Seasons at Inter, from 1960 to 1977, without a single match for another club.
Superga
Torino won five Italian championships in a row in the years around the war, and the team was so dominant that Italy once fielded ten of its players in the same national side. On 4 May 1949 the aircraft bringing them back from a friendly in Lisbon flew into the retaining wall behind the basilica of Superga. Thirty one people died, the whole first team among them.
The captain was Valentino Mazzola. His son Sandro had been born in Turin in November 1942. He was six.
The name
There is no neutral way to carry a surname like that into a football club. Every coach knew whose son he was, and so did every crowd.
He went to Inter, not to Torino. He was spotted by Benito Lorenzi, who had played for Inter, and in the youth sector he was coached by Giuseppe Meazza, whose name is now on the stadium where he would spend his career.
Nine to one
His debut in Serie A came on 10 June 1961, and it came by accident. Inter had to replay a league match against Juventus that had been suspended earlier in the season. The club president, Angelo Moratti, ordered Herrera to send out the youth team in protest.
Juventus won nine to one. The one was a penalty, scored by the eighteen year old Mazzola.
Vienna
Under Helenio Herrera, Inter became the team that the rest of Europe learned to fear, and Mazzola became the man who finished what the system built.
In the 1964 European Cup final, in Vienna, Inter beat Real Madrid three to one. Mazzola scored twice. The following year Inter won it again, against Benfica. In 1967 they reached the final a third time in four years, in Lisbon against Celtic, and Mazzola put them ahead from the penalty spot. Celtic won two to one.
He was the league's top scorer in the 1964-65 season, with seventeen goals, and won four championships with Inter. In 1971 he was second in the Ballon d'Or, behind Johan Cruyff.
The relay
He won the European Championship with Italy in 1968.
At the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, Italy had two players for one position and would not give up either. Mazzola usually started and Gianni Rivera, of Milan, came on for the second half. The arrangement was called the staffetta, the relay, and the argument about it outlived both careers.
In the final against Brazil, the relay was not run. Mazzola played the whole match. Rivera came on in the eighty fourth minute. Brazil won four to one.
After
He retired in 1977, after seventeen seasons, in the only club shirt he ever wore.
He died in September 2026, at eighty three. His father's team is remembered for how it ended. He is remembered for how long he stayed.