Mazzola confession on referee Gonnella resurfaces after his death

Sandro Mazzola died at 83, and his memory has already become tangled with an ugly moment from recent days: chants from the home end during the minute's silence before Fiorentina-Napoli. But another story, confessed for the first time in a late-2020 interview, has also put the former Inter captain back at the centre of Napoli's history — an attempt to influence referee Gonnella during an Inter-Napoli match, almost fifty years earlier.

Guardi, lei sta arbitrando malissimo e ci farà perdere la partita e lo scudetto, se ne assumerà la responsabilità e le colpe. E non garantisco su come la gente allo stadio la prenderà.

In the same interview, Mazzola admitted his regret: "Era quello che pensavo, non erano minacce: ero nero perché davvero ero convinto che ci avesse danneggiati. Fu un errore, non dovevo farlo, ne parlai anche con Juliano tante volte e lui mi ha sempre perdonato." Juliano is Antonio Juliano, Napoli's captain in those years, known to everyone as Totonno.

The rest of the account, told with a smile, was lighter in tone. Mazzola revealed he had toyed with the idea of finishing his career at Napoli, at Juliano's own urging, and that he was one of the few players for whom masseur Gaetano Masturzo made coffee — not only with the national team at the San Paolo, but also when he wore Inter's shirt.

For a fanbase that waited decades before its first title in 1987, the suspicion of having been robbed by refereeing has never been just a bar-stool theory. Hearing it confirmed — even so many years later, and from the voice of someone who admits it as a mistake — touches a nerve that the chants of a few days earlier had already reopened in the worst possible way.