I am having to explain to Christian Vieri that despite us being in London and only a few miles from Lord’s, organising a game of cricket with Sir Ian Botham is probably going to be a bit tricky. I just don’t have that sort of pulling power, but also because the former Ashes legend is in Australia and a bit banged up after falling into crocodile-filled waters on a fishing trip.
The thing is, Vieri – the former striker who at one time became the most expensive footballer in the world when he moved to Internazionale in 1999 for about £30m – doesn’t just like cricket, he loves it, having spent most of his childhood in Australia.
As a legend of Serie A and the Azzurri – no Italian has more World Cup goals than Vieri’s nine – the 51-year-old talks often about his extraordinary football career when working as a pundit in Italy but rarely of the other sport that dominated his childhood in Sydney’s western suburbs.
Vieri comes alive at the mention of West Indies and when I tell him that Botham also played professional football. “I would go to the Sydney Cricket Ground and saw Australia play the West Indies,” remembers Vieri, who speaks in perfect English with a strong Australian accent, just as he did as a young man. “The West Indies are the best cricket team ever. Ever. In those days Viv Richards, Joel Garner, Malcolm Marshall, Clive Lloyd – all those guys – they were just phenomenal. Like the 20 best players in the world, they were always West Indians, like Michael Holding, like Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Haynes.
“Allan Border was my favourite Australian player,” continues Vieri. “He’s the boss of the boss. He gave me his cricket bat. But my No 1s are Viv Richards and Botham. Amazing, man. Maybe he was the best all-round cricketer that ever played the game.” What it is about West Indies that he loves so much? “Just like the West Indies, you’ve got to be confident in life if you want to go somewhere. Everyone’s going to put you down when you want to do something. So you’ve just got to just go for it 100%.”
Vieri, nicknamed Bobo, has never struggled for confidence, either in front of goal or off the pitch. But after playing for Marconi Stallions – a remarkable Sydney team that also nurtured Harry Kewell, Mat Ryan, Mark Schwarzer, Brett Emerton, Paul Okon and Steve Corica – making the move from Australia to Italy at 14 was a difficult and uncertain decision. Helped by his family, Vieri hit the ground running at non-league Santa Lucia, before being spotted by Prato and then the Italian giants Torino.
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“My grandfather was the only one that believed in me,” says Vieri. “And the first game that I played, when I scored four goals, my grandfather said to my auntie: ‘If we keep him here, he’s going to become one of the best strikers in the world.’”
Vieri’s grandfather offered him a reward of 5,000 lira for every goal. “After three games, we went to one. Because the first two games, I scored like seven goals, So he said: ‘Listen, I can’t keep up with this.’”But Vieri’s journey to becoming one of the world’s best was not straightforward, with an inconsistent three years in Serie B in the early 90s for three different clubs, only returning to Serie A in 1995 with Atalanta aged 22. Initially there were few signs of the player he would become but two years on Vieri won his first and only Scudetto with Juventus, and started the 1997 Champions League final against Borussia Dortmund, having scored in both the quarter- and semi-finals.
Alongside Zinedine Zidane and Alessandro Del Piero and under Marcello Lippi, Vieri learned a lot despite falling out with his manager, almost coming to blows in the dressing room during a league game.
“I was on the bench and [Alen] Boksic got injured,” says Vieri. “So I played like 10 minutes in the first half. Then Lippi says something to me. I said: ‘But I just played five minutes, what do you want from me?’ I was nervous I wasn’t playing so I answered back. He came at me. We had a fight, then he took me off. Not quite a physical fight, as another player stopped us. These things happen. That means you care. Zidane and I were so different,” he continues.
“He doesn’t talk much. He’s a silent man. And so when it was the winter I would take him home to my house and eat with my mum’s friends. But I would always play around with him. We always had an amazing relationship. I like to pick on everyone, you know. So he would come for dinner, my mum would speak in French and he would enjoy that.”
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Vieri stayed at Juventus for a single season before Atlético Madrid offered to nearly double his salary, and it was in Spain where Vieri truly became elite, scoring 24 goals in as many La Liga games to win the 1997-98 Pichichi award, despite Atlético finishing sixth. “At Atlético they were all relaxed. When you fill your head with stress, it’s all bullshit. During the pre-season, I was running like crazy. Everyone’s going: ‘Where are you going? Relax, take it easy.’”
Vieri even won a Ferrari 550 Maranello after betting Atlético’s president, Jesús Gil, he would score three goals in a European game against Paok, audaciously sealing his hat-trick from the byline. “I left the Ferrari in Spain,” says Vieri. “It was after I went to Lazio. After two months Atlético called me and said: ‘Listen, the Ferrari’s arrived.’ I said: ‘I can’t take it.’”
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At Lazio, Vieri scored an outrageous looping header in the 1998-99 Cup Winners’ Cup final against Mallorca at Villa Park and shone alongside Marcelo Salas but Lazio lost the title on the final day as Milan pipped them to the Scudetto by a point. Still, he enjoyed his time under Sven-Göran Eriksson – “always calm, relaxed, the opposite of me” – and in the Italian capital. “I would sometimes go around Rome on my motorbike, so Salas bought a Harley-Davidson, but he slammed it into a lamp-post,” says Vieri. The Chilean had to have seven stitches in his shin, but “nobody found out”.
Vieri’s world-record departure from Lazio to Inter in 1999 sent shockwaves through world football, so much so that the Vatican denounced the Catholic striker’s fee as “an offence against poor people”, while a Lazio fan, Elio Di Cristofalo, included Vieri in a suicide note. “Lazio have sold Vieri. All that money for a footballer, but money is not everything in life,” it read.
Inter, though, is where he became a club legend with 123 goals in 190 games – only nine players have scored more for the Nerazzurri. Vieri is talking at an event to promote Serie A’s streaming deal with the OneFootball app, and among the 600 fans in attendance in Shoreditch, many of the shirts are Inter, remarkably the only club of his 18-year career where he stayed for longer than a season.
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“In Inter, we were an amazing team,” smiles Vieri. “When I arrived I saw Ronaldo and said: ‘I came here to play with you!’ He just started laughing. We had phenomenal players. We could have won everything. But of all those players that you played up front with Ronaldo, Adriano, [Hernán] Crespo, [Álvaro] Recoba, Roberto Baggio, it was fucking awesome.”
Ultimately, injuries to others and bad fortune meant Vieri won only one Coppa Italia across that six-year period. Vieri played just 667 minutes with Ronaldo on the pitch (although they shared 18 goals in 11 matches in that time) before the Brazilian’s transfer to Real Madrid in 2002, a case of what could have been.
Further spells at Milan, Monaco, Atalanta, Sampdoria and Fiorentina ensued despite a serious knee injury just before the 2006 World Cup. But it is in the blue of Inter and Italy that Vieri will be remembered, his old-fashioned blend of speed, power, swagger and alpha energy akin to Gigi Riva stood out in an age of otherwise dainty Italian forwards: Del Piero, Baggio, Pippo Inzaghi, Francesco Totti.
That energy lives on in his current ventures, which range from running a YouTube Channel, Bobo TV, to a beer company, a padel tournament, a fashion line with Paolo Maldini and restaurants.
“I’m the happiest now I have ever been,” beams Bobo. “I have a wife and two daughters. Six and four years old. They’re my two best things in my life.”
We’ll have to try to find time for that game of cricket.
This article was amended on 17 November 2024 to correct the spelling of Gordon Greenidge’s last name.
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