EXCLUSIVE | Massimo Ambrosini: ‘Right now France is on a different planet to Italy.’

EXCLUSIVE | Massimo Ambrosini: ‘Right now France is on a different planet to Italy. ’ Get French Football News spoke exclusively to AC Milan and Italy great Massimo Ambrosini ahead of Italy’s World Cup play-off matches, to discuss Milan’s French contingent past and present and to discuss France and Italy being drawn against each other in the Nations League. In this first part, we looked at French and Italian players swapping leagues, whether Italy are excited about meeting France in the Nations League – and where Ambrosini’s loyalties lay in last year’s Champions League final.

You mentioned the difficulty of playing in another country. If you look at France’s 1998 World Cup squad there were a lot of players – Deschamps, Zidane, Thuram, Desailly – who were great successes in Serie A and who said that it was playing there that changed their mentality, that improved them physically. Did you notice this when French players arrived?

In that period, at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the new millennium, Serie A was the best league in the world. So for any player – French, Spanish, Argentinian, Brazilian – arriving in Italy was the top of their career and they realised that they needed to be at that level. So maybe it changed their attitude.

If you want to play for Juve, like Didier or Zidane, the Juventus of the late 90s was the best – the best – so when you arrive in that team you know that you have to perform at the highest level. There are not so many Italian footballers who go the other way, to Ligue 1? At that time there was Fabrizio Ravanelli.