Piero Trellini
THE MATCH 1982
THE STORY OF ITALY v BRAZIL
(LA PARTITA. IL ROMANZO DI ITALIA BRASILE)
Mondadori, July 2019
Rights sold: Debate/Penguin Random House SP (Spanish World), Grande Area Livros (Brazil), Pitch Publishing (English World).
​
Film Rights: Eliseo Multimedia (Sky docu-series, 2022)
​
Rights: Worldwide
​
ENGLISH SAMPLE AVAILABLE
​
BANCARELLA SPORT AWARD 2020
MASTERCARD LITERATURE AWARD 2020
MASSAROSA JURY AWARD 2020
APE AWARD 2020
BEST NARRATIVE PERFORMANCE BY CORRIERE DELLA SERA
BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TUTTOSPORT
FINALIST AT MEGAMARK PRIZE 2020
FINALIST AT CRAL PRIZE 2020
TUTTOSPORT BOOK AWARD 2020
​
THE SERIES BASED ON THE NOVEL AND WRITTEN ALSO BY PIERO TRELLINI IS ON SKY PLATFORM
«It wasn't just the best game ever played in a world championship; it was probably the best game of all time." Glen Levy, Time
"An admirable story, like everything that springs from a magnificent obsession".
Marco Cicala, Il Venerdì di Repubblica
"Trellini has turned her sweet, very strong obsession into this volume that represents a football Odyssey (...) I had never read, on a single game, anything so complete and engaging. In its genre: a masterpiece. ” Darwin Pastorin – Huffington Post
"The Match by Piero Trellini is an exceptional undertaking. (...) Books like these are no longer written. It's a super-novel (as it is called superhero), with superpowers, the greatest being the ability to revive the race with irresistible suspense as if we didn't know that Paolo Rossi would have made three goals. I recommend The Match to non-football fans. They will discover many things. About life, not about football."
Antonio D’Orrico, 7Corriere
"You may wonder how it is possible to equal the size of Moby Dick by writing about twenty-two men kicking a ball .... Trellini took the trouble to analyze the whole analyzer of the protagonists of that challenge ..." Giuseppe Culicchia, La Stampa
"A great book, but you can read it all in one go: the game comes only after about four hundred pages, but Trellini – like a writer of good detective novels – is very adept at attracting us slowly." Corriere dello Sport
​
ONE OF THE 2019 EDITORIAL HITS, WITH
FIVE REPRINTS AND RAVE REVIEWS!
MORE THAN 15.000 COPIES SOLD
THE ORIGINS, THE STORY AND THE AFTERMATH OF THE MOST EXCITING 90 MINUTES IN THE HISTORY OF FOOTBALL. THIS MARVELOUS BOOK BRINGS US INTO THE DETAILS OF A UNIQUE AND UNFORGETTABLE MATCH WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN DESCRIBED IN SUCH A WAY.
How would we observe a football match if we knew each and every detail about all those who lived it? What if we followed each player from his earliest life to that pitch? Why that specific ball? Why those uniforms? And that specific advertising? We would find ourselves in a new story, much more complex than we expected. Last but not least, if we are talking of the “finest World Cup game of all time” (as Time described it in 2010) this makes everything even more absorbing. On 5 July 1982 Italy and Brazil played against each other in the 1982 FIFA World Cup. Brazil was the favorite, and everything seemed to be already written. And yet the match became history. Several historical key figures of the period move in the background of this story: politicians such as Pertini, Spadolini, Franchi, Sordillo, Matarrese, Havelange, Blatter, Agnelli, Berlusconi, Figueiredo, Saporta and Gheddafi, and journalists such as Brera, Soldati, Arpino, Viola, Del Buono, Sconcerti, Cucci, Galeazzi or Pastorin. On the main stage we find Enzo Bearzot’s boys, from Dino Zoff to Paolo Rossi, and on the other side the Brazilians forming the so-called “magic square” (Socrates, Falcao, Zico and Cerezo). Their most unexpected secrets are unveiled: Israeli referee Klein’s son is fighting a war as the match unfolds; FIFA’s president Havelange, who is watching the game from the tribune, is alive thanks to the fact that his father missed the ferry to reach the departing Titanic; Saporta, organizer of the Mundial, had been hiding his identity to save his life. Then there are the countless lives of the players on the pitch. Trellini’s book is a total, all-encompassing book. Everything here is at the same time real and mythical.
Piero Trellini was born in Rome in 1970, and he still lives there. He wrote for “La Stampa”, “Il Messaggero” and “Il Tempo”. In 2008 he created Datazienda, which deals over 200 online newspapers and micro- newspapers. He spent, however, most of his life re-living the Italy-Brazil match disputed in 1982, collecting stories, anecdotes and real antiques, including referee Klein’s original whistle. He has published also Danteide (Bompiani, January 2021) and The Affaire. All the men of the Dreyfus case (Bompiani, March 2022) in the collection “Munizioni” directed by Roberto Saviano.