As a player, the Italy defender has a well-earned reputation as a brute and a brawler, but away from football he is softly spoken and fiercely academic

Giorgio Chiellini is probably not the man you think he is. Nor, indeed, the animal. The Juventus and Italy centre-back has a well‑earned reputation as a footballing bully, brute and brawler. He has broken his nose four times, been sent off five times and pulled opponents’ hair along the way. He pounds his chest with closed fists when he scores and characterises himself on his own website as a cartoon gorilla.

All of which is rather hard to reconcile with the softly spoken master’s student sitting opposite me in a sensible jumper and buttoned-up shirt, telling me how Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book, The Little Prince, helped his younger self to fall in love with reading.

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“It’s true,” he chuckles when I point out the discrepancy between his on- and off-pitch personas. “I met [Álvaro] Morata’s mum the other day, we had a train journey together, and she said the same thing: ‘When I saw you playing I never thought that you would turn out to be so calm and such a sweetie!’ That has always been my character – on the pitch I have a strong temperament, but off the pitch I’m more serene, reflective. I manage to separate out those two things.”

On some level, the divide echoes his childhood. Chiellini grew up in Livorno, a rugged dockyard town on the coast of Tuscany, but to parents with intellectually demanding jobs: his father is an orthopaedic surgeon, while his mother is vice-president of a Norwegian navigation company.

Chiellini would have liked to study medicine, but found that to be incompatible with the life of a professional footballer. He got his bachelor’s degree in economics and commerce instead, scoring 109 out of a possible 110 marks on his thesis – an analysis of Juventus’s balance sheets.

Perhaps, when he is done playing, the club will employ him to crunch numbers. For now, they are happy enough to leave him where he is – as the vocal leader of what might be the world’s best back-three. Juventus’s BBC – Leonardo Bonucci, Andrea Barzagli and Chiellini – represent, together with Gianluigi Buffon, the foundation on which five consecutive Serie A titles have been built.

Each defender has his own role. “I am the most aggressive one,” he says. “I go hunting for my opponents high up the field, and I put stock in physical one-on-ones and winning individual duels. Leo is our defensive regista, who helps us to launch attacks and to close down the time and space that the other team gets on the ball. Andrea is our professor. He’s always in the right place at the right moment.” They will not necessarily start together for Italy’s Euro 2016 opener against Belgium . Antonio Conte is the man who put the trio together in the first place at Juventus, but he has alternated three- and four-man defences during his two years as coach of the Azzurri.

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On paper, though, trusting in the BBC would seem the obvious option. Italy have lost two of their most dynamic midfielders, Marco Verratti and Claudio Marchisio, to injury and are short of elite options up front. Why would Conte eschew the one proven unit available to him, and especially after a season in which the BBC helped Buffon to set a Serie A record for longest-ever sequence without conceding?

Besides, isn’t defending what Italy has always done best? “In my opinion, we’ve actually lost this a little bit,” Chiellini says. “We have a generational gap for defenders between 1987-88 and 1994 in Serie A that’s incredible.

“We Italians are always criticising ourselves. The idea that we do not play with the ball enough – that we always think about defending first – became a big topic, and so you had this project of Spanish-isation. Guardiola-isation. Suddenly we have little boys playing the ball out from the keeper, zonal marking, football the way Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona played.

“And the truth is that, playing like this, we lost a few characteristics that have always made Italy great. Man‑marking, the ability to win one‑on‑one challenges. Characteristics that have, down the years, allowed us to produce some great defenders. I think that now people have understood this again, and we are trying to find a compromise. To get better at some things we were closed to, mentally, but without losing the good things that history had given us.”

Perhaps Atlético Madrid’s recent rise has also helped Italians to recapture a little lost faith in those old defensive principles. “In my opinion,” Chiellini says, “it’s no coincidence that their manager [Diego Simeone] played for so many years in Italy.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chiellini reacts to being bitten by Luis Suarez at the 2014 World Cup. “What we can say is that was the moment when, in effect, both teams went out of the competition,” He says of the incident. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters

Chiellini has a keen interest in the art of defending. He grew up idolising Paolo Maldini, and in 2014 co‑authored a book on the Juventus great Gaetano Scirea. Asked to name the one trait that every defender needs, he says simply: “Concentration.”

He uses the same word when asked to define the greatest qualities of his former Juventus team-mate, Fabio Cannavaro – one of only three defenders to win the Ballon d’Or. “He had this monstrous explosiveness,” says Chiellini. “But his concentration, his focus, his pure man‑marking … his defensive qualities were incredible.”

Yet when asked recently which player he would have liked to play alongside in his career, Chiellini did not name an Italian but an Englishman – John Terry. “He’s a defender that I’ve always admired,” Chiellini says. “He’s physical and has a good sense of how to read the game, but he’s also a charismatic defender who gives the impression of dragging his team-mates onwards with positivity.”

Chelsea fans hoping that Conte could yet unite them at Stamford Bridge are likely to be disappointed. Chiellini has long suspected that he might suit English football, but if there was a window for him to move it was in the summer of 2007 when Liverpool were among several Premier League clubs to register an interest. As Chiellini tells it, a transfer “was close … but not that close”.

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He can have no regrets, given the successes he has achieved at Juventus. Chiellini remains fascinated with the Premier League, but does have some criticisms. Asked why England never seem to live up to their potential in international tournaments, he replies immediately: “Because they get to the end of the season exhausted. Knackered.”

In part, he suggests, that might come down to conditioning and nutrition, but it is also because the domestic game is so unapologetically physical. And perhaps it is also the fault of the Premier League, whose focus he suggests might be slipping away from technical quality towards glitzy entertainment.

“England have always had talent,” he adds. “And the beautiful thing is that there will be a load of new players and managers in the coming years because the money from the new TV deal means that teams can do what they want. But the important thing as, someone who loves football, is that English football does not become too much like the NBA. At a certain point, it almost just becomes a show.”

And what of Italy? Chiellini has experienced some significant highs and lows with the national team, from a run to the final of Euro 2012 to eliminations in the group stage of the World Cup finals either side. Italy’s early exit from the 2014 tournament in Brazil left an especially bitter taste. Might things have gone differently if officials had spotted Luis Suárez’s bite on Chiellini right before Uruguay scored in Italy’s final match? “We’ll never know,” he says with a shrug of resignation. “What we can say is that was the moment when, in effect, both teams went out of the competition.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest “He’s a defender that I’ve always admired,” Chiellini says of Chelsea’s John Terry. Photograph: Scott Heppell/PA

Chiellini would welcome the opportunity to wash away those memories with a strong showing this summer. Injuries notwithstanding, he believes it is possible, arguing that Italy’s “greatest quality, in the end, has always been the group – the collective”.

That and a healthy dose of defensive pragmatism. The Azzurri were often underwhelming in qualifying for this tournament, registering 1-0 wins home and away against Malta, but they finished first and undefeated in Group H. Such progress calls to mind a line in another book from Chiellini’s personal library – not the Little Prince, but his own ‘social biography’, The Defender. “At the end of the day,” Chiellini writes. “It’s better to be an unpleasant winner than a nice loser.”