To celebrate 30 years of the Premier League, The Athletic is paying tribute to the 50 greatest individual performances in its history, as voted for by our writers. You can read Oliver Kay’s introduction to our Golden Games series (and the selection rules) here — as well as the full list of all the articles as they unfold.
Picking 50 from 309,949 options is an impossible task. You might not agree with their choices, you won’t agree with the order. They didn’t. It’s not intended as a definitive list. It’s a bit of fun, but hopefully a bit of fun you’ll enjoy between now and August.
In a 20-acre mountain ranch high up in the hills of Umbria, Fabrizio Ravanelli scuttled down to the gym of his Perugia home and unveiled one of his keepsakes from a glittering playing career.
Ravanelli, the silver-haired striker nicknamed La Penna Bianca (the white feather), represented Italy at a European Championship, and starred for Juventus, Lazio and Marseille. He possesses photos of himself alongside Diego Maradona and the Pope.
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Yet the blown-up canvas he revealed was a front-page portrait from a Middlesbrough fanzine, the Riverside Roar, which greeted his extraordinary arrival in English football in the summer of 1996.
Middlesbrough were riding the crest of a wave, turbocharged by the millions of local fan and owner Steve Gibson. By the time Ravanelli arrived, Middlesbrough (managed by former Manchester United captain Bryan Robson) had recruited the Brazil playmaker Juninho, as well as his compatriot Emerson. After securing promotion to the Premier League in 1995, they sealed a 12th-placed finish in their first season back in the top flight.
In Ravanelli, however, they secured arguably the most jaw-droppingly unexpected signing in the history of the competition and when he opened his account with a hat-trick against Liverpool, expectations spiralled. In Middlesbrough fan Tom Flight’s account of the season, he described the performance as “one of the most electrifying debuts in history”. Team-mates interviewed for this article remember internal discussions as to whether the club could finish in the top six.
The goals themselves were not show-stopping but they did demonstrate Ravanelli’s aggressive instincts in front of goal. The first strike was left-footed from the penalty spot, rammed into the top corner, the second was a sliding finish in the six-yard box and the third was an opportunistic screwed finish into the far corner.
#OnThisDay in 1996, Ravanelli announced his arrival in England with a debut hat-trick ⚽️⚽️⚽️ #UTB
— Middlesbrough FC (@Boro) August 17, 2020
Yet it was, perhaps, what the game represented that made it so memorable. Ravanelli’s arrival was emblematic of the shifting sands of European football, where England, the country that hosted Euro ’96, increasingly became perceived as the land of opportunity.
Awash with Rupert Murdoch’s millions, the Premier League’s gentrification was upon us. Ravanelli and Juninho represented a new age; the era of Eric Cantona and Dennis Bergkamp, Jurgen Klinsmann and Georgi Kinkladze, Gianfranco Zola and Paolo Di Canio.
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These foreign names captured the imagination and imbued English football with a sense of mystique. For Middlesbrough, it was to be one of the most peculiar seasons in modern memory as the club reached the final of the League Cup and FA Cup (losing both) while being relegated from the Premier League after receiving a controversial points deduction.
Amid it all, Ravanelli scored 31 goals in all competitions, 16 in the Premier League. Yet that is only half the story of a player who could, at times, be a “pain in the butt”, as Robson once put it, while his fiery personality and sharp tongue came spectacularly to a head on the morning of the FA Cup final against Chelsea, as witnesses recall him spending the morning in confrontation with the club’s defender Neil Cox. This is Ravanelli.
Andy Campbell, now the Middlesbrough women’s team manager, was a young striker on the fringes of the first team in the summer of 1996. He was part of a group of players performing pre-season fitness drills when a silver-flecked presence emerged in the distance.
“My first impression was surreal,” he says, “because although we had moved stadium to the Riverside, the new training ground was still under construction so we trained at a prison playing field at times.
“We were running around and I said to my young team-mate Mark Summerbell that I had seen Ravanelli. I was quite persistent as he was very distinguishable with that hair. Mark said, ‘Don’t be so stupid, he’s just won the Champions League’. I was convinced it was him but Mark talked me out of it as we completed the lap. Then at the end of training, Bryan Robson walked onto the pitch and announced the signing and I was gobsmacked.
“I was a Boro fan and it didn’t sink in until I went home and I told my dad, although he wasn’t quite as excited as he realised it meant his son would play less football, which was a bit of a comedown.”
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Four months earlier, it had appeared inconceivable that Ravanelli could join Middlesbrough. Ravanelli had started and scored for Juventus in their Champions League final victory over Ajax. Yet after Juventus signed Christian Vieri and Alen Boksic, Ravanelli became disposable.
In a previous interview for the Daily Mail, I joined Ravanelli at his Italian home. He recalled: “I felt it was impossible to leave Juventus because I was the best player in the world. I was angry Juventus even considered selling me. So I decided to leave Italy altogether.”
He later told The Athletic: “I played in Euro ’96 and I sensed straight away that the future of football would be in England. It was a fantastic atmosphere, fantastic fans. It felt totally different to other parts of Europe. It felt like the future. After that, it started to be the best league in the world.”
Middlesbrough had spent that summer scratching around for a marquee name. Robson had missed out on attempts to sign Andrei Kanchelskis from Everton and Miguel Angel Nadal (the uncle of Rafa) from Barcelona. He then tried to sign Gianluca Vialli on a Bosman transfer from Juventus, but Chelsea nipped in.
It was then that conversations began with Juventus over Ravanelli. The chief executive Keith Lamb and Robson twice flew to Turin. The owner Steve Gibson later claimed Juventus first quoted £12 million before negotiating down to £7 million. Robson met Ravanelli in Milan, where he compared Middlesbrough to the ambitious Italian club Parma.
In his autobiography, Robson wrote: “To sell the club to Ravanelli, I took over photos of the stadium, along with plans for the extension work and the new training ground. I’d visited a lot of training facilities on my scouting trips around Europe and made sure our training would lack for nothing. Ravanelli didn’t know much about Middlesbrough — some the players we went for had never heard of the place — but when I showed him the plans and the pictures, and told him the place was packed out every week, he was impressed.”
The reported figures were staggering for the time, with Ravanelli said to have signed a £42,000-per-week deal, although Robson’s book claimed it was closer to £30,000. This was just a decade after Middlesbrough had been relegated to the third tier. Little wonder supporters were so giddy they dyed their hair silver.
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Robbie Mustoe, who played for the club between 1990 and 2002, recalls: “Little old me was one of the lower earners in the first team and I remember thinking that this is so many multiples more than what I earn. I guess I was OK with it, and maybe I shouldn’t have been, but I understood what he brought and what it took to bring him to the club.
“I wasn’t one of those who was resentful. There was a little bit of it around the dressing room — players keep to themselves over that kind of thing — but there were jokes about the money he was earning. I just thought, ‘So what?’. I was on a ride with these guys and I was desperate to play with them. The place was bouncing and it was a thrill. So first impressions of Ravanelli? Massive name, massive news, massive excitement.”
Campbell was in the stands with his parents for the opening day draw with Liverpool. “This was the Liverpool of John Barnes, Robbie Fowler, Jamie Redknapp and Steve McManaman. The ultimate spice boys and superstars. But Rav on his own made it impossible for Liverpool to take a breath. It was a statement performance and it showed the league that he was unplayable. Give him a sniff and he will score. But it was the passion he showed, just how much he enjoyed and celebrated scoring, which was the same against Hereford as it was against Liverpool. He celebrated every goal as though it could be his last.”
On the pitch, the goals continued to flow, but behind the scenes, Ravanelli had discovered the footballing development of Teesside to be rather different to Turin. And he made sure everyone knew about it.
Issues included the facilities provided for training sessions and the intensity demonstrated by his team-mates. They trained at local parks and at a local prison, while Mustoe recalls one field they used being nicknamed “The Avenue of Trees — because it was literally an avenue of trees”.
Due to the facilities, the Italian newspaper Gazzetta Dello Sport had described the signing of Ravanelli as the equivalent of “buying a Ferrari without having a garage”.
Mustoe concedes: “The training was scandalous. We had very poor training facilities. We later went to Rockliffe and the owner invested a lot into that and it was brilliant.
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“But Ravanelli was exactly like you saw him on a matchday. A great trainer; a dedicated, serious, fierce competitor; it was like an electric shock to the squad. Like anywhere in those days, there were some good pros and some not so good.
“It was pretty stunning to see the juxtaposition between Ravanelli and some who were not quite as motivated. In some ways, it brought a bit of a problem to the squad because he didn’t suffer fools or bad pros and let his feelings get known, which after a period of time can make you a bit unpopular.
“There weren’t many he respected and got on well with but I was one of them. When he left, he came over in the dressing room and said a few nice things. It was not that he was a total dick but he wanted you to be a good pro and put everything in and then he’d respect you.
“I have never known anyone quite like Ravanelli and Gianluca Festa. They hung out together, trained together and roomed together. Juninho embraced Teeside with his family and he was a good professional. But he didn’t have that almost aggressive streak of Ravanelli, who was edgy, fired up and almost angry at times.”
Chris Freestone was another young forward around the first team. He tells The Athletic: “Festa came back for pre-season every year shredded and ripped. He’d be running up hills with tyres strapped to his back whereas we were blowing after 20 minutes.”
Ravanelli remains supremely fit to this day, still sporting chiselled abs and competing locally in amateur cycling races in the Italian mountains. He does the same training drills in his mid-50s as professional cyclists.
In our interview for the Daily Mail, he said: “My old coaches from Juventus would send training programmes to me by fax. I got very angry because sometimes players would take a day off. The first thing is discipline and respect. This was the only Ravanelli problem in 1996. I was ultra-professional and wanted to win for Gibson.
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“Fans pay to see us win football matches, not lose games. You don’t go away drinking or say, ‘I’m injured today, no training’. My life was at home, with my wife and kids. It was impossible for me to go out drinking and come back at 5am. I didn’t like it if a player got drunk. Many times myself and Juninho spoke with some guys about it.
“At home now, I don’t have any alcohol — no wine, no beer, no whisky. No smoking. Never, ever. It is my gladiator culture. Everyone has their way of life, but my house, my rules. I don’t want my wife or sons to be drunk in my home. That is impossible. My son is 22 but can’t drink here. He takes a shower before he comes home after drinking in case I smell it.”
Campbell recalls how Ravanelli encouraged Robson to introduce double training sessions for the team, which were later reduced as some players were not sufficiently conditioned to cope with the demand and picked up too many injuries.
Former forward Jan Age Fjortoft, who shared a room with Ravanelli before games, says: “I always used to train double sessions because I had learned that from Norwegian football. Then Rav came and he could not understand why British players trained once per day.
“We went to the stadium on our own sometimes to train and he was frustrated there were no coaches there to challenge him. He was ahead not only of English football at the time. He had a strict regime. I remember once my wife wanted to go out with his wife and she said she had to stay in because Fabrizio is sleeping! The way he improved and developed was a 24/7 regime.”
Mustoe says Ravanelli recruited a chef to join the team for away matches.
Campbell explains: “Now if you plonked him into a top team in 2022 with high expectations, he would fit right in. The diet was very different in English football back then and the drink element was not ideal. The manager tried to change things to suit him and then it wasn’t adhered to and it caused factions between experienced British players and some of the foreign players.”
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Mustoe was one of those who embraced Ravanelli’s standards. “He gave a shot in the arm to the club and squad. It was, ‘This is how you train and prepare’. I remember later going out and buying a Gianluca Vialli book which described football as a job, and it is easier to understand Ravanelli in that context.”
Freestone says: “I still make my pasta al dente now like he did it, nine minutes so it’s still firm. Some of the older players did not buy in, such as Clayton Blackmore who was still stuck in full English for breakfast rather than toast or less fattening and calorific foods that Ravanelli encouraged.
“For the older players, when you have done things for a long time, and it had worked for them, it is hard to change. Clayton was coming to an end — he was gonna have a full English regardless and he was a former Manchester United team-mates of the gaffer Bryan Robson and they were more like mates.”
In his book, Robson was critical of Ravenelli’s complaints. He wrote: “Ravanelli was a great player, but also a pain in the butt. He had a terrific attitude to training and was a fantastic goalscorer. The problem was that he could be a big moaner. When things were going well he was fine, but if they weren’t, nothing would be right for him.
“If we had a bad result, he would go on about how unprofessional we were for not having proper training facilities. The trouble was he had come from Juventus, the European champions and Italy’s most famous club, to a club where the structure was totally different, where was no training ground and building work was still going on. Everything was in place, but it could not be done overnight.”
Despite Ravanelli’s angst, his form remained strong. He scored 16 goals by Christmas Day but the team’s form and results still fell off a cliff. They won only five Premier League matches until March. Over the season, they scored 51 league goals, the sixth highest in the division, and Ravanelli had identified the issues.
“The problem was about the defenders!” he told The Athletic during an interview in 2020. “When we built the team, we had a lot of problems at the start of the season with the defenders. We had good quality to score goals but every shot on our goal was a goal! We did not have any quality defenders. This is the first problem, but a big problem.
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“We later bought Festa from Inter Milan and he made it better but we needed a goalkeeper. We had a lot of problems. Then Mark Schwarzer arrived and he stayed for a long time in goal, and he was excellent. If we started the season with the team that finished the league, we would have stayed up.”
In person, Ravanelli is direct and quite funny, as harsh as his words may read on paper. He says he “only has one face”, which means he will always be honest in his opinions. But as Middlesbrough’s form nosedived, Ravanelli’s views — which often emerged in the Italian media — did not go down well.
Mustoe recalls: “When he’d go away on international duty with Italy, there would be stories that came back — particularly if we were having a bad time — where he would be saying we were great going forward but not very good at the back. The defenders were not happy.”
In one interview with Gazzetta Dello Sport, Ravanelli had been quoted as saying the team were “tail-enders” with hardly any hope of staying up. Freestone says: “I know papers can twist things but he never came back and apologised or said to us that he was misquoted.”
Freestone recalls how Ravanelli would return to Italy for treatment, giving the impression — rightly or wrongly — that he did not trust the club’s physios. While Ravanelli had joined the team for meals out early in the season, Freestone says he became more withdrawn, often hanging around with a personal “entourage”.
Freestone says: “They were friends, family, maybe agents. He had four or five Italians he knocked about with, all wearing suits and sunglasses, even in the Teesside winter.”
Fjortoft tells The Athletic about one team talk from Robson that descended into a comedy scene. He says: “One of the funniest things; he had a translator, Gianni Paladini, who later became an investor at QPR. We played Aston Villa away and we had a team meeting. Robson was explaining how the forwards will play and he turned to them and said: ‘Is that ok Rav?’. Paladini translated. Ravanelli then goes into this rant with all the international recognisable words like ‘catastrophe’ and you were clear what he was saying. That was funny enough but the funniest thing was when he finished his rant, the translator turned to Robson and simply said ‘Yes, OK’. But that was Rav — very clear in his analysis; A or B, black and white.
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“I was a forward, too, and the Danish striker Mikkel Beck joined. The plan was for Ravanelli and Beck to play together. I always quote Princess Diana and say, ‘There were three of us, it was a bit crowded’. Unfortunately, Ravanelli didn’t like very much to play with Beck. On one occasion, he had a bit of a rant and by then he had learned a bit of English. Ravanelli, who often spoke in the third person, said: ‘For me, Fabrizio, Mikkel Beck is Serie C’. I said to Rav to calm down a bit, as Beck was sat next to him! Now we can laugh about it. But whatever people say, every memory of that time always ends with the clear fact Rav scored over 30 goals.”
In his book, Robson was less complimentary. He said: “He started getting selfish on the pitch. He was all, ‘Me, Me, Me’. For instance, he wouldn’t help Mikkel Beck, a young striker we had signed from Fortuna Cologne. He would never encourage Mikkel or do anything to boost his confidence, which was what the lad needed. All he did was knock him, saying he was hopeless and generally putting him down. He was a poor team player in that sense. Ravanelli worked hard and tried his best for the team, no question about that. He just didn’t have the personality to make him a popular player. He wasn’t well-liked within the group and was the only one who didn’t hit it off with the other lads.”
Not everyone shared Robson’s view. Fjortoft says he found Ravanelli a “brilliant room-mate”. He says: “I still love him. We are on WhatsApp and he is a family man. I always remember we once went to a training camp in Italy and he had the biggest sunglasses and I said you won’t see a Hollywood star with bigger sunglasses. I said to him, ‘You are poco loco’ — crazy man. He had a great humour. He is in many ways very Italian, a family guy. Our children went to each other’s birthday parties.”
Campbell says: “He was very helpful where I needed him. We did finishing drills together in training and he told me what I needed to do and where I needed to run when we played together. As a senior striker, he had been where I was, developing, and I loved learning from him.”
Freestone adds: “I learned stuff I still use in veterans’ football now — trying to pass the ball into the net rather than trying to smash it, early look at the keeper and then find the gap. He was amazing in that sense.”
Middlesbrough’s form did pick up towards the end of the season. They lost only two of their final 12 Premier League matches but ended up being relegated only due to the three points they had deducted when, in December 1996, injuries and illness stripped the squad down to fewer than 11 available professionals and they did not travel to play Blackburn Rovers.
The FA argued they did not follow the correct protocols, and even one of the country’s most expensive barristers was unable to win the case. They were relegated at Leeds United on May 11 and then competed in the FA Cup final the following week. The club had been to Wembley earlier in the season, when they drew 1-1 in the League Cup final against Leicester City and then lost the replay 1-0.
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Yet after relegation, a season of tension reached boiling point in the dressing room. It was clear that a number of players would be leaving as they had no intention of playing in the second tier. On the day of the final, the defender Neil Cox gave an interview to the Daily Star newspaper, in which he was asked to select his preferred line-up for the final, and he left out Ravanelli, who had been struggling with an injury.
He later told FourFourTwo: “I did an interview on the pre-match press day as a favour for a mate. I left Rav out of the starting XI because, like me, he was struggling to be fit and we could not afford to gamble. On Saturday, it was all over the back page: ‘Cox — Rav should miss out’. So while we were having the photos taken for the suits and sunglasses, he decided to spit and throw a punch. I dived in, fists flying. I wasn’t slagging him off. I was right. That’s why it got nasty. We had a scuffle.”
When The Athletic asked Ravanelli about the alleged scrap, he laughed and said: “Nothing, nothing,” before adding, “There was no problem with me and another player. Cox… it is impossible to speak about football with Cox because he was not professional. He was not a quality player. It is impossible for me to take a relation with a player who is not professional. There was no fight. In my life, in my career, I did not fight. I don’t like this.”
When asked to clarify 100 per cent if there was a fight, he grinned and said: “Noooo. It is very easy to fight with Cox. Honestly. It is the same as if I would have a fight with my son if he was 14 and if I was 35. It is impossible. It is too small to call it a fight with Cox.”
For those watching on, however, the impact was significant. Campbell says the morning of the game was “horrific”. He says: “Everything was negative, and it was meant to be the biggest day in the club’s history. During the suit fittings and everything, it just wasn’t nice. It was a disaster for everyone. I wish it was different. It turned into a farce.”
Mustoe, who had been at the club seven years by then, felt similarly. He told The Athletic: “There was so much that was wrong at the end. The cup final was shockingly poor in preparation and in terms of mentality going into that game. It was incredible really. Ravenelli was trying to get hold of Coxy in the back row of our team photo, just as we are about to leave for Wembley. The atmosphere on that bus was… well, yeah. When you are relegated and things are coming out and there’s stories about players leaving, others are going to say things and Coxy spoke from the heart. It was ugly in the end.”
Freestone says: “The fight was actually on the bus. There were arguments when the suits were fitted, arguments during photos and then he came on the bus and it came to a head. It was less of a fight, more a swing and handbags.”
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They went a goal down inside a minute when Roberto Di Matteo scored a stunner and the season ended in more heartbreak. Ravanelli started but his injury flared up and he needed to go off inside the first half.
In the week leading up to the game, Beck had been chosen to start and youngster Freestone was told he would be on the bench. When Ravanelli declared himself fit on the eve of the game, Beck was demoted to the bench and Freestone missed out on a squad place at Wembley. Plenty of the players were exasperated, as Ravanelli had struggled to train. Freestone recalls: “When you’ve done your hamstring and back, he was trying to stretch and couldn’t touch his toes. You could see in the warm-up.”
Ravanelli was around for part of the next pre-season — Campbell recalls playing with him and Paul Merson in a friendly against York City — but his days were numbered.
Several English clubs were interested. Ravanelli told The Athletic in 2020: “I was very close to joining Liverpool and Tottenham. I tried for one month over the possibility with my agent to sign for Manchester United but it did not happen. But Liverpool was a real opportunity. The Liverpool manager Roy Evans called me when I was on holiday in the summer and said he wanted me to join the club. I said, ‘OK, no problem’.
“After, I have no idea why, it did not happen. Liverpool, it would have been a great move for me. I had to play in the top flight and Middlesbrough had been relegated.
“Before leaving Middlesbrough, I received a call from Alan Sugar, the Tottenham chairman. He said to me, ‘Please come in to Tottenham’. But I was literally in the taxi to take the flight to Marseille (who he joined for £4.5 million). If this call had arrived one day earlier, I am sure I would have signed for Tottenham.
“I needed to be in a big league because we had a World Cup the next year in the summer of 1998. If it was not for the World Cup, I would have stayed there (in the second division), for sure. My heart is in Middlesbrough. When I arrived there, I remember the Italian flag at the Riverside, ‘Welcome Fabrizio’. They were fantastic with me.”
