The Heysel story behind Del Piero’s Baresi message: ’39 times thank you’ | OneFootball

Amid the countless tributes to Franco Baresi following his death on Friday, one carried a message that puzzled anyone outside Italy, and moved everyone within it.

Alessandro Del Piero, Juventus’s own great captain, signed off his farewell to the Milan legend with a line that read like a private code: “39 times thank you. The Juventus fans will understand.”

According to the Gazzetta dello Sport, Del Piero’s words revived one of the most powerful acts of cross-club respect the Italian game has known.

“Thank you Franco for what you taught us, on and off the pitch, with your legendary career. A club icon is forever,” the former Juve forward wrote, before adding the coda that binds two great rivals together in grief.

The story dates to 7 March 1990. Hours before a European Cup quarter-final between Mechelen and Milan, staged in Brussels at the Heysel stadium, Baresi and Milan director Paolo Taveggia walked to the former Sector Z, the terrace where, on 29 May 1985, 39 supporters, most of them Juventus fans, had lost their lives before the European Cup final against Liverpool.

Milan had wanted to hold an official commemoration, but the Belgian authorities refused permission.

MILAN, ITALY – DECEMBER 15: Franco Baresi looks on during the Serie A match between AC Milan and Genoa at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza on December 15, 2024 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)

Baresi’s 39 roses at Heysel that moved Juventus

Baresi went anyway.

Quietly, without ceremony or fanfare, the Milan captain laid a bouquet of 39 red roses at the foot of the stand, one for each victim. It was a gesture made entirely on his own initiative: a moment of humanity from the captain of Juventus’s fiercest rival, at the scene of the bianconeri’s darkest night.

Word of it reached Turin. At the next home game at the Stadio Comunale, the Juventus curva answered with a banner that has lived in the club’s collective memory ever since: “Baresi, 39 volte grazie”, “Baresi, 39 times thank you.”

Thirty-six years on, it was Del Piero, himself a one-club “bandiera” in the same mould as Baresi, who reached for those exact words to say goodbye. In doing so, he reminded a grieving football nation why Baresi was mourned far beyond the red and black of Milan: not only as one of the greatest defenders the game has produced, but as a man whose decency transcended the rivalries that usually divide it.