The World Cup Zone

The World Cup is being played in the United States this summer, which makes it a good time to tell you how the Zone diet helped three veteran players lead their country to become world champions.

In 2006, Italy won the World Cup. What very few people knew was that three of the squad’s oldest players, Marco Materazzi (32), Alessandro Del Piero (31), and team captain Fabio Cannavaro (32), were following the Zone diet. At an age when most footballers are slowing down, they were among the reasons Italy lifted the World Cup trophy. To understand how they got there, you have to rewind about fifteen years and start in a swimming pool.

My work with elite athletes began with the Stanford University swimmers who made the 1992 US Olympic team. That small group brought home seven gold medals. Seven is very good for a single country. For a single university, it is almost unheard of. The same approach produced similar results with US Olympians in 1996 and again in 2000. Word of what these athletes were doing began to travel.

By 2004, that word had reached Italy. My Italian partners and I were asked to work with the Italian national basketball team, which at the time was considered the worst in Europe. We made them a simple offer: follow the Zone diet, and we’ll turn your season around. The one catch was that they had to stop eating pasta. The players told us that without pasta they couldn’t perform. I pointed out that, as the laughingstock of European basketball, they had nothing to lose.

Within a few weeks, the team was unrecognizable. The players stopped making careless mistakes on the court, and they seemed to have a limitless supply of energy. They went on to win the European championship and qualify for the 2004 Olympic Games. Nonetheless, they were still ranked as the weakest team in the field. Then, in an exhibition match just before the Games, they faced a heavily favored US team made up of NBA all-stars and won by 20 points. They kept winning in Athens, all the way to the gold medal game, where they finally lost to Argentina, led by NBA All-Star, Manu Ginobili. Nonetheless, a silver medal from the team that no one in Europe had taken seriously a year earlier was quite an achievement.

Which brings me back to the soccer pitch. Watching the basketball team’s transformation, three veteran players on the Italian national football team, Materazzi, Del Piero, and Cannavaro, with the help of my Italian partners, adopted the same Zone diet. The following summer, Italy won the 2006 World Cup.

The story did not end in 2006. In 2009, Manchester City of the English Premier League signed Carlos Tevez to a long and lucrative contract. His coach, Roberto Mancini, another Zone enthusiast, was not impressed. He told Tevez that at 28, he was already old, and frankly, overweight. But he would be willing to work with him if he followed the Zone diet. Mancini sent him to one of my top Zone coaches in Italy for three weeks of dietary training. Tevez came back a different athlete. He became Manchester City’s leading scorer for several seasons, then moved to Juventus in Italy’s Serie A league and led them in scoring as well. He continued to compete at the highest professional level well past the age of 40.

By now, the pattern should be clear. Follow the Zone diet, and you create the metabolic foundation for peak athletic performance. For the rest of us who are not chasing gold medals or World Cup trophies, the same advice does something just as valuable. It helps you lose excess body fat, better manage existing chronic conditions, and live a longer, healthier life.