From Verona in Italy, Richard Hough charts the highs and lows of following his local team. In this Notes from Verona column he remembers the handful of Scots who have played in Serie A, including Joe Jordan’s memorable season with Verona.
This second monthly column from Verona comes at the tail end of an international break that saw Scotland qualify for Euro 2024.
Without even kicking a ball!
Spain’s one-nil victory in Oslo on Sunday evening guarantees Scotland at least second place in Group A of the 2024 UEFA Euro Qualifiers and comes on the back of qualification for Euro 2020 – Scotland’s first major tournament since 1998!
We are now surely in the midst of a new golden age for the Scottish national team.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to give this month’s column an unapologetic tartan tinge, focusing on that select group of Scottish players who made the leap, with varying degrees of success, from the Land of the Brave to the Bel Paese.
In a future column I’ll take a look at the talented crop of players, including Liam Henderson, Josh Doig, Lewis Ferguson and Aaron Hickey, who have tackled Serie A in more recent years, but for now let’s start with the legends of the past.
A brave(heart) few
Until just a few years ago, you were more likely to encounter a woolly mammoth on Sauchiehall Street than a Scotsman playing football in Italy.
I tried to buck that trend when I rejuvenated my five-a-side career here in Verona in 2011, but it was really only with the arrival of Liam Henderson in sunny Bari in 2014 that the tide began to turn. Now, after a decades-long barren spell, a seemingly endless stream of Scots are plying their trade on the sunny peninsula.
Prior to Henderson’s arrival in Italy, you have to go way back to the 1980s, a period when the Scottish national team were still regularly qualifying for major tournaments, to find the last Scots – Graeme Souness and Joe Jordan – to play in Italy.
Prior to that, Denis Law, the only Scot to have won the Ballon d’Or, was the only other Scotsman to have played in the Italian top division.
His sobering experience may explain why so few dared to follow in his footsteps.
Scots crash in Torino
In 1961, Denis Law and Joe Baker (born in England but raised in Scotland, Baker had scored 42 goals for Hibernian the previous season) signed for a combined fee that broke the Torino transfer record (approx. 300 million lire).
Almost immediately Law was embroiled in an ownership dispute with Inter, who claimed he had signed a pre-contract agreement with them.
On the pitch, the flamboyant Scottish winger struggled to cope with the ultra-defensive catenaccio style of football then widely practiced in Italy, which meant that chances to score were few and far between.
Off the pitch the two high-living foreigners soon became targets for the local paparazzi, who were fascinated by their off-field shenanigans. In one legendary incident in Venice on the eve of a game a particularly invasive pap nearly ended up in the canal.
Worse was to follow, as the pair were involved in a near fatal car crash in Baker’s brand-new white Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint.
At four o’clock in the morning, after visiting various nightclubs, Baker took a corner at excessive speed, his Alfa struck a wall below a monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi, flipped over and crashed into a lamppost thirty metres down the road. Suffering severe facial injuries, Baker had to be sedated before being taken to hospital. Law somehow emerged from the wreckage with barely a scratch.
Law, though, had had enough. In April 1962 he submitted a transfer request that was brusquely denied. In a subsequent match against Napoli, he was sent off – apparently on the instructions of his own coach who wanted to teach him a lesson! Disgusted at how he had been treated, Law went AWOL, flying home to Aberdeen, never to play in Italy again.
Having been marginalised in Italy, with Manchester United, Law went on to win the European Footballer of the Year in 1964 and lift the European Cup in 1968. Baker, recovered from his injuries, signed for Arsenal, and scored 100 goals in just 156 games.
Chastened by the experience, Italian clubs would shun Scottish talent for the next two decades. Or was it the other way around?
Jaws bites back
Joe Jordan had begun his playing career in 1968 at Greenock Morton before moving to Leeds United in 1970 for the not insignificant fee of £15,000. It took him a few seasons to establish himself in Yorkshire but by 1974 he was the club’s main target man, contributing seven goals as they coasted to the league title playing alongside the so-called “Scottish mafia” that included Gordon McQueen, Billy Bremner, Eddie Gray and Peter Lorimer.
In 1978, Jordan transferred to Manchester United for £350,000, a new record for a transfer between to English clubs, where he would score 37 goals in 109 appearances.
He joined AC Milan in 1981 and, though his achievements in Italy were relatively modest, he remains a much-loved figure in both Milan and Verona.
In his first season in Italy, he scored just two goals in 22 appearances, as the Milan giants were relegated to the second tier. The following season he scored 10 goals in 30 appearances, earning promotion with Milan as champions of Serie B.
Despite the setbacks on the pitch, Jordan would subsequently describe his transfer to Milan as the best move of his career.
At the end of his second season with Milan, Jordan was transferred to a high-flying Hellas Verona, who were then enjoying an unprecedented spell in the upper echelons of Serie A under the watchful eye of wily coach Osvaldo Bagnoli.
Jordan’s strength, size and experience were seen as the perfect foil for Verona’s up and coming young strikers, Maurizio Iorio and Giuseppe Galderisi.
Though he managed just two goals that season, Lo Squallo is still fondly remembered here in Verona, where he is generously credited with passing on his vast experience to the younger players who would go on to lift the Scudetto with Hellas Verona the following season.
Jordan, though, didn’t hang around to make history with Verona, leaving Italy in the summer of 1984 to make way for Preben Elkjær Larsen.
A highly respected figure in the dressing room – the most memorable moment in his long and varied coaching career involved a notorious touch line altercation with Milan’s Rino Gattuso at the San Siro. The uncompromising Scotsman had taken the precaution of removing his glasses (but not his teeth) to tell a topless Gattuso to fuck-around and find out – surely one of the defining moments of Champions League football!
Like many of the Brits who were drawn to Italy during that period (Blissett, Hateley, Rush and, later, Gascoigne), the perceived wisdom is that Jordan’s time in Italy ultimately ended in failure. Though few doubt his talent or commitment, with just a handful of goals and a relegation with Milan, that’s probably a fair assessment.
But Jordan cemented Scotland’s reputation in Italy for producing physical, uncompromising players, and he is remembered in both Milan and Verona with nothing but widespread respect and admiration.
Souness paves the way for a historic scudetto
There were few less compromising or more physical players than the next Scot to arrive in Italy.
Graeme Souness was the captain of arguably the most successful Liverpool team ever, where he spent seven seasons, won five League Championships, three European Cups and four League Cups alongside fellow Scots Alan Hansen and Kenny Dalglish.
Souness left Liverpool in 1984, joining Sampdoria for a fee of £650,000, joining England international Trevor Francis who had played in Genoa since 1982. Like Jordan at Verona, Souness brought much needed muscle and experience to an emerging group of young Italian players that included the likes of Roberto Mancini, Pietro Vierchowod and Gianluca Vialli.
As others had found before him, there were cultural adjustments to make.
Accustomed to the heavy drinking culture around the English game, at lunchtime in Genoa he watched on in surprise as his teammates ordered a bottle of wine each, only to realise it was to last them for four or five days! He soon discovered too that the simple routine of a post-match beer was one that was frowned upon in the highly disciplined world of elite Italian football.
But on the pitch Souness undoubtedly delivered. In his first season with the club, Sampdoria won the Coppa Italia for the first time in club history. It was Souness himself who scored the winning goal in the final (look out for the cheeky back heel from Vialli to Francis in the build up).
Indeed, Souness is widely regarded as one of the few to have successfully made the transition from the English to Italian game. Though he was long gone by then, in 1991 Sampdoria won their first and only Serie A title. Vialli, Mancini and Vierchowod, the young players that Souness had protected and encouraged, were instrumental to Sampdoria’s success. As Vialli explained many years later, Souness and Francis weren’t in Italy on holiday, “they were there to win something and pass on their knowledge“.
That respect between Souness and the Italian players was clearly mutual, as his emotional tribute to his former teammate Gianluca Vialli demonstrates (Graeme Souness breaks down in tears as interview cut short during emotional Gianluca Vialli tribute).
It’s that kind of professionalism and competitiveness that the next generation of Scottish players in Italy seems to have taken on board.
But that’s a story for another day!