Gennaro Gattuso has finally put a name to the illness he has carried for 15 years.
On stage at the Festival dello Sport in Trento on 4 October, the 48-year-old Lazio coach told the audience he lives with ocular myasthenia, a chronic autoimmune disease that disrupts the muscles controlling his eyes and leaves him seeing double every waking hour.
“I stopped playing because of the autoimmune disease I got.”
“I have been taking cortisone for 15 years.”
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He put a date on another cost of the condition.
“It has been six or seven years since I drank any kind of alcohol.”
‘People stay in bed for four or five months’
Gattuso said his own symptoms are mild compared with what the same condition does to others.
“There are people with my illness who stay in bed for four or five months because they cannot move,” he told the Trento audience.
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He refuses to let the diagnosis define him.
“I accepted the illness, I work on it. But it takes its toll on me, because taking cortisone every day is not easy.”
Ocular myasthenia is a form of myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks the receptors that let nerves tell muscles to move. In its ocular form it typically affects the eyelids and the muscles controlling eye movement, producing drooping lids and the double vision that Gattuso lives with around the clock.
The illness that ended his career in 2013
Gattuso retired as a player in 2013, two years after the first cortisone prescription he described in Trento. The Italian spent the rest of the decade building a coaching career across Italy and abroad before taking the Italy national team job, which he left this year after the Azzurri lost to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the playoffs for the 2026 World Cup.
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Lazio confirmed him as head coach on 23 June in a short club statement, his first club job since the national team exit. The appointment came less than three months after the World Cup disappointment and reunited him with Serie A, where he had previously coached Milan and Napoli.
By his own account, the illness was already with him through parts of a playing career that produced two Champions League titles with Milan and a World Cup winner’s medal with Italy in 2006.
“You keep going until God gives you the strength to carry on,” he told the Trento audience.
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