Mancini has led Italy out of the abyss once and is best placed to do it again – promoting youth is key to the future
James Horncastle 6h ago
Roberto Mancini probably didn’t have the radio on at Coverciano on Friday.
The national team had got in at three in the morning from Palermo and were still in a state of shock after missing out on the World Cup in Qatar with their play-off loss to North Macedonia. No media engagements were planned as the players and coaching staff tried to process what had just happened to them.
But Mancini’s mother, Marianna, did appear on the airwaves as a guest on the radio show Un Giorno da Pecora.
“I would have called up Mario Balotelli,”
she said. “He’s unbelievably strong and no one can stop him in front of goal. He’s done a few silly things in his time but I would have called him up.”
Marianna’s boy
had brought Balotelli back into the fold for a training camp at the end of January but his country apparently didn’t need him for this month’s World Cup play-offs. Ironically the Adana Demirspor striker remained in Turkey, which is where Italy had to travel on Tuesday for a pointless friendly against another national team who will not be in Qatar this winter after losing their own play-off semi-final to Portugal.
Cancelling the Turkey game out of embarrassment was not an option with the TV rights package for the play-offs paying out €3 million to the Italian Football Federation. The shortfall in revenue caused by that stoppage-time defeat to North Macedonia means every little helps.
“Football is sometimes a metaphor for how ruthless life can be,” Italy coach Mancini posted on Instagram. “Last season we were on top of Europe after pulling off one of the greatest feats in the history of the Nazionale. A few hours ago we were shaken by one of the most dramatic. We went from total joy to frustrating disappointment.”
The reactions were predictably extreme.
Tuttosport’s front page screamed: “Noooooooooooo!” Il Corriere dello Sport described Italy as “in hell!” Sky Italia’s lead commentator Fabio Caressa called for Mancini to hand in his notice.
“It’s the worst result in the history of Italian football,” Caressa argued. “Worse even than Korea (which meant an early exit from the 1966 finals). At least we were at the World Cup that time. Results are what matter in sport, not a philosophy. This is a failure and if I were Mancini I’d resign.”
In the heat of the moment, Mancini didn’t.
He has acted in haste before, quitting Inter Milan after
Liverpool knocked them out of the Champions League’s last 16 in March 2008 only to then go back on his word.
Once so irascible, the sangfroid that characterises Mancini in his late 50s must come as a surprise to former team-mates and anyone who played under him. “It’s very hard to accept, but knowing how to lose is a healthy part of our growth as human beings and sportsmen,” he insisted. “We’re going to take some time to reflect and try to understand what happened with lucidity.”
Unlike when people were disgusted by Giampiero Ventura’s shameless but ultimately futile attempt to hang around in the aftermath of the 2017 play-off defeat to Sweden that meant Italy would not go to the following year’s World Cup in Russia, Mancini has not been held in such contempt. Four years ago, the senior players regretted not intervening before it was too late, feeling they should have gone to the FIGC — the Italian FA — and expressed the opinion Ventura was out of his depth.
Open dissent manifested itself on the sidelines, with Daniele De Rossi furiously questioning Ventura’s in-game decision-making at San Siro. Now a valued member of Mancini’s coaching staff, De Rossi said: “Everything about this is different. The team is different. We’re coming off winning the Euros. That’s our starting point.”
The loss to North Macedonia will end some international careers, such as that of Giorgio Chiellini, whose stoppage-time cameo on Thursday will likely be the last minutes he ever plays in Savoy blue. But the tearful Tuscan did not see why the defeat should bring a close to Mancini’s tenure as Commissario Tecnico (CT).
“We’re gutted, heartbroken,” Chiellini said. “There’s going to be a huge void deep inside of us and I hope that in the future the energy we need to come back can be drawn from this void, as was the case over the last years. I hope Italy do it together with Mancini, who I consider essential to the national team. I remain proud of this side and my team-mates.”
Gabriele Gravina, the snowy-haired president of the FIGC, also stood firm in support of Mancini and spent the days after the North Macedonia debacle subtly imploring him to see out the new five-year contract which he pushed ‘Bobby Gol’ to sign amid the fear one of Europe’s top clubs might suddenly remember what a good coach he is.
Winning the Euros last summer, setting new national-team records for winning streaks and going on the longest unbeaten run in the Azzurri’s history were still too fresh in the memory. How could you sack someone so soon after so great an achievement?
Italy had gone undefeated through World Cup qualifying’s group phase, coming only to regret that their fate even came down to the play-offs after the
hatful of chances they missed against Bulgaria. The mistakes Jorginho from the penalty spot both home and away against Switzerland will “weigh on him” for the rest of his life.
And then there was Domenico Berardi, all 14 goals and seven assists of him in Serie A this season, looking a North Macedonian gift horse in the mouth on Thursday by intercepting a pass from goalkeeper Stole Dimitrievski and tamely hitting it straight back at him rather than firing the ball into a gaping net.
Blame did not lie with Mancini beyond the loyalty he showed out of form players including Lorenzo Insigne and Nicolo Barella.
Parallels were drawn with Enzo Bearzot and Marcello Lippi who stayed true to 1982 and 2006 World Cup winners in the 1986 and 2010 campaigns, with pretty disastrous consequences. But it is one thing to stand by a core group of players for four long years and another to do so after eight short months that came and went in the blink of an eye.
Fingers instead predictably began to point at Italian football in general.
As with climate change, worrying incontrovertible signs have been in front of everybody’s eyes for years. The same stat-lines are produced after every major tournament flop and the alarm sirens flash red. But once the indignation and self-flagellation fade, the calls to action fall silent and the news cycle moves on. Club football soon drowns it out and nothing changes.
For the first six months of every year, the national team meets once in spring and then again in summer. “When there’s a European Championship or World Cup, the national team becomes important, but it then gets abandoned a little, at least compared to the past,” Mancini lamented. “It’s a thought I’ve had for some time, not that it has anything to do with the defeat.”
He is not the first nor will he be the last CT to make this pained observation.
All the while, the concern grows.
Last week, Italy Under-21s coach Paolo Nicolato complained about the shrinking pool of players available to him at the top domestic clubs. Before a 1-1 draw with Montenegro on Friday, he went through some figures to give weight to his argument.
On average in Serie A, only 2.7 players per club are eligible for a call-up to Nicolato’s squad and their share of the minutes is just four per cent. They rarely start matches, either. In fact, around 80 per cent of their game time comes after the 70th minute. “Serie B is now our reference point,” he observed. “If we carry on at this rate, it won’t be long before I’m having to look at players in the third division. This trend is going to cause the national team a problem.”
Sticking with an out of form Lorenzo Insigne was one of Roberto Mancini’s problems (Photo: Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
The foreign player ratio in Italy’s top flight has long been a drum to bang whenever the national team does badly and standing at 64 per cent — inferior, historically, only to the Premier League — the paradiddle of panic has been the percussive element of post-play-off self-pity.
Only this time attention has turned to the youth sector, specifically at club level.
Anecdotally, when you think of the best players to have come through the finishing school of Italian academies, the names and transfer fees that first spring to mind are those of Dusan Vlahovic and Dejan Kulusevski, who were teenagers when they came over from Serbia and Sweden respectively to play in the Primavera 1 domestic youth competition. Ivory Coast duo Amad Traore and Franck Kessie were hyped and sold for big money upon emerging in Atalanta Under-19s.
Italian examples are not exactly lacking either, as we will get to, but Gravina has pointedly raised the issue that 42.81 per cent of players under contract in Primavera 1 are not eligible for selection to Italy’s under-age teams.
The lack of alignment between clubs and country is a distant cry from the days of Artemio Franchi, the former Fiorentina executive who is credited with reforming Italian football after the humiliation of the 1966 World Cup. Franchi fought to ensure the national team was at the centre of everything. Nobody was left in any doubt that it represented the pinnacle of the Italian game and that everything should flow towards it.
Coverciano, the training ground and coaching school, was set up under his auspices on the outskirts of Florence and Italy soon rebounded. They won the Euros in 1968 and reached the World Cup final two years later.
But Franchi’s reforms are not repeatable now. Signing foreign players was forbidden then, and only in 1980 were teams able to buy one import per season. Such a ban is unenforceable today on account of EU employment law and freedom of movement.
The FIGC, like all national associations, now has to reckon with its diminishing influence, which has suffered in competition with the leagues ever since the game started to globalise, the Bosman ruling came in, TV rights boomed and the Champions League did not just become more lucrative, but the standard and spectacle of it reached such proportions that it rivals and betters the World Cup.
Relations with Serie A have gradually become more and more fractious and if any further evidence of the league’s self-interest were needed, look no further than Serie A’s plans to hold a tournament in the US this winter
at the same time as the World Cup.
At least all of the top Italian players will now be available for it, should it ever get off the ground.
La Repubblica has also claimed Serie A is debating whether to raise the number of non-EU players a club can sign per season from two to eight.
Rather than best friends forever, league and federation are practically strangers in the same house and not just because Gravina annoyed owners including Claudio Lotito and Aurelio De Laurentiis by introducing a law that stops them having stakes in clubs such as Salernitana and Bari as well as their ones in Lazio and Napoli.
The two bodies expect more from one another but personal interests and politics get in the way. Their priorities are not the same, just as the priorities of Serie A and some of Europe’s other leagues are not the same. France and Portugal seem to have an endless talent production line but for many of the clubs in those countries this is the only way for them to make money. Ligue 1 — which readily owns its reputation as the ‘league of talents’ — has only two automatic Champions League slots and
Paris Saint-Germain are always going to take one of them.
Developing players for sale has to be a primary revenue stream and the same is true of Porto, Benfica and Sporting Lisbon in Portugal’s Primeira Liga.
Serie A, by contrast, has double the number of places in the Champions League and, in a crude way of looking at it, half the incentive. For the top clubs in Italy, where seven teams realistically compete to finish as the top four, qualifying or not is so important that it is hard not to think in the short term.
Atalanta are an exception and them aside, the only club outside the European places who have the backing, stability and top-flight continuity to invest in Italian youth is Sassuolo, which is why they have become arguably the most valued and unexpected supplier of players to the national team.
The problem this presents is two-fold.
First, it highlights the precariousness of the other, smaller Italian clubs who are mired in debt, living day-by-day and focused on surviving. Growing American investment may yet stabilise these teams and enable them to switch mentality from maintaining their frail Serie A status to building strong and sustainable foundations. Second, the lower down the division Mancini and Nicolato have to go for players, the less those given call-ups are exposed to the pace and quality of European football, with Sassuolo’s Berardi being a case in point.
Italy, like many countries, are struggling to find a reliable forward, and Domenico Berardi does not appear to be the answer (Photo: Tullio M. Puglia/Getty Images)
But, for all the doom and gloom, it is not all bad.
Talent in Italy is not completely drying up. Strikers are hard to come by, it is true, but
Germany are experiencing the same issue since Miroslav Klose’s retirement, the Netherlands do not have a Ruud van Nistelrooy, Patrick Kluivert or a Robin van Persie, most of Spain is not convinced by Alvaro Morata and even Portugal are blessed by Cristiano Ronaldo, having spent years wondering how they might replace Pauleta.
Whether this is a consequence of the Guardiolification of football over the last decade, who knows, but it certainly isn’t unique to Italy. The lack of green space and street football amid the concern for kids’ safety were some of the reasons why Arsene Wenger felt Western Europe was no longer as productive in making strikers as in the past.
More generally though, what Italy are going through now is not a repeat of the Apocalypse in 2017, when nobody could see the light of a new generation. On the contrary, it risks becoming an eclipse not only of everything
Mancini has done in the past four years but the good work implemented by Arrigo Sacchi in 2010 and carried on by
Maurizio Viscidi, the FIGC’s technical coordinator.
Italy were finalists at the Under-17 and Under-19 Euros twice each between 2016 and 2019. A steady stream of players has stepped up in the meanwhile, and though some have inevitably been overhyped, things could be worse than being able to call on Gianluigi Donnarumma, Alessandro Bastoni, Sandro Tonali, Manuel Locatelli, Federico Chiesa, Gianluca Scamacca, Moise Kean, Nicolo Zaniolo and the like. Not much should be read into Tuesday’s 3-2 win over Turkey in Konya but it did at least hint at what this next cycle will look like under Mancini with Tonali in midfield, Scamacca up front and his Sassuolo team-mate Giacomo Raspadori scoring twice.
None of this underplays the gravity of missing out on Qatar. While a lucrative new sponsorship agreement with Adidas worth around €125 million has been agreed for 2023 and other commercial partnerships have followed since winning the Euros last summer, it is estimated the failure to qualify will cost the FIGC between €15 million and €25 million.
An entire generation of Italians have grown up without seeing their country play at a World Cup and their passion may be drawn to other things in the meantime. Andrea Agnelli justified last year’s doomed launch of the Super League as part of a plan to make young people enthusiastic about football amid perceived waning interest and competition from video games.
Perhaps that feeling is more acute in Italy than it is in other countries because scandals have damaged the game’s credibility and the
stadia are run-down and in desperate need of an upgrade if the match-going experience is to continue its appeal. Nevertheless, the impression of Italy as a football-crazy nation endures.
If defeat to North Macedonia had happened in the context of Italy having gone out to Austria in the round of 16 at the Euros — imagine for a moment Marko Arnautovic’s goal that day at Wembley doesn’t get disallowed by the VAR — then valid concerns would be even more pronounced.
But let’s not underplay how engaged and proud the nation was last summer when Italy seemed to win every competition it entered. Too often it is the negatives that get emphasised, like failing to win the Champions League since 2010 without acknowledging that
Juventus got to the final in 2015 and 2017 or Italy’s World Cup record since the 2006 triumph when they reached a Euros final in 2012, threatened to win it again in 2016 and did so in 2021.
The bambino should not be thrown out with the bath water.
Mancini led Italy out of the abyss once and nobody is better placed to do it again.
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