He covered many sports, but his greatest work was in words. Franco Ligas, a Sardinian journalist, has died at 79. A well-known figure on Mediaset, he hosted the popular Monday show "Sport Club" on Videolina during the 1999-2000 season. Ligas leaves behind a legacy of sharp wit, authentic expertise, and a great passion for journalism and sports.
His journey began between the desks of the Eleonora d'Arborea Teacher Training Institute in Cagliari and the first cameras of a local television station in Florence. It was 1976, he was just 30 years old, and he had two legends like Panatta and Pietrangeli to interview after the Davis Cup: not a bad debut for a boy with a teaching qualification under his belt, but a different calling in his heart.
His career has been a long journey spanning boxing, horse racing, football, and his own personal sports stories. First covering Fiorentina, then on national sports talk shows, he became one of the most recognizable voices on the Mediaset editorial team, where he worked for nearly thirty years, from 1984 to 2013.
Ligas was anything but banal. With his colleague Paolo Ziliani, he created "Inspector Ligas," a satirical character who intelligently debunked the absurdities of football.
"I've never been a great journalist," he said with that Sardinian modesty that never made him lose touch with his roots. Throughout his career, he never stopped. Even in retirement, he continued to write: first on Sportitalia, then on Elefante TV, and finally on his blog, Francamente vostro, where he continued to write about sports in the style that made him unique—concise, knowledgeable, and always with a smile at the tip of his pen. He loved Cagliari, because "I'm Sardinian and I even played there as a boy," and Fiorentina, the city that welcomed him as a young man and where his son was born.
