Legendary Italian goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon has called time on his glorious career after announcing his retirement from football aged 45.
“That’s all folks! You gave me everything. I gave you everything. We did it together,” he posted in English on social media.
Buffon hangs up his gloves after two more years at Parma, the club where it all started almost 30 years ago, when Italian football was the best in Europe.
He was signed to Parma until next summer, but he won’t be helping the Serie B club try to get back to the top flight after two years.
Buffon is a reminder of a golden age of football when the best players went to play in Serie A and Italy made a lot of world-class players.
The former captain of Italy has a record 176 caps for his country. He also holds the record for most games played in Serie A, with 657 games since 1995.
When he was 17, Buffon made his debut for Parma against AC Milan and stopped George Weah and Roberto Baggio. He went on to win 27 major trophies.
Most of them came from his 19 years at Juventus, where he won 10 Serie A titles and 5 Italian Cups. In 1999, he won the UEFA Cup with Parma, which may have been the best team in the club’s history.
He also won Ligue 1 with Paris Saint-Germain in 2019 before going back to Juve, but the 2006 World Cup victory will be what people remember him for most.
Buffon was one of the best players on the Azzurri team, which had been hurt by the “Calciopoli” match-fixing scandal, which cost him two league titles as Juve’s custodian. The Azzurri beat France on penalties after beating Germany in the semi-finals.
That was the last hurrah for a generation that had made Italy one of the best football nations in the world. As Italy’s fortunes slowly went downhill, he had to go out in the group stage twice in a row and then quit not long after Italy didn’t make it to the 2018 tournament.
In his last season with Juventus, two years ago, Buffon won the Italian Cup with Federico Chiesa. This was 22 years after he won the same trophy with Parma with Chiesa’s father, Enrico.
But Buffon’s career has also been full of scandals, including rumours that he is, or at least used to be, a far-right supporter.
For the 2000-2001 season, he put the number 88 on his jersey, which is a neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler.” This led to a lot of criticism.
Two years ago, he wore a t-shirt under his uniform with the neo-fascist slogan “Boia chi molla,” which roughly means “Death before surrender.” This was for a game against Lazio, whose fans are some of the most far-right in Europe.
He publicly apologised for the shirt and said he didn’t know where the phrase came from. However, in his book “Number One” from 2010, he said he was still shocked at how he was “crucified.”
Buffon also said that he chose the number 88 because he wasn’t allowed to have the number 00, which he wanted to stand for “balls” as a symbol of his return from an injury. He said that the number 88 was just four balls.
He changed his number to 77, but in his book he was angry about the criticism he got from the Jewish community in Rome. He said that his only mistake was “being weak.”
“I shouldn’t have apologised and I should have pushed to keep the number I had already chosen,” he said.
Soon after he won the World Cup, he was found not guilty of illegally betting on Serie A games. These accusations came up at the height of the “Calciopoli” scandal.
