DH Lawrence, in his travel book Sea and Sardinia, writes:-
“This land resembles no other place. Sardinia is something else. Enchanting spaces and distances to travel-nothing finished, nothing definitive. It is like freedom itself.”
With my All Time Sardinian XI, I have taken this sentiment to heart, creating a team that breaks Fifa rules by combining both male and female footballers. The second largest island in the Mediterranean sea boasts a proud footballing heritage. The men’s Cagliari team won the first Scudetto away from the north in 1970 and, the often renamed F.C. Sassari Torres Femminile, is the most successful league team of all time in Italian women’s football, picking up seven Scudetti.
Sardinians often capture the sporting public’s imagination – the Dettori horse racing dynasty (Gianfranco and his perhaps more famous son Frankie) hailing from Sarramanna in the south of Sardinia. Half of Italy’s 2020 Olympic gold medal winning 100m relay team were born on the island, Fabio Aru has won stages at all three Grand Tours in cycling and Dinamo Sassari stole the hearts of the Italian sports viewing public with their 2015 league triumph in basketball. People thinking of crossing a Sardinian should be warned that boxer Joe Calzaghe’s father, Enzo comes from the region.
Sardinians have excelled across sporting codes and I hope this XI demonstrates that football is no different.
Goalkeeper – Salvatore Sirigu (Born in Nuoro)
Sirigu hails from the same region as Sardinian footballing legends Gianfranco Zola and Antonella Carta. His goalkeeping process has led to a storied career across Europe, with his six year stint at Paris Saint-Germain (2012-2017) perhaps his most memorable period. Many Italians consider Sardinians to be a quiet group of people, Mauro Morandi famously spending nearly thirty years alone there, but Sirigu challenges this stereotype – his dressing room presence being a key factor in seeing off more glamorous competition for the #1 jersey in Paris. Sirigu has never played professional football in Sardinia, could a move back home be on the cards as he approaches the twilight of his career?
Right-back – Gianluca Festa (Born in Cagliari)
Festa represents a trend of sorts in Italian football – a player not afraid to finish their career in Sardinian’s highly competitive lower league football community. The Cagliari-born defender played for Nuorese, Tavolara and Sanluri before retiring at the age of 40. The Belgian superstar Luis Oliviera followed a similar route, even managing a team in Serie D. Festa combined playing right-back and centre-back at a variety of English Premier League clubs with spells in Italy with Cagliari, Roma and a brief stay at Inter. His experience, versatility and an eye for goal all being useful qualities in this team.
Centre-back & Player/Manager: Manuela Tesse (Born, Sassari)
The first of three calciatrice in this side. Tesse began her career with her hometown club, now known as F.C. Sassari Torres Femminile and won the first of their seven league titles in 1994. She went on to win trophies with four other clubs before retiring with 87 Italy caps. As a coach, she won the league with Torres in 2013 and has twice finished runner-up as Italian manager of the year.
Not many footballers in the men’s and women’s game can combine steel with brains and, at the time of her graduation, Tesse was one of only five women to have a UEFA Pro Master licence. You can read her Coverciano thesis here – roughly translated its title is ‘Tactical technical evolution in women’s football: Italy vs Brazil twenty years later ‘ and it functions as a comparison between two Brazil v Italy matches. The first game, a 2-0 defeat at the 1999 World Cup, featured herself on the pitch.
Centre-back: Marco Materazzi (parents born in Sardinia)
If Sardinia was an independent nation, Italy’s most infamous defender would have a passport. Both his parents were born on the island despite his not-very-Sardinian-sounding surname. Materazzi’s, father, Giuseppe forged a respectable lower league career in the 1970’s and briefly coached Caglari during a period spent in Serie B. His mother, Anna, could claim a deeper, more long standing connection to the island and was born in Tempio Pausania. She died when Marco was just fifteen and he often returns to Tempio where his mother is buried and his Sardinian cousins live. Materazzi ended his career with 15 red cards, perhaps explained by his DNA – S’istrumpa is a particularly intense form of wrestling native to Sardinia.
Left-back: Nicola Murru (Born, Cagliari)
There’s no pretending: Murru is the least glamorous name on the team sheet. Sardinia has not been a fertile ground for left sided defenders but Murru has quietly gone about his business at Cagliari, Sampdoria and Torino since 2011. 2021 was a big year in the Murru household, after 256 professional games and ten years without a goal, Nicola struck a low shot into the bottom corner of the Verona goal to register his first. The floodgates remained closed, however, and it continues to be his only professional shot to have crossed the opposition line. Murru is yet to entirely fulfill the promise he demonstrated as a youngster, when he became the youngest captain of Cagliari in 2016.
Central Midfielder: Nicolò Barella (Born, Cagliari)
Barella is the only household name of the current crop of Sardinian calciatore. He was discovered at the age of seven by this team’s captain and Inter legend, Gianfranco Matteoli and was spoken about in revered tones by Cagliari’s youth sector. At just 17 he made his debut for the Sardinian capital and broke Murru’s record to become their youngest club captain. His move to Inter has proved a success thus far, the only concern being burn-out owing to his importance to the team as well as the vast amount of minutes the Sardinian has clocked so far in his career.
Central Midfielder (C): Gianfranco Matteoli (Born, Ovodda)
Matteoli was the regista of Inter’s record breaking 1989 Scudetto winning side. Giovanni Trapattoni saw discipline and stamina in him and converted the Sardinian from an attacking midfielder to a deep lying presence in his team.
Matteoli hails from the mountainous Barbagia region of Sardinian, christened this way by Cicero in ancient times owning to the region’s resistance to Roman rule. This indefeasibility was a characteristic of Matteoli who moved back to Cagliari from Inter in 1994 and during his time there helped the team qualify for the UEFA Cup. Since retiring, he played a vital role in the development of Sardinian youth players in official and unofficial roles at Cagliari. Beyond Barella, Barbagia natives Andrea Carboni and Marco Sau owe their discovery to the Scudetto winning former regista.
Central Midfielder: Damiana Deiana (Born, Sassari)
Torres’ iconic 1994 Scudetto winning side has another entry in this All Time Sardinian XI. Deiana could play in both defence and midfield and unlike Tesse, spent much more of her career playing in Sardinia. She won three Scudetti with Torres but also plied her trade with Atetico Oristano and Olbia – a total of eleven seasons in Sardinia. She retired a Roma player, with eleven major honours in the women’s game and 78 caps for Italy.
No. 10: Gianfranco Zola (Born, Oliena)
When Gianfranco Zola was born in the village of Oliena in the Nuoro region of Sardinia, it’s a safe assumption to make that none of the roughly six thousand inhabitants would imagine him being bestowed the honour of Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II thirty eight years later.
Zola’s arrival in Serie A came after a very long apprenticeship with Sardinia’s lesser known clubs. As a youth he was with Oliena’s own Corrasi before moving to the regional team Nuorese and then heading to the men’s Torres team who were much less prestigious than their female counterparts. The Italian darth vader, Luciano Moggi noticed him playing in Serie C and signed him for Napoli at the age of 23. An apprenticeship under Maradona was followed by glory years at Parma and Chelsea before the call of his home island became too strong. In 2004 he returned to Sardinia to help Caligiari return to Serie A and retired a year later, scoring a brace in his final match.
No. 10: Antonella Carta (Born, Nuoro)
If Zola can claim to be the Maradona of Sardinia, then surely Antonella Carta is the Marta. She was born in the same region and just eight months after her fellow No.10 in this All Time Side and finished her career with more league winners medals (6) than Juventus’ femminile side (5). Her career took to her twelve different clubs and, despite starting out at Attilia Nuoro, most of her playing time was away from the island.
The year 2000, however, represented a glorious homecoming as she signed for Torres and played an instrumental part in their third league title win, helping the team score 117 goals in just 30 games. On top of league success, the team also won the Coppa Italia and Super Cup. Although her stay only latest another year, it is only fitting that a legend of the women’s game like Carta, has winners trophies with the greatest club side in the Italian game.
Her standing in the game has never been in doubt, in June 2022, she was inducted into the Italian Hall of Fame, a fitting mark of respect to a player with 350 goals in club 750 appearances and over a 100 caps for Italy with whom she has a 1986 Mudialito winner’s medal.
Forward: Pier Paolo Virdis (Born, Sassari)
Viridis is a good contender for the most underrated striker in the history of Italian football. He won three Scudetti at Juventus and Milan during the golden era of Calcio in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. He also finished ahead of players like Diego Maradona, Gianluca Vialli and Michel Platini to be crowned Capocannoniere in the 1986/87 season with seventeen goals.
This team is set up in a ‘Christmas tree’ formation and needs a deadly finisher – Virdis is the perfect man for the job. His manager at Milan, the great Arigo Sacchi said he ‘had all the qualities you look for in a pedigree striker.’ Perhaps his lack of recognition is to do with his unassuming personality? Sacchi has a chapter in his memoir titled, ‘The Book of Virdis’ a reference to the Sardinian’s habit of reading on the team bus. Readers keen to immerse themselves further in Sardinia’s culture could take a leaf out of Virdis’ book and pick up a work by Grazia Deledda – the island’s first, and to date, only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A fitting conclusion to this celebration of Sardinian football is to draw focus towards the importance of teams such as Nuorese and Torres who have played a key role in the development of many of these players. Visit Sardinia, one of the most beautiful places in the world, and take a trip to one of these clubs.