It was winter in the Spanish capital. Fabio Cannavaro was leaving Real Madrid’s training ground when a stranger flagged him down. An autograph hunter, he thought. A piece of paper was produced from a pocket. But there was no pen to apply the accompanying signature.
Instead, he was presented with what turned out to be a business card. Cannavaro saw the red lettering of France Football, the magazine behind the Ballon d’Or. Their reporter asked if he could get in the Italian defender’s car. He was insistent. The vote for that year’s award was happening in real time and a tipping point had been reached.
He thought Cannavaro was going to win. Cannavaro thought it was a joke.
This was 2006 and, only a few months earlier, Cannavaro had captained his country to World Cup final glory. Still, he didn’t think much of his chances. Zinedine Zidane’s red card in that final gave him a shot. But a defender had never won the award, given to the world’s best footballer over the previous year (and none have since). Franco Baresi had come second in 1989, Paolo Maldini “only” third in 1994.
But it was to be different for Cannavaro. During that tournament in Germany, he earned the nickname ‘The Berlin Wall’.
As the fourth and, so far, final Italian to collect the Ballon d’Or and the most recent man to skipper the country’s national team to victory at a World Cup, Cannavaro is often asked about Italy’s travails. Why have they gone from winning the greatest tournament of all to not even qualifying for the finals in 2018 and 2022?
On some occasions, he has been critical: Italy has lost itself. It has tried to be different when it does not need to be ashamed of its football DNA. In others, he has been more diplomatic: football is cyclical and, sooner or later, a new generation will bring renewed competitiveness.
Giovanni Leoni, the Parma centre-back on his way to Liverpool for an initial £26million ($35.3m), was born less than a month after Cannavaro was presented with the Ballon d’Or in November 2006, so he is too young to have seen him in his prime.
Aged only three when Italy’s defence of their title ended in a bottom-of-the-table and winless group-stage exit from South Africa 2010 (a point below New Zealand), he was seven when they made it to their most recent World Cup in Brazil, again going out after three first-phase games, beating England but losing to Uruguay and Costa Rica.
In truth, producing defenders such as Leoni has never been an issue for Italy in the meantime. It’s the Baggios, Tottis, Vieris and Del Pieros they have lacked.
Leoni, who after only 14 starts in Serie A is already being hastily talked about as a future captain of Italy, grew up in the era of the BBC defence — Leonardo Bonucci, Andrea Barzagli and Giorgio Chiellini — at Juventus. They have been succeeded by Alessandro Bastoni and a late bloomer in Francesco Acerbi as a pair at Inter. It has been a time of European Championship finals lost (2012) and won (2021) and Italian back lines being the bedrock of Champions League runners-up in 2015, 2017, 2023 and 2025.
Only one of those great centre-backs played outside of Italy going into their peak years.
The reason for that is quite simple. For many Italians, it doesn’t get any bigger than playing for one of their country’s big three. Few stages are greater than San Siro. Few clubs, historically, guarantee you success like Juventus. Cannavaro, for instance, only moved to Madrid on the back of that World Cup, the Calciopoli scandal and Juventus’ subsequent relegation. Chiellini and Bonucci departed Turin in their twilight years for experiences in Los Angeles (for Chiellini) and Berlin then Istanbul.
The exception is Barzagli, and it’s Barzagli to whom one Italian sporting director, speaking on the condition of anonymity, compares Leoni.
A squad player at that 2006 World Cup and a member of the Wolfsburg team that upset the odds to win the German Bundesliga three years later, the Tuscan heart-throb, now a pundit and wine-maker, was Andrea Agnelli’s favourite signing throughout his chairmanship of Juventus — and not just because he cost as little as €300,000 (£258,000; $350,000 at the curent rates) in January 2011.
Chiellini and Bonucci were already at the club when Barzagli arrived a few months before his 30th birthday. Juventus were floundering, finishing seventh for a second season running, and wouldn’t start a nine-year Scudetto winning streak until Antonio Conte was appointed and Andrea Pirlo arrived from Milan on a free that summer.
But within Juventus, Barzagli continues to be recognised as a foundational piece. He is lesser spotted than Chiellini and Bonucci, and yet both credit him with making them better centre-backs. Both bow to him. When Barzagli retired in 2019, Juventus’ manager at the time, Max Allegri, called him “the professor of defenders”. It chimed nicely with Jose Mourinho’s comment about the club being the Harvard of defending.
And so for Leoni to draw comparisons with Barzagli at only 18 is no faint praise.
It is rare for the big three in Italy to let a talent like him get away, and perhaps there is a parallel to be drawn with Marco Verratti here. Paris Saint-Germain gazumped Juventus in 2012 and Verratti, then a 19-year-old at second-division Pescara, never looked back.
Is that what’s happening with Leoni?
On the one hand, the powerlessness to stop his move reflects the financial state of Serie A and the gulf in spending power between Italy’s elite and their English peers. Serie A clubs have spent €860million (£742m; $1bn) gross so far this summer. A fair amount. Premier League teams, though, have cut cheques for nearly €2.4bn…
At the same time, better choices could have been made by the domestic candidates for Leoni’s signature. For example, the commitment made by Juventus’ old sporting director Cristiano Giuntoli to sign Lloyd Kelly from Newcastle is one to rue. In that they only have themselves to blame.
On the other hand, England is no longer the road less travelled for Italian players. It is more and more the direction of travel, especially for the young. If, like Leoni, Cannavaro had been playing for Parma in 2025 instead of 2002, his next move would probably have been to the Premier League, not Inter.
The financial pull is too great but, regardless of the economics at play, it is where up-and-coming Italians are being encouraged to test themselves. When champions Italy were eliminated from Euro 2024 at the round-of-16 stage last summer, their coach at the time, Luciano Spalletti, said if the opportunity presents itself to go abroad, particularly to England, then Italians need to seize it. They’ll be better for it, he argued, such is the standard and competitiveness.
Flash forward 13 months and the Premier League has never been able to count on so many. Sandro Tonali, Riccardo Calafiori, Federico Chiesa, Michael Kayode, Luca Koleosho, Wilfried Gnonto, Diego Coppola, Guglielmo Vicario, Destiny Udogie. Maybe Gianluigi Donnarumma soon.
This should be a source of optimism in their homeland.
Kayode, who got the only goal of the final when Italy won the Under-19 Euros two years ago, was an under-the-radar signing by Brentford from Fiorentina on an initial loan in January. Coppola, a 21-year-old who plays the same position as Leoni, has been picked up this summer by Brighton. Both signing clubs are renowned for talent identification.
As for Liverpool, well, their reputation in that regard precedes them.
Leoni’s rise, it must be said, has been stratospheric — so rapid, he has played just eight times for Italy at youth levels. He is the son of a banker and a physiotherapist, who both played water polo to a high level. One of his brothers, Edoardo, has followed in their wet footsteps and also competes in that sport in Italy’s second division. A sporty family, they fostered a basketball player, Mahamadou Diarra, who made it onto their local professional team, Petrarca.
Leoni is their only footballer. He made his debut for Padova, then in the third tier, at 16, showing himself to be even more precocious than Alessandro Del Piero, the future Italy great who came through at the same club as a teenager in the very early 1990s.
One of Leoni’s role models around then was Smalldini. No, not Paolo Maldini, who he never saw play. For the uninitiated, ‘Smalldini’ is the nickname bestowed upon Chris Smalling during the Englishman’s head-anything-that-comes-into-the-box phase with Roma at the start of this decade. The other? One of his new team-mates at Anfield, a certain Virgil van Dijk.
Even amid their current dysfunction, Sampdoria spotted Leoni early and snapped him up in February last year. Pirlo, their coach at the time, quickly brought him into a promotion-chasing first team where Leoni, benefiting from some injuries to more senior players, partnered 22-year-old Daniele Ghilardi. Although Sampdoria didn’t go up that summer, Leoni and Ghilardi did. One joining Parma, the other Verona. Ghilardi played more regularly last season, next to the aforementioned Coppola. They clocked up more than 2,000 Serie A minutes each; Leoni, by contrast, scraped to just over a thousand in 17 appearances.
For now, Coppola is the only one of them to have been capped at senior level, but neither of the Verona duo made the impression Leoni did when he established himself in the Parma team under Fabio Pecchia, then stayed here when Cristian Chivu took over in February. Leoni stood out for defending one-v-one and winning duels in big open spaces.
Such was the impression he made in a short space of time, it came as no surprise when Chivu, a former centre-back himself, expressed his desire to bring the kid with him to Inter, where he replaced Simone Inzaghi there earlier this summer.
While Leoni can improve in terms of guile and edge in his own penalty area, the prevailing sense is that he has what it takes to partner Bastoni at international level in the near future. No doubt, the likes of Arsenal’s Calafiori and Alessandro Buongiorno at Napoli will have something to say about that. Both of them, unfortunately for them, are injury-prone. Leoni, so far, is not.
In moving to Liverpool, the talented teenager addresses both immediate and long-term needs; a combination that perhaps makes it the ideal time and place for him to develop and learn from one of his heroes, a now 34-year-old Van Dijk.
Leoni means Lions in Italian. It is a surname that calls to mind one of the most famous (now defunct) ultras groups in Italy, the Fossa dei Leoni at Milan, which translates as The Lions’ Den.
We’ll have to see if that’s what Liverpool’s penalty area becomes in the Leoni era: a place to fear, a place nobody gets near.
Read more on The New York Times
