Torino won five consecutive league titles in the 1940s, playing a flowing brand of football with such dominance they were named Grande Torino. Their dominance was tragically and shockingly halted on the 4th of May 1949. Returning from a friendly with Benfica in Portugal, the plane crashed into the hilltop Basilica of Superga in Turin.
The air disaster claimed the lives of all those on board, including most of the team and their coaches, as well as accompanying journalists and crew.
Roberto Pennino’s book, originally published in his native Holland, has been translated and published in the UK by Pitch Publishing. It is a well-written, well-researched and moving account of that wonderful team, and serves as a fitting tribute. I caught up with Roberto to hear of about his own history with Grande Torino and his writing process.
The book is available via pitch publishing and all major booksellers. You can also read our previously published extract- You can read an extract from the book on the Gentleman Ultra– An extract from Immortal Torino by Roberto Pennino –
James Oddy (JO): How did you come to write about the Grande Torino team?
Roberto Pennino (RP): The start was in July 1999. The air crash was 50 years ago at that point in time and I was in Italy. I saw a newspaper about that team that was a couple of months old. I was fascinated by it. It was a whole page of pictures of the players that died in that crash. In January of that same year my mother had suddenly died, and she was only 49 years old. So those two things got connected in my head because my mom was born in the same year that Il Grande Torino perished. Something about it made it stick and because I didn’t know anything about that air crash disaster, I started looking for books about it. I realised in The Netherlands where I’m born, raised and still live, the Grande Torino story was not known at all. There were no books or articles that I knew of. I had become so involved in the story that I wanted to bring it to The Netherlands. I’ve found out in the years since that there are some pretty good books in Italian.
JO: What’s your own background in Italian football or Italy? Were you a Torino fan?
RP: I wasn’t a Torino fan at all. But somehow this story about the great Torino team, it supersedes everything, even in Italy itself. Even if you’re a Roma fan or a fan of whatever team. Everybody respects the story and the history of Il Grande Torino. In the sixties my father came from Sicily to the south of The Netherlands. That’s my Italian, or Sicilian, heritage.
JO: Has the Grande Torino team become mythical because of the tragedy? Or was it the beauty of the football that has given them a lasting legacy?
RP: Well, that’s an interesting question, in a sense that obviously you can never know for sure. But I think that a tragedy like this always adds to the myth. I wrote my book not to discard the myth, but to investigate the myth. How was this team regarded in the days that they were still around? I dug deep in the archives of that time. So, the statements of people are not being influenced by the fact that they died in the air crash. If you look just at the football, it was a very strong team with key players like Valentino Mazzola as the captain. They died in their prime and won five titles in a row. They formed the backbone of the Italian team. 10 Torino players played for Italy against Hungary (in 1947), the most from any club side to appear for the national team in one match.
They had a flavour of what became to be known as total football, like the Dutch played in the 70s. Everybody had to be able to attack, but also to defend. It was an organic type of style, and they scored a lot of goals. The crash added to the myth, but if you look back like I did at newspapers of the time, they must have been a great team to watch.
JO: We have a lot of readers of the site who are writers and researchers in their own right. Can you tell me your progress for such in-depth research?
I always enjoyed unravelling things, to dig very deep into stuff, because what I experienced by reading all those Italian books is that writers are mentioning or writing stuff that other people have written before. There’s no problem with that. But for example, when Grande Torino went to Lisbon for a game against Benfica before they perished in Superga there was a certain urban legend. In a lot of books that I read, it is said that when they came back from the game against Benfica, they had a stopover in Barcelona. At that moment, they are supposed to have met players of AC Milan who were coming back from Madrid. Well, legend had it that the chairman of Espanyol heard that both were at the airport, and he suggested playing a match together, to have those two big teams in his stadium. That was strange. I mean, they would have been maybe half an hour or an hour at the same place at the same time, and how did the Espanyol chairman know that? Then you dig into the archives of a newspaper, and I spent many hours just trying to find something about the meeting between those players, and all of a sudden, after three weeks of looking out for something that would give me something to work with I found a very small article. They had met on the flights out, not during the return form Lisbon. You know, you have to be a little bit crazy, but to me, that is something to be very excited about. When you find out something, because you had a hunch that it didn’t add up, that it was strange, something almost every book about the team mentioned, and then I found out that it wasn’t entirely true. The meeting happened, but on a different moment. I really enjoy unravelling things like that.
JO: Torino was considered to be a big team, like Juventus or Inter these days. The players of that team had a spell of massive success. Is that why are still so loved?
RP: I think there’s a sliding doors element in the story. What would have happened had they not gone to Lisbon? It’s easy and logical to say they could have been champions for the next ten years. But it didn’t happen. And that’s something I investigated. How would life be for the Torino squad if they would have come home and just started a new season a couple of months later? And, I mean, there were things changing. The fact that this disaster happened, everything was being put into ashes, like Pompeii. Those players are forever together as that invincible team.
But the English trainer Leslie Lievesley, he had already signed the contract for Juventus. Mazzola, the big-name captain, he was very close to going to Internazionale because he wanted, at the end of his career, finally make some more money for his family. Every great team has an end of a run. Ajax in the 70s, AC Milan around 1990 with Gullit, Rijkaard and Van Basten or Barcelona with Pep Guardiola and Messi. Every big team has a cycle of success that ends. You cannot have 10 years on the same level – winning everything. It’s not going to happen… Maybe they could have, over a period of four or five years, created a new team. The older guys with maybe a couple of players from outside of Turin. But the club was an empty shell after the crash. Everything was gone, everybody was gone. So, their reign was over and that, of course, massively changed the course for the club.
But there’s one thing that could have been different. And that would be the participation of the national team in the 1950 World Cup, because if the Torino players would have been still around Italy could have had a completely different run, I’m sure. Not that they necessarily would have won the World Cup in Brazil, but due to the Superga crash they were forced to send a team with, whilst I wouldn’t say mediocre players, but definitely with a lot less talented players than the Torino ones. And because of the air crash, the Italian federation didn’t want to lose another team. So they had a very long and fatiguing trip to Brazil by boat.
In a sense, in 1968 Mazzola’s son, Sandro, filled that gap by winning the European Championship with Italy. It was the first title for the national team for 30 years.
Sandro Mazzola with a Dutch copy of the book
JO: Was there any players or people involved with the club that whilst you were researching you felt history had forgotten a little bit?
RP: It depends if you mean Italy or the rest of the world. In Italy, the players are still well remembered. But Torino’s long-time Hungarian coach, Erbstein, deserves more credits for his influence on the game. He had to flee Italy due to antisemitism. He had a philosophy that was very modern for that time. Erbstein believed firmly in humanism, and he looked at his players first and foremost as human beings. Dutch coach Louis van Gaal, who implemented a very similar idea at Ajax in the 90s, was very impressed that there was a visionary man called Erbstein who in a sense preceded him in the 40s.
