Fabio Quagliarella says he wasn’t ready to retire from football and would have signed for Sampdoria for free to help them in their promotion bid. The former Napoli and Juve striker was a free agent after the summer and decided to call time on his career last week, having turned 40 earlier this year.
Speaking with La Gazzetta dello Sport, Quagliarella explained why he was not ready to quit and would have returned to his beloved Samp, citing a ‘moral obligation’ to the club that believed in him:
A career finale at a high level.
‘I always trained until the last day, I was never managed, and that’s the thing I’m most proud of, you can ask any coach, even last year I was doing the same training as a 20 year old teammate’.
There were stories that you would quit because you were no longer physically whole….
“Write it in big letters. I didn’t quit for physical reasons, no interesting offer came in and so I said stop. Up until a couple of months before the end of the championship I had decided to stop, then seeing Samp’s club situation and seeing that I was doing well, I thought I could give a hand to get them back up. I could have also signed for nothing, I was not interested in money, I would never have considered other solutions, it was like a moral obligation to a club that had always believed in me and where I had a great time. I had two or three requests from Serie A teams, but I didn’t consider them. At the same time I never thought I would get to play until I was 40 years old in A and, I’m honest, I was really proud of that. Elsewhere I would have been a third or fourth striker. But then it was better to give Samp a hand.”
Instead…..?
“A week after the new ownership took office, I had guessed something. Then with a phone call at ten o’clock at night, five days before the meeting, they told me that they would focus on young players. Let me be clear: no hard feelings towards the club, but that is the reality of the situation. I quit that day, and from there in the past few days in a television interview on Sky my joke was born, that I was no longer in a position to continue. In reality I stopped because that was my decision.
Surprised by Samp’s uphill start?
‘With such a young team set-up one could imagine some initial difficulties. I thought that a skeleton of three or four players who really cared about Samp would be maintained, and I can confirm that many would stay. Then, you know, everyone is waiting for you because you are Sampdoria when a team comes to play at the Ferraris. If anything, I would have been surprised at the opposite. You can see, however, that Pirlo has ideas, I’ve spoken to some of my former teammates and they have confirmed it, even if you need the right players to put them into practice.”
The national team lacks a real bomber.
“You have to take into account that you are in training camp for a week and after 4-5 days you play: in the Azzurri there is a different pressure, in your club you get 5-6 goal balls, one of them you can convert, and you are a striker. In Italy you’re not: you’re just waiting to see if the right man is there, and in any case it’s not easy to have the same continuity you have at your club. Spalletti is turning everyone around a bit, I think he will find a solution in the end. There are also fewer champions than in the days of Toni, Gilardino, Cassano, Di Natale, Totti, Del Piero. Not only that: you have to be unpredictable, you have to invent something, like Raspadori, Politano, Chiesa, Berardi do’.
You had Mazzarri at Napoli in 2009. Can he lift the Italian champions?
“First of all the choice surprised me, but in my opinion De Laurentiis needed a coach who knew the environment and had done very well at Napoli. He had been out of the game for a couple of years, but he knows how to move and what needs to be done. Obviously, football has evolved, I read that he should reintroduce the 4-3-3, we are all curious, but he doesn’t have an easy task”.
