Fit, lean and 33 years young – De Gea ready for an Italian renaissance

They played the triumphal march from Verdi’s Aida to see in the new Serie A season at Parma, a milestone moment for the home team, back in Italy’s top flight after three years away. A rousing anthem too to herald the most celebrated star from visiting Fiorentina back into the big time. He’d not been involved in competitive football at any level for 14½ months.
David de Gea was on the bench throughout Saturday’s 1-1 draw, a gesture to show that just because he’s come in at the top of Fiorentina’s salary scale, he’s still obliged to prove, in training, there’s no rust on his limbs after a long, unorthodox sabbatical. He’ll be hoping for a debut on Thursday, when the club who reached the past two Europa Conference League finals begin their campaign in that competition against Hungary’s Puskas Akademia.
The moment De Gea does displace Pietro Terracciano, the first-choice goalkeeper these past three seasons, he can expect scrutiny of how the once brilliant reflexes have weathered his voluntary professional exile; and because it’s De Gea, there’ll be close attention to how confidently, how accurately the 33-year-old moves the ball with his feet.
The longer De Gea stayed away from employment, after his brusque departure from Manchester United in June last year, the more easily he could be caricatured as a sort of relic, a symbol of how the template for the ideal elite goalkeeper has shifted so far towards swift, precise distribution that the best part of a dozen years as shot-stopper supreme in the most-watched league in the world had come to count as almost secondary.
By the time De Gea was collecting his Premier League Golden Glove award in 2022-23, United were already planning to replace him with André Onana, a ’keeper capable of javelin passes and bold jaywalks beyond 18 yards. It would be the second of two dispiriting demotions for De Gea. In 2021, he lost his place as Spain’s No1 under a coach, Luis Enrique, for whom a sure-footed sweeper-keeper is always a manifesto pledge.
De Gea has different fortes, but for all the diminishing of his relevance over the past three years, he says he never doubted that, post-United, he would return to top-flight football. What he did learn, over 12 months that yielded various offers — all refused — was that nobody in Europe would readily pay him even half as much as United used to.
“I never thought of retiring,” he told reporters in Florence. Addressing the questions about the effects of more than a year away from team practice, he insisted his personal training regimen has left him “probably fitter than I was before”. Anybody looking for signs of physical neglect will struggle. He’s still the lean, wiry De Gea Old Trafford came to regard, at his peak, as United’s most reliable performer.
And he’s only 33, eight months Terracciano’s junior. As De Gea was reminded on the way to Parma, it makes him a dozen years younger than Gigi Buffon was when Buffon, a Parma idol, played his 1,151st and last senior match, on the weekend before De Gea’s farewell game, a losing FA Cup final, for United.
As one former colleague of De Gea’s pointed out last week, he’s in the right place to feel a young 33: “Italy’s a place where we veterans feel a bit more respected. In Spain, maybe there’s more scepticism about players with a few years under their belts, even when they’re in good shape.”
Those observations, shared with the Spanish newspaper Marca, come from Pepe Reina, who embarked on a parallel adventure to De Gea on Sunday. The pair, different sorts of ’keeper and men on distinct ends of the extrovert-introvert spectrum, go back a long way. They went to two World Cups together with Spain, Reina cultivating his role as the perfect understudy, a squad member so full of bonhomie that, in the era where Spain were rattling up European Championships either side of winning the 2010 World Cup, he would be compensated for having been on the bench all tournament by being appointed as MC when the trophy celebrations took place in Madrid.
That profile, that charisma, has given Reina several sidelines working in television. But, 11 days from his 42nd birthday, he has no inclination to call time on a playing career where the encores never run out. This evening, he’ll be at the Juventus stadium, embarking on his 26th season in senior football, the wisest old head among newly promoted Como’s fleet of worldly summer signings.
He’ll have an auxiliary role as trusted counsel for Como’s novice head coach, Cesc Fàbregas, who, while hoping Reina is right about Serie A being good for evergreens — Reina’s new team-mates include the 30-somethings Raphaël Varane, Andrea Bellotti and Alberto Moreno — will also note how open Italy has become to younger managers. Reina will tonight shake the hand of a Juventus coach, Thiago Motta, a direct contemporary with whom Reina graduated from the Barcelona academy at the end of the 1990s. Reina first knew Fàbregas, now 37, as a kid four years his junior at the same academy.
Before Como there was Barçelona, Villarreal, eight years at Liverpool, another eight in Serie A with Napoli, AC Milan and Lazio, a season as Bayern Munich’s back-up, a stopgap stint at Aston Villa and two years back at Villarreal. The reign of Reina has its epic span, he believes, not because he’s a cheery, uncomplaining reserve when asked to be but because his technical portfolio meant he, unlike some, was never deemed to have gone out of fashion.
“The main thing is making saves,” he said, “but yes, if, at 42, I’m still going strong, it’s because of my passing game, my ability with my feet, which I’ve always been comfortable with. It has been a huge asset for me and very obviously extended my career.”
When Fabregas suggested this “last dance”, as Reina calls it, he barely hesitated. He followed his established summer routine of a week or so in what he calls “a spiritual retreat” and set about selecting where on the banks of Lake Como he would like to live.
Is there a more agreeable setting for a new chapter? De Gea may think so as he surveys Tuscan real estate, confident of one thing above all about his comeback, which is that his wife, Edurne, will not be describing their new abode in the way she infamously spoke of Manchester, a city “uglier than the back end of a refrigerator”. So now try Florence. It’s a lovely place to launch a renaissance once De Gea has found his feet.