Football’s nostalgia machine makes us long not just for the game’s lost talents, but for how they made us feel

The lights have just dimmed beneath the great concrete dome of the Palazzo dello Sport, a sort of cross between a yurt and a spaceship that squats on top of a hill out in Rome’s southerly sprawl. A countdown flickers on the single big screen. The crowd, 10,000 or so strong, follows along in unison. The anticipation – and the pitch – rise with each number: sei, cinque, quattro.

By the time we hit uno, there are children shrieking with excitement. There is a moment of darkness, of silence. And then, as one, the whole arena is exposed to what may well be the first use case for AI that meets with absolutely universal approval: the technology of the future harnessed to deliver a pure, unadulterated hit of the past.

An image of a bus fills the screen. Quite why there is a bus is never really explained. It does not need to be, because on board the bus are avatars of the people everyone has come to see. Not as they are now, middle-aged men with greying hair and the occasional spreading paunch, but as they were then: 20 or 30 years ago, back when they were kings.

There is Edgar Davids, complete with wraparound shades, in the zebra stripes of Juventus; Alessandro Nesta, with his olive skin and raven hair, in Lazio’s sky blue; Juan Sebastián Verón, complete with glittering earring and pirate beard, as he looked in his Sampdoria days. The noise is a gathering storm. It breaks with the final shot.

On the back seat, flanked by Javier Zanetti and Zvonimir Boban, his hair long and his eyes shining, is Francesco Totti. He is depicted in his imperial phase, circa 2001. The Totti who led Roma to the Italian title, the Totti who is depicted pointing to the heavens in his mural in the Monti neighbourhood of the eternal city: long hair, white headband, skintight shirt. The photorealistic image elicits a collective shudder of almost narcotic pleasure.

The adoration for all of these players is genuine, deep-rooted, eternal. The chance simply to see them in the flesh is what has drawn everyone here, on a crisp spring evening, to watch a round-robin, five-a-side tournament contested by teams made up of some of the most garlanded stars from the golden age of Serie A. (And, being honest, a few slightly deeper cuts.)

Each player is granted their own introduction, the crowd reminded of the teams they graced and the trophies they won and the talents they boasted. Some look no different than they did in their playing days. Some have, to be diplomatic, blossomed just a touch. But each is afforded a rapturous round of applause.

Totti, of course, gets an ovation of an entirely different order – an ecstasy that borders on religious – but still: the affection for Antonio Di Natale and Stefano Fiore and the others is innocent, heart-warming.

Beneath it, though, it is hard not to detect an undercurrent of something like sadness. As the video inadvertently made plain, the players we see now are just stand-ins for who they used to be. They are the best we can do. We trap them in our own pasts. We watch them as they are. But, really, we wish they could be as they were.

*

Operazione Nostalgia, the brainchild of Andrea Bini and Luca Valentino, has now been running long enough that it has created its own feedback loop. It started out as a Facebook group, a place where fans could share their memories of the glory days of Serie A. In 2016, Bini and Valentino organised their first legends’ game; 2,000 fans, in era-appropriate replica shirts, travelled to Ostia to watch.

In the years since, they have organised dozens more events all over Italy; for their last match, in Reggio Calabria, they drew a crowd of 15,000 and attracted the attention of Gianni Infantino. (It did not work out quite as he would have liked; he was booed when he took to the field. The fans did not, it appeared, appreciate having their nostalgia contaminated by modernity.)

The tournament in Rome – the first version that had been held indoors – was earmarked as the program’s tenth birthday celebration. It closed with a video tribute to those early games: nostalgia, in fact, for how Operazione Nostalgia used to be.

None of this, perhaps, sounds all that innovative. Legends’ games have long been a staple of many clubs’ calendars. What used to be called Masters Football was once broadcast in the UK. Operazione Nostalgia is different not only in terms of its success, though, but in terms of what it is commemorating.

Inside the Palazzo dello Sport, for example, are fans wearing the colours of dozens of teams: Roma and Lazio, of course, and the rest of Italy’s fabled sette sorelle – the Seven Sisters – but also Catania and Reggiana and Verona. “Rivalry matters on a Sunday,” said Francesco and Niccolo, sitting next to each other, one in a Roma shirt and one Lazio. “But not today.”

The appeal is not tribal. It is, instead, temporal. It is a monument to a very specific era, one bookended by the oldest player on show – the Brazilian defender Aldair, now 60, who joined Roma after the 1990 World Cup – and the youngest, the 40-year-old Valeri Bojinov, who came to prominence in the early 2000s.

“Every team in Italy had great players then,” said Nicola Borghesi, a Juventus fan watching the game with two friends. “They had much more money than they do now, too. But the most important thing is that it was the first generation that we were all able to watch on TV.”

That cultural cut-through made them something more than stars. It made them something closer to myths. And myths, of course, are the sort of thing that can be passed down from parents to children. Some of the audience in the Palazzo dello Sport is old enough to remember seeing these players the first time around, but some of them are not.

There are plenty of teenagers, plenty of children. They are no less excited than their parents. Maybe that is not a surprise. They are watching the heroes of the stories they have been told, again and again. It must be like being told you can go and watch Hercules.

*

The second game of the evening is something of a procession: the team representing Europe, captained by Boban, being dispatched by a Rest of the World side led by Zanetti but inspired, a little unexpectedly, by David Pizarro, the former Roma and Chile midfielder. As he saunters around, orchestrating what turns into a 7-0 win, the crowd’s interest briefly starts to wane.

In response, the two emcees for the evening – Jimmy Ghione and Gianluca Gazzoli, both regular features of Italian television – ramp up their rhetoric, an attempt to refocus the fans’ attention. They lavish praise on each player; they swoon with every goal. They discuss just how good Vincent Candela, formerly of Roma and, less relevantly, Bolton, is at padel.

By the time Verón brings the ball to heel and then, with an air of unruffled insouciance, begins to juggle it around a flummoxed opponent, their adoration has started to bleed into yearning. “How we miss these boys,” one of them says to the other, and to the audience at large. “Where has the talent gone? Where has it gone?”

Perhaps they were thinking purely in terms of Serie A, which has now not produced a European champion since 2010, or about Italy more broadly, which a few nights later would once again fail to qualify for the men’s World Cup. In that case, there is a fairly simple answer to their question: the talent has gone to the Premier League, or Paris St-Germain.

Or perhaps, in that moment, they were mourning the game’s increasing suspicion of imagination and impudence, its gradual shift away from individual inspiration towards tactical orthodoxy. The great idol of most Italian teams in the 1990s was the fantasista, the embodiment of ingenuity. They are an endangered species now.

It felt, though, that they were expressing a sentiment that they assumed everyone in the Palazzo dello Sport would share: the conviction that Serie A in particular and football in general is not quite as good as it used to be, that it has lost its magic. That is at least part of the appeal of these events, why Operazione Nostalgia has become such a cultural phenomenon in the decade since its launch.

But it is also, in a very strict sense, wrong. Boban, Verón, Zanetti and the rest were all wonderful footballers. They were among the very finest of their generation. Several players of that era – both those present and not – might rank among the best of all time. And Totti is, and always was, something of a unicorn, a player whose meaning exceeded even his extraordinary ability.

As much as we all tell ourselves otherwise, though, it is just not the case that their successors lack their talent. There are vast, industrialised production lines across the world designed to unearth, nurture and polish players blessed with similar gifts. They work so well that there are, most likely, more of them than ever before.

The difference, the absence that Ghione and Gazzoli had identified, the one that had drawn everyone to the Palazzo dello Sport, is not in the game itself. It is in us.

The nostalgia at the heart of this tournament, of this phenomenon, is not just for these players or for the football they played. It is for the way they made us feel. That is what has gone, that first flush of love and wonder, and what can never be recaptured. We cling on to them, to what they were, because it reminds us of what we used to be.

Photo by Steve Bisgrove for the Observer