I won the Champions League after Chelsea put me in the reserves - so where did it all go wrong?I won the Champions League after Chelsea put me in the reserves - so where did it all go wrong?
I won the Champions League after Chelsea put me in the reserves - so where did it all go wrong? | Getty Images
Samuele Della Bona was set to be a star at Chelsea - so why did it all go wrong after he left?
By the time he hung up his boots in 2012, Samuele Dalla Bona seems to have had plenty of regrets – about the way he had severed ties with Chelsea, where he was seen as one of their most promising players, about the way he had mishandled his career, and about the way he felt he had been treated in Italy. His story isn’t an especially happy one.
Not that it didn’t start brightly. Long before he reached the point at which he would call Italian football “repulsive”, Dalla Bona was a fresh-faced young midfielder who was forcing his way into the Chelsea first team, scoring brilliant goals and convincing plenty of pundits – and AC Milan – that he was a superstar in the making. So how did it all fall apart?
What happened to Samuele Dalla Bona?
2002 was the year that Dalla Bona made his big mistake. At 21 years old he had established himself in Claudio Ranieri’s first-team squad at Stamford Bridge, scored a screaming 20-yard winner against Ipswich Town, and seemed destined for big things. Serie A sides agreed.
Venezia made a reported £6m bid for his services (a big fee at the time) and when that was turned down, Dalla Bona seemingly went into a bit of a huff. Briefly exiled to the reserves and with one year left on his contract, Chelsea eventually agreed to cut ties and settled for a rather smaller £1m sale to AC Milan. Dalla Bona was delighted – Milan were arguably the biggest and best side in the world – but it wasn’t the right move.
“I was happily settled in London. I have regretted the decision to leave Chelsea ever since,” he would later tell journalist Alessandro Schiavone. “I should have listened to Ranieri. But I was young and when you are young you are stupid."
Dalla Bona found himself stuck behind a midfield stacked with world-class players. With Andrea Pirlo, Rui Costa and Clarence Seedorf all on the books, he made just four league appearances. He won the Champions League in 2003 and played a role in the group stages, but never made it past the bench in the knockout stages. Carlo Ancelotti ignored him almost completely.
Dalla Bona asked his agent to see if a return to Chelsea could be engineered but the way he had forced his way out left a sour taste at Stamford Bridge, and a string of unhelpful loan spells followed. Bologna, Lecce and Sampdoria all borrowed him for a little while and he found time to score a few scorchers (a glorious controlled half-volley for Bologna against Siena is worth seeking out), but his career was going nowhere.
Napoli, then in Serie B as they made their way back from an administrative relegation all the way down to the third tier, took a chance on him in 2006 but after a solid first season in the second tier in which he helped the club to promotion, he was dropped from the squad – playing just twice in the league in 2007/08 - and he faded again.
This time, the loan spells didn’t even earn him significant playing time. Temporary moves to Verona, Atalanta and Greek side Iraklis resulted in the sum total of four league appearances. Then, in 2011, the then 30-year-old signed a one-year deal with lowly Mantova, down in the third tier of the Italian game following bankruptcy. It was the last stop of his career. Aged 31, just a decade after that screamer against Ipswich at Stamford Bridge, he was done.
Where did it all go wrong?
Speaking in occasional interviews following his retirement, Dalla Bona often sounded frustrated by the course his career took, although tragedy may have played a role in his mood at the time. Dalla Bona’s loan move to Atlanta was ended prematurely in 2011 because his father fell ill – heading to Mantova, in the city of Mantua, allowed him to play closer to home.
"I still had a year on my contract with Napoli, but I terminated it because I wanted to be closer,” he would tell Gazzetta dello Sport. “So I joined Mantova. My father died that October and I couldn't cope any more. I became depressed and I practically stopped playing."
He also expressed anger with Italian football culture, with the pressure placed on players by the fans and the lack of moral rectitude within Serie A both issues he has lashed out at.
“In Italy, football's repulsive, particularly everything which goes on around it. The pressure, the mentality -- I'm not made out for the Italian culture.
“There are players who have been banned for life, then their sentences got shortened and they are playing now, while there are honest players who are unemployed," Dalla Bona said. "[Simone] Farina, who reported an approach to fix a game, had to quit playing and he had to go to England to find work. It makes you ask yourself 'what's the point in being honest if it's the sly ones who get on in their careers?'"
If his frustration at the way Italian football handled match fixing allegations had any direct personal connections, he kept them to himself, but at some point it seems that the frustrations he endured in his career soured the entire sport for him.
“I just cannot watch football on TV anymore,” he told Schiavone in 2017. “It gives me a feeling of sadness… to think that I used to be there is difficult to take.”
Perhaps, had he followed the advice of Ranieri and his team-mates and signed a new deal at Chelsea, he would have stayed in love with the game – perhaps, in life after football, he has made peace with it. He has offered comments on the game to media publications on occasions in the last few years, at least hinting that he has been able to have it on the telly again.
Not that he appears to have any full-time role within the game. Dormant social media accounts suggest that he found work both with the Italian board of education and as a male model, but it isn’t easy to find out what he’s doing with himself now. Let’s just hope that wherever life has taken him, and whatever role football plays now, he’s found the happiness that a once-promising career never provided.
Related topics:ChelseaAC MilanChampions League
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