Luciano Gaucci, the ex president of Perugia died: from the outburst with Matarrese to the passion for horses

This is how Gaucci – who died on Saturday in Santo Domingo at 81 years of age – to the world of football, where he had entered the previous autumn like a hurricane. Expert navigator of the First Republic, he was enriched with the contracts obtained for his Roman cleaning company La Milanese (To give an idea of ​​efficiency, he said): after being vice president of Dino Viola’s Rome in the eighties, he bought Perugia , which at the time languished in the slums of Serie C and was on the verge of bankruptcy, and promised Serie A in five years. The first hit failed him for that horse, then he kept his promise: in June 1996 he celebrated the return of the Umbrians to the top division after 15 years.

In the meantime, Hurricane had become one of his nicknames: for the exuberance, for the outbursts, for the players convinced to go down in the category – the first were the world champion Beppe Dossena, now at the end of his career, the bomber Giovanni Cornacchini and Rocco Pagano, one who put even Paolo Maldini in difficulty – but also for the punitive retirements ordered suddenly, for the coaches kicked out without warning (ask Walter Novellino, fired when he discovered that on the plane that would bring the team to the playoff with the Acireale there would also be his successor Ilario Castagner) and for the dramas.

Many, of all kinds. The most famous was the one with Antonio Matarrese, in front of the Bari coach and the cameras. The player in the hospital has a fracture, said Gaucci to the referee and the Apulian president intervened: Gaucci, we are from Serie A. To which he replied – Go fuck your brother and you in the ass – and a fight broke out in the rain in which Gaucci, trying to free himself, said: Leave me, I have to tell him four. A hit from YouTube, which still grinds clicks and laughter.

Then there was the time he tried to buy a woman, the German center forward Birgit Prinz, to make her play with men – early 2000s – and the one in which, interviewed at Controcampo on Italia 1, he said that Roberto Baronio brought bad luck because he wore the number 13. The few times he entered he certainly did not bring us well. But the problem was the number 13, which like a black cat crossing your road, said. Tomorrow he will burn his shirt with the number 13. Anecdotes, which a little amused and a little made the red and white fans ashamed, accustomed to gentlemen such as Franco D’Attoma and Spartaco Ghini.

In the meantime, Perugia was permanently in Serie A and with Carlo Mazzone at the helm he also paraded a scudetto to Juventus under the flood, sewing it on the shirts of Lazio. It was 2000 and Gaucci, Roman and Romanist, had forced the players to win, on pain of a post-championship retirement, otherwise he would not have been able to return to his city (as had happened, however, the previous year, when his parents did not resist Milan).

Thanks to brilliant intuitions – but also to exceptional collaborators such as his son Alessandro and Walter Sabatini – meanwhile he was throwing players who would have made the history of football: a young Gennaro Gattuso, who was forced to escape from the boarding school window where he slept with the youth boys to go to Scotland to the Glasgow Rangers (with Gaucci reporting his disappearance), then the other world champions Marco Materazzi and Fabio Grosso, and in random order Fabio Liverani, Hidetoshi Nakata, Marco Negri, Milan Rapaic, Federico Giunti and Fabrizio Miccoli, only for mention a few. And Ahn Jung.Hwan, of course, the South Korean hunted for eliminating Giovanni Trapattoni’s national team with a goal at the 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan.

Even with the coaches he had a nose. First you launch Novellino, then in the summer of 2000 he caught a young Serse Cosmi in Arezzo in Serie C and put in his hand a team of promising and obscure exotic players (among others Chinese, Iranians, Greeks and also the son of the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi): the man of the river – just returned after 16 years at the helm of the red and white, who will take to the field on Sunday with mourning on his arm – saves Perugia for three years in a row, giving a show and bringing the team up to the UEFA Cup , achieved after winning Intertoto.

Those were golden years for Gaucci, who bought football teams such as peanuts (Catania, Viterbo, Sanbenedettese), had the championships changed – he owed the Serie A to 20 teams – and in the meantime he was engaged to Elisabetta Tulliani, friend of his son who exhibited under the Curva Nord and with which, later, he came to the clash in court because of a millionaire win at the enalotto of which both declared themselves owners. Even in a tie, he kept the winnings and she kept the properties that the ex-partner had registered to her. Ex, because in the meantime Gaucci had already introduced the girl to Gianfranco Fini, and here begins another story that turns towards Montecarlo and was told in depth by the newspapers.

An intense life, that of the volcanic Gaucci, who in the thirteen years at the helm of Perugia won two promotions in B and two in A. Then came the relegation to Serie B in 2004, after a strange playoff with Fiorentina, the transfer of the company to the children and the financial crash of the club in June 2005: children go to prison for fraudulent bankruptcy (35 million debt with the taxman and 6 million unpaid wages), he in exile in Santo Domingo, where he remained in hiding until 2009.

And where Saturday died after a long illness, bringing to mind all the football fans the amazing adventures of which he was the protagonist, for better or for worse, in the two decades at the turn of the millennium: champions, soccer players, superstition. And horses.