is clinging to their seats and I, however, when I realize I am causing harm, remove the inconvenience by paying personally from every point of view and not just the economic one”, declared Agroppi in one of the many interviews given . With that typical Tuscan habit of not knowing how to remain silent and repeatedly taking pleasure in giving the final thrust that angered the targets of his attacks, without exception. At times confusing the hatred for matters of the pitch and contracts of the past for battles of the present and taking on the role of the Cyrano de Bergerac of Italian football, shouting “At the end of the license I touch”, with that unmistakable grin that he sent the opponents he marked roughly on the pitch went crazy.

Values ​​and that ‘forgone’ minute

The rest? A difficult life, marked by poverty, the death of his brother and the separation of his parents. But it was precisely in those roots that he found the strength to create a solid family impervious to everything that happened, first on the pitch and then on television. Almost sixty years together with his wife Nadia, for whom he always spent sweet words, two children, Nilio and Barbara, and his beloved grandchildren to whom he wrote letters: «… so that the good I think of them survives in their heads». An act of absolute love for a man considered rough and angular, to whom all that remains is to dedicate his favorite song: “Look at the moon / Look at the sea / From this night without you I will have to stay / Mad with love / I would like to die / While the moon above is watching me / All that remains / All the regret / Because I sinned in wanting you so much / Now I’m alone in remembering / And I wish I could tell you / Look at that moon / Look at that sea”.

That of his Piombino, who greeted him in the farewell room of the Public Assistance. To commemorate him, starting from the semi-finals of the Italian Super Cup and for all the matches of the weekend – including advances and postponements -, the FIGC had planned a minute’s silence, later canceling the one for the tournament being played in Riyadh, for fear of generating another unpleasant episode like what happened last year with Gigi Riva. Who knows what Agroppi would have said, he who couldn’t stay silent.