MILAN – Unforgettable, historic, legendary. There are few adjectives that can truly hope to sum up Giacinto Facchetti: goalscoring full-back, football icon through the ages, president of F.C. Internazionale. It is all of this that Gianfelice Facchetti has tried to reflect in a new website dedicated to the man he knew simply as dad.
The site will go live on 12 May, a date forever linked to the great Giacinto’s career. For it was on 12 May 1965 that he scored past Liverpool in the European Cup semi-final to send Inter marching on their way to a second successive cup win.
"The idea for a website about dad came about when my sister Barbara started talking to the journalist Marco Traferri," explains Gianfelice. "We let things stew for a few years, then we made up our minds and from that moment on I set about gathering up the content.
"We got Fabio Monti – the legendary Corriere della Sera reporter – involved in the project too. He wrote a kind of autobiography featuring 333 dates from dad's time as a player and an official. It’s going to be an encyclopaedic space with lots of exclusive audio and video content: the European Cup finals from the UEFA archives, a special programme shown on Sky and Inter Channel plus extracts from Rai broadcasts.
"There’ll also be his last interview with Massimo Raffaeli, a Radio Popolare documentary and audio reports by Alfredo Provenziale from the Tutto il Calcio Minuto per Minuto programme."
It promises to be a fascinating website for collectors too: "We have lots of rarities and it was tough to pick just a few. Panini provided us with the entire sticker collection for Giacinto – their first edition was the same year that dad made his debut. There’ll even be stamps, coins and other memorabilia we’ll insert as we go along.
"The home page will feature a phrase dad said in his last interview: ‘Time is a gentleman.’ Plus there’ll be a section dedicated to initiatives organised in his memory and to the vision of football and sport in general that Giacinto always supported. It’s something that lives on thanks to prizes like La Gazzetta dello Sport’s Il Bello del Calcio and indeed the Primavera – Trofeo Giacinto Facchetti championship."
