The Other Side of a Football Icon

We’re fascinated by liminal spaces because they exist on the edges of what we know and what we fear. It’s where we confront the quiet tension of waiting, the unease of not knowing what comes next. They force us to acknowledge that we are always in a process of becoming, and this ambiguity, though unsettling, is profoundly human. It also makes for really good photos.

In Simplemente Del Piero, Juventus legend Alessandro Del Piero is captured in such a liminal state—between injury and recovery, in the months after the death of his silent father, Gino, galavanting in the spaces between matches. For me, this taps into a deeply felt fascination: we see him not as an iconic footballer with the world’s sharpest sideburns, but as Alex, a man paused on the threshold of something larger.

I remember Del Piero only after his injury, not before. In my memory, he was always a man to stroll around, letting the ball do the work, but before overstretching to reach a fatal through-ball against Udinese in 1998—a move that popped his ACL like the cork on a half-decent bottle of Asti—he was pure motion, lightning fast, and at 23 years old, in with a fair shot at being named the best player on the planet. What followed was an agonising wait—for fitness, for form, for something that might never return.

Simplemente arrived in 2002, a book of intimate portraits by the late Gianni Giansanti, best known as Pope John Paul II’s personal photographer. For 27 years, Giansanti shadowed God’s Messenger on Earth, capturing gladhands with world leaders and intimate prayers in solitude, even documenting Papa’s visit to forgive his would-be assassin. That eye for the sacred and the profane prepared him well for Del Piero. The public moments on the pitch are striking, but it’s the private ones that bring the book to life.

When they agreed to work together, Giansanti demanded 'unlimited' artistic freedom, even joining Del Piero and his wife Sonia on vacation in Miami.

“At first, Del Piero was a bit worried,” Gianni’s son Andrea told me via email. “But my father was one of a kind, obsessed with his work: narrating people’s intimate and public life through pictures. He was proud of how his relationship with Alex grew over time and how that intimacy unlocked the path to take such amazing pictures.”

I learned about the book through a friend but, too skint to buy it, I pieced together what I could from scans online. I was in my twenties, not much older than Alex in these photos, and stuck in my own liminal space, spending it as we must: blessed with energy and cursed to expend it searching for all the wrong things. But I found Gianni and Alex’s intimacy brilliant, even as it was regurgitated as fodder for Monday Moodboards and screenshotted into oblivion. No matter how many times I saw the photos—of Del Piero alone in a changing room as a cleaner swept or doing sit-ups on a pristine towel atop sun-battered roof tiles, reclining in a drop-top Cadillac in Miami or piloting an airboat through a deserted Floridian swamp—their impact did not dim.

Del Piero, on the field, was all about constant momentum—defence-splitting passes, long sweeping diagonals, curling shots from obscene angle. But here, Giansanti’s photos ask us to sit in the stillness of his downtime. In that space, he is not the player he was, nor the one he will be. And in that stillness, too, I faced my own uncertainties: not knowing if this moment is the one before everything starts to fall into place or the one where you realise it never will.

Liminal spaces strip us of our roles, leaving only the core of who we are. But as the Piedmontese poet Cesare Pavese once wrote, we do not remember days, we remember moments. We know what became of Del Piero: one of Turin’s greatest idols, one of the coolest to ever bang one top bins, a player who rebuilt his game around guile rather than speed. Still, it is here—in these photos, moments frozen in frame, largely alone or with his wife Sonia—that I remember Del Piero most clearly. An icon, suddenly mortal, caught in quotidian repose, more notable because his every day is so extremely different from our own, except it seems, at times, here; where he’s just stuck in the same waiting game as the rest of us.

The book’s most famous image is one you’ve likely seen and features a rare third in the frame. It’s night-time at Desert Autogrill on the Milan-Turin motorway. Zidane, fresh off winning the World Cup, stands alone, eating pizza with a knife and fork, camera right, while Del Piero and Sonia neck passionately across the room.

“This is one of the photos I care about the most,” Del Piero wrote on his blog, a decade later. “It holds almost everything: love, friendship, simplicity, normality, light heartedness, tenderness, the desire to be together, feeling lucky, full of life.”

I own this book now, by the way, a mark of my own becoming. And flicking to this photo, I used to think the picture was just cool, come here and gaze at the absolute boys. But what lingers, now, isn’t just Zidane’s diligent culinary hate-crime or Alex lost in the moment. It’s the space between things—between games, between roles, between Milan and Turin—when, in the quiet, everyone is themselves and anything is still possible.

“The memory of a night in a motorway restaurant,” Del Piero adds, “with Sonia, Zizou, Gianni, a pizza, and a camera that saw what’s behind an image like this...”