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    Fabrizio Romano: Soccer's Prophet of the Deal

    Fabrizio Romano has turned rumors into an industry. But is he an observer of soccer’s multibillion-dollar transfer market, or a participant in it?The quickest way to capture the extent of the influence wielded by Fabrizio Romano, a 28-year-old Italian journalist with a five o’clock shadow and an overworked iPhone, is to boil it down into a list of easily digested numbers.Currently, Romano has 6.5 million followers on Twitter, two and a half times as many as, say, Inter Milan, the team that featured in Romano’s breakthrough moment, or Bruno Fernandes, the Manchester United star who inadvertently made Romano a global phenomenon.He has 5.6 million more on Instagram, and a further 4.5 million devotees on Facebook. There are also 692,000 subscribers on YouTube and 450,000 on Twitch, the video streaming platform.Or there are at the moment, anyway. Chances are that in the gap between the writing of that paragraph and your reading it, Romano’s figures will have ticked inexorably skyward. It is January, after all, one of the biannual boom times for a journalist covering soccer’s frenetic, multibillion-dollar transfer market. Every day, Romano’s accounts will draw another few hundred fans, another few thousand even, all desperately seeking news of the players their team is or is not signing.Yet even as these social media metrics provide an immediately comprehensible, faintly intimidating snapshot of the breadth of Romano’s popularity — self-professed insiders covering the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. could make similar claims — they do not tell us much about quite how deep his impact runs.Last month, the Spanish forward Ferran Torres posted a video of himself on Twitter doing light physical work at the training facility of his hometown club, Valencia. Torres had spent Christmas in a gentle form of limbo, waiting for his former club, Manchester City, to agree to sell him to Barcelona.By Dec. 26, things had moved sufficiently that Torres wanted to let his followers know a move was imminent. “Getting ready at home … Valencia,” he wrote in a message posted alongside the video. And then, on a new line, a single phrase: “Here We Go!”Those three words were intended as the digital transfer market’s equivalent to white smoke billowing from a chimney. They have come to mean that a deal is not just close, but completed. And they are indisputably Romano’s: They are his seal of approval, his calling card, what he refers to with just a hint of regret as his catchphrase.That, more than the numbers of followers Romano has accrued, is the best gauge of his influence. Increasingly, to players, as well as fans, a transfer has not happened until it bears Romano’s imprimatur. (“Here We Go” is, in some cases, now used as a noun: Correspondents now regularly ask Romano if he is in a position to “give the here we go.”)Romano in his home office in Milan, where he records some of his TV and podcast appearances.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesHis power is now so great that he has, not entirely intentionally, made the leap from being merely a reporter covering soccer’s transfer market to something closer to a force within it. And in doing so, he has blurred the line between journalist and influencer, observer and participant.The ScoopThe call that made Romano’s career, in his telling, came entirely out of the blue. He had started writing about soccer as a teenager in his hometown, Naples, composing stories and firing them off, free of charge, to a variety of fairly niche Italian soccer websites in the hope they might publish them.He does not quite know how an aspiring Italian agent in Barcelona got hold of his name, or his phone number. “He was working at La Masia” — the famed Barcelona academy — “and he wanted to become an agent,” Romano said in an interview last month. “He was hoping to convince two young players to let him represent them, and he asked me if I would write a profile of them.” The players were Gerard Deulofeu, a young Spanish wing, and a prodigious teenage striker named Mauro Icardi.Romano wrote the profile, the agent got the clients, and the two stayed in touch. In the summer of 2011, Romano broke the story that Icardi was leaving Barcelona for Sampdoria. He refers to it proudly as his “first news,” but its impact was limited: Icardi was an 18-year-old youth team player, after all. His arrival at a team then struggling in Italy’s second division was hardly earth-shattering.But in November 2013 the agent called again. “He said I had helped him at the start of his career, and now it was his turn to help me,” Romano said. Icardi, his source told him, had agreed to move to Inter Milan the next summer. Six months before the deal was officially announced, Romano published the news on an Inter Milan fan site.Mauro Icardi, the player who helped make Romano’s career, at Inter Milan in 2013.Luca Bruno/Associated Press“That was the time everything changed,” he said. He left Naples for Milan, and the hardscrabble world of freelance journalism for a job at Sky Sport Italia. The first story he was sent to cover was, as it happens, Icardi’s physical at Inter. “That story was part of my life.”Soccer, in general, has long had an insatiable appetite for gossip and rumors and tittle-tattle from the transfer market: In England, the nuggets of news appear in old copies of long-defunct sports newspapers dating to 1930. Nowhere is the obsession quite so deep-rooted, though, as in Italy.“You have to remember that, for a long time, we had four daily newspapers devoted to sport,” said Enrico Mentana, a television presenter, director and producer who started his career at one of them, Gazzetta dello Sport. His father, Franco, worked there; he had been a celebrated correspondent, specializing in transfers.For those newspapers, Mentana said, transfer stories were “the only way to sell copies in the summer, when there were not any games.” They were aided and abetted in turning player trading into “a spectacle” by the presidents of the country’s biggest clubs. “The owners were great industrialists, scions of great families,” he said. “For them, attracting a big star from South America, say, was a chance to show their greatness, their power, to give a gift to the people.”By the time Romano had made it to Sky Sport Italia, the doyen of the genre was Gianluca Di Marzio, the channel’s star reporter, the host of the nightly — and unexpectedly cerebral — show it broadcasts during soccer’s two transfer windows.Romano helped Di Marzio build, and fill, his personal website. In return, he learned the finer points of his craft, particularly the value of the traditional shoe-leather journalism that had long been deployed to harvest those precious hints and whispers. “For years and years, I would go every day around the city,” Romano said. “Restaurants, hotels, anywhere football people would meet.”But while the methods had endured, Romano had some intuitive sense that the landscape was changing. He quickly grasped not only that social media could serve as both an outlet and a source, but that he had an innate eye for which sort of content worked on which kind of platforms.“For example, I used Instagram initially as a personal thing,” he said. “I would post a picture of a nice sunset, a good dinner. But all the time, in the replies, people would ask me about transfers. Nobody was interested in my life. I’m not a star. I am a journalist, and a journalist is an intermediary.”His most significant insight, though, was that there was no reason to be hidebound by borders. With his replies swelled by interest from fans around the world, asking for updates on teams in England, France and Spain, as well as Italy, he started to seek stories away from home.To Romano, the great leap into the global soccer conversation came in 2020. Fernandes, a talented Portuguese midfielder, had spent most of the previous summer being linked with a move to Manchester United; Romano consistently played it down. A few months later, though, the club made its move, and when Romano bestowed his customary “here we go” on the deal, the reaction was “huge.”He does not claim to have had that story first: It had, after all, been bubbling for months, and had been extensively reported in the weeks before it was completed. In his eyes, though, speed is not where true value lies in a social media world, and particularly in that portion of it devoted to soccer’s chaotic, contradictory and often chimerical transfer market.What followers want more than anything, he said, is to know that what they are reading is true. That is what he tries to provide. “I do not have a deadline to meet or a paper to sell,” he said. “I write things when they are ready.”Two players in Romano’s rumor mill this month: Fiorentina striker Dusan Vlahovic ….Massimo Paolone/LaPresse, via Associated Press… and Mohamed Salah, whose future at Liverpool is suddenly anything but clear.Lindsey Parnaby/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn part, his expanding influence — he has added five million social media followers in the past 18 months alone — can be attributed to his work ethic. When Romano is not submitting transfer stories to The Guardian or Sky Sport, he is uploading them to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, or he is talking about them on his podcast or his Twitch channel or in his latest role, accepted last year, with CBS Sports. He discusses them with one of the suite of club-specific podcasts he finds time to grace with his presence as a guest, or replies to his followers directly on social media. There is talk of a book, too. During transfer windows, he said, he regularly does not go to bed until 5 a.m.Whether it is dedication to his trade or dedication to his brand, or neither — Romano has a puppyish delight in talking about his passion — it has worked. Often, now, the reach of the clubs and the player actually involved in any given transfer is dwarfed by that of the person reporting it.The Fine LineLast summer, as the Spanish team Valencia closed in on a deal to sign Marcos André, a Brazilian striker who had spent the previous season playing for its La Liga rival Real Valladolid, the club’s marketing and communications arm, VCF Media, was commissioned with finding an unexpected, impactful way to announce it.A transfer, after all, is a chance for a club to attract attention, to win a few eyeballs and perhaps gain a few new fans in what is now a global battle for engagement. Valencia is not just competing with domestic rivals like Villarreal or Sevilla for that audience, but teams from Italy and Germany and England, too.The problem, as far as the club could tell, was that there was nothing new about the club’s interest in signing Marcos André. There had been a run of stories hinting at the move for weeks. To reach the broadest audience possible with its confirmation, VCF Media decided to do something a little different.Once the paperwork on the deal had been completed, and the player had successfully passed his physical, the club contacted Romano and, with the blessing of Borja Couce, Marcos André’s agent, asked if he might like to be a part of the announcement. He agreed, and filmed a short video to tease the deal. It concluded, of course, with his catchphrase.The logic, for Valencia, was simple. Romano has 6.5 million Twitter followers. The club has 1.3 million. In VCF Media’s eyes, he was a “tremendous influencer in the world of football, a shortcut to a global audience,” as a club representative put it. Romano was the point at which “sport and entertainment” converged.Since then, others have followed suit. Romano, a confessed fan of Watford, the on-again, off-again Premier League team, featured alongside a host of players in the video to launch the club’s new jersey last summer.This month, Romano has featured in videos for both Germany’s Augsburg and Major League Soccer’s Toronto F.C., announcing the signings of Ricardo Pepi, the U.S. forward, and the Italian playmaker Lorenzo Insigne. Sportfive, the marketing agency based in New York that arranged the Augsburg announcement, did not respond to a request for comment as to whether Romano had been paid.Those appearances are testament to Romano’s hybrid status. Ordinarily, European clubs prefer to keep journalists of all stripes at arm’s length; the locker-room access traditionally offered by America’s major leagues is anathema. They guard their transfer plans with particular secrecy, fearing that a mistimed leak could jeopardize a deal months in the making.Romano with the jersey of the one club that he, perhaps surprisingly, places above the rest: Watford. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesRomano, though, has been embraced by every player in the market. Official club social media accounts reference his catchphrase. He enjoys regular interactions with owners and agents — a few days ago, Mohamed Salah’s agent, Ramy Abbas, told Romano, unprompted, that he was “a little bored these days,” an apparent reference to the stalemate over the Liverpool forward’s new contract — and even players themselves.That renown is professionally useful, of course. Romano’s fame has opened doors. “I remember a sporting director called me last January,” Romano said. “I had always talked about him a lot, and just like that, he called. He said he wanted to know the boy who seemed to know everything.” Romano was, briefly, just a little star-struck.But those relationships come with a risk, too. The same influence that makes Romano valuable to clubs looking to gain access to his followers also makes him vulnerable to those looking to exploit his reputation for reliability.The global transfer market is a $6 billion industry. Deals can be worth millions in commissions alone, but they are fragile, unpredictable things. And one word, from someone like Romano, can make or break them.There is a danger, he knows, in people giving him “their vision of the truth.”“But then I do not have a show that needs to be filled or a headline that has to be written,” he said. He can wait until “the right moment” for all concerned. “A journalist does not need to be the enemy,” as he put it.That is how he sees himself, even now, even with all of that impact and all of that reach. He rejects the term “influencer,” but he crossed that particular Rubicon some time ago. It is a fine line, though, the one that runs between observer and participant, between inside and out. He has now crossed it. Even he will not be able to say, not with any certainty, where he goes from here. More

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    The Two Ciro Immobiles

    The spearhead of Italy’s attack is either its secret weapon or its fatal flaw. At age 31, it is still not clear which.The raw facts are, on the surface, overwhelming. In the last five seasons, Ciro Immobile has scored 26 goals, then 41 goals, followed by 19, 39 and 25. Over the course of that run, he has won the Golden Boot — the prize given annually to Europe’s most prolific goal-scorer — once, and tied the record for the most goals scored in a single season in Italy’s top league, Serie A.The context of those facts only serves to embellish them. Immobile does not play for an all-conquering superpower, the sort of team that carves out a dozen chances a game and regularly dispatches overmatched opponents by four- and five-goal margins. He plays, instead, for Lazio, a side constructed — by superclub standards — on a shoestring.And he operates in Serie A, a league which no less an authority than Cristiano Ronaldo regards as the most difficult in the world in which to score goals. A league in which Ashley Cole, among the greatest defenders of his era, was regarded as being surprisingly naïve, tactically.The conclusion, then, should be obvious. Immobile, 31, belongs in the front rank of contemporary forwards, perhaps not quite an equal to the only four players in Europe’s major leagues to have scored more than him in the last five years — Lionel Messi, Ronaldo, Robert Lewandowski and Harry Kane — but not out of his depth in their company.Immobile has scored twice at Euro 2020 for Italy, which cruised in the group stage and faces Austria on Saturday in the round of 16.Pool photo by Andreas SolaroThat, certainly, is how he looks up close. Simone Inzaghi, Immobile’s coach at Lazio for the last five years, regards him as “one of the three or five best attackers” in Italy in the last two decades. On his goal totals alone, he should have been in contention for a Ballon D’Or.From a distance, though, everything changes. Immobile’s name is rarely mentioned when lists of the finest attackers of his era are compiled. On the eve of Euro 2020, the most pressing question asked of Italy’s coach was whether his team could hope to fare well in the tournament when it was lacking a top-class forward. And no, Immobile, the striker who had scored 123 goals in 177 games, did not count.A few weeks ago, as the Italian season drew to a close, Immobile had a brief and vaguely unbecoming spat with Urbano Cairo, the president of Torino. Cairo had, at one time, regarded the forward as “a protégé.” It was a prolific season in Turin, in fact, that had first made Immobile one of Italy’s hottest properties.But Cairo was annoyed to see Immobile, in his view, diving to win a penalty in a game between Torino and Lazio, so he waited for him by the locker room to make his feelings known. That night, Immobile posted a message to his Instagram account denying Cairo’s accusation. “Everybody knows who Ciro Immobile is,” he wrote.He was almost right. Everybody thinks they know who Ciro Immobile is. It is just that not everybody thinks the same thing.The Real CiroThe conversation, as Monchi remembers it, was “very open, very honest, very mature.” Five months earlier, in July 2015, he had brokered the deal to bring Immobile to Sevilla from Borussia Dortmund. As Sevilla’s sporting director, Monchi had been looking for a third striker, one “with a different profile” from the two the club currently employed: the rangy Fernando Llorente and the explosive, hard-running Kevin Gameiro.Immobile — who describes his own gifts as “strength, tenacity and cunning” — fit the bill. Monchi, renowned as among the shrewdest pilots of the transfer market, spotted the potential for a deal. Immobile’s service were no longer needed at Dortmund; Sevilla could obtain him on an initial loan, and later, and permanently, at a bargain price if he met certain performance clauses.Instead, the striker would go down as one of Monchi’s rare missteps. He did not score his first goal for the club until November. He made only a handful of appearances. And then, early in January, he requested a meeting with Monchi and Unai Emery, the club’s coach at the time, to discuss his future.Immobile explained that he felt he needed a change of scenery; he admitted that he was not performing as he should. “He was worried about the European Championship,” Monchi said of the 2016 tournament then looming just over the horizon. “He wanted to be in the Italy squad, and he knew that to do that he had to be playing. And he was not playing enough here.” Sevilla acquiesced, and allowed him to join Torino on loan.“There are two reason transfers go wrong,” Monchi said. “One is that the player does not find the confidence they need at their new club, or in a new league. That is especially important for strikers. And the second is that the style of play of the team does not suit them. I think both applied to Ciro.” To him, it was just one of those things. He knows that, sometimes, deals just do not work out. He and Sevilla moved on.Immobile has been a prolific scorer at Lazio, but his ventures outside Italy did not go as well.Pool photo by Friedemann VogelFor Immobile, the consequences lasted a bit longer. He had spent 18 months abroad, and they had been an unmitigated failure. At Dortmund, he would later say, he felt “unsupported” by the club. In eight months, he told Gazzetta dello Sport’s SportWeek magazine, not one of his teammates had invited him out for dinner.Dortmund was “cold,” there was “nothing to do,” and while the coach who signed him, Jürgen Klopp, had insisted on providing him with a German translator, his replacement, Thomas Tuchel, removed that privilege, insisting on holding even one-on-one meetings in German, a language that Immobile found “impossible” to learn.More pertinent, he found himself unable to cope with the weight of expectations. He had been pinpointed as a replacement for the Bayern Munich-bound Lewandowski and he sensed his predecessor’s gold-fringed shadow at every turn. “The error I made at Dortmund was that Lewandowski left and I felt the responsibility,” he said.Immobile looks back on his time in Germany with regret. He and Klopp encountered each other at “the wrong time in their careers,” he has said. Had the timing been different, been right, then he feels that Klopp’s percussive style would have suited him perfectly. As it was, Klopp never had chance — in Immobile’s words — to work with “the real Ciro.”And yet, for many, that was precisely what Klopp, and later Monchi, had seen. Those unhappy 18 months came to define Immobile’s career, to set his reputation. No matter what he did afterward, no matter how many goals he scored in Italy, no matter what the context, the fact that he had failed in Dortmund and in Seville meant his fate was sealed. Everybody thought they knew who Ciro Immobile was.Italy’s coach, Roberto Mancini, at times seemed to be searching for any striker who was not Immobile.Mike Hewitt/Getty ImagesRevengeUntil almost the last moment, the one part of Italy’s team that remained a mystery — to Roberto Mancini, its coach, as much as anyone — was the attack.Over the course of his three years in charge of the national side, Mancini has experimented with various systems, and various options: the young Moise Kean and the experienced Fabio Quagliarella, the traditional Andrea Belotti and the unorthodox Federico Bernadeschi. From the outside, Mancini has looked, at times, like a man searching for a way not to play Immobile upfront.That is not because Mancini doubts whether Immobile is right for international soccer — he has no doubts as to his ability — but if international soccer is right for him. “If we played 38 games over the season, Ciro would score 25 goals,” Mancini said a few weeks before naming his squad for Euro 2020. “It is tougher when you only join up two or three times a year.”That is as close to a consensus as there is on Immobile: He can be devastating, but he needs everything to feel just right, on the field and off it. At Lazio, he has found it. Inzaghi designed the team to suit Immobile’s strengths, deploying Luis Alberto and Joaquin Correa as foils for his darting runs, his elusive movement, his hunter’s instinct.Just as important, his family is settled in Rome. He feels valued by the club — Lazio’s president, Claudio Lotito, organized a private audience with the Pope a few months ago — and he has a grander animating force.Italy may advance only as far as Immobile can carry it.Pool photo by Andreas SolaroIn 2020, when Immobile won the Golden Boot, the first player not based in Spain to win the prize since 2014, he admitted that it was “a kind of revenge.” Quite who he was taking it on was not clear — it was “not against anyone personally,” he said — but it seemed fair to read it as a riposte to all who doubted him, who took the disappointments of Dortmund and Seville as shorthand for his career, who did not see the player that Immobile saw in himself.That award, perhaps, started to shift the debate in his favor just a little. Five goals in five games in the Champions League last season will have helped, too; that is the stage, after all, on which soccer now ordains greatness, and it has been to Immobile’s detriment that he has graced it only rarely.Euro 2020, then, offers him a precious chance to prove his point, to demonstrate that Italy does have a forward fit for a place among the elite, that all of those goals cannot just be written off as circumstantial evidence. He may, yet, be allowed a little autumnal afterglow to bathe his career.The group stage brought two goals in two starts on home soil. The knockout rounds, starting with Austria on Saturday, are an opportunity to build his case. All he needs to do is what he has been doing, with a relentless consistency, for the last five years: scoring goals, making the raw facts of the matter overwhelming. More

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    Euro 2020: Italy Bets on Youth, and Fun

    A nation steeped in soccer stopped producing trophies because it stopped producing players. Can a commitment to youth, and fun, bring back the glory days?At one point, for reasons that presumably made sense in context, the coach and one of his assistants spent a few minutes onstage playing padel — a Basque version of tennis — with a set of frying pans. At another, three players were lined up in descending order of height and asked to perform as backing vocalists for someone who, apparently, self-identifies as a rapper.Most of the countries competing in this summer’s European Championship announced their squads in the traditional manner: a list of names and some anodyne quotes in a simple news release or, for those investing a little more effort, a slick graphic released on social media.Italy, though — well, Italy went in a very different direction. It unveiled its players for the tournament during a variety show, broadcast live and late into the night, that did not actually conclude with confirmation of the squad. The federation never quite managed to fit it in, what with all the music and games and cooking equipment. Italy’s list was released on social media a couple of hours later.The proceedings, though, created just the sort of impression Roberto Mancini — the pan-wielding coach — wanted. Italy’s record at major tournaments over the last decade or so has been checkered at best. It reached one final, at Euro 2012, and performed creditably in 2016. In 2010 and 2014, though, the Azzurri slunk home from the World Cup at the end of the group stage. In 2018, for the first time in more than half a century, they did not even qualify.Italy’s players after they failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. The team’s recent history is filled with devastation.Luca Bruno/Associated PressSo as they prepare for the opening match of the postponed Euro 2020, against Turkey on Friday in Rome, Mancini and his team should be under intense pressure. Major tournaments, ordinarily, are a time of high expectation and hair-trigger tension.This Italy, though? Well, it has gone another way. The variety show was only the first piece of media content the national team will put out over the next few days. There is a fly-on-the-wall documentary, too, and an official song that is one long inside joke. Mancini appears, singing along, in the video for it.The angst and the anguish of recent years have been thoroughly banished. Instead, as Mancini said while he stood onstage that night, broadcasting live to the nation, his frying pan laid to one side, he is going to try something novel.“We will get the fans on board,” he said, “by having fun.”Long ShadowsMarcello Lippi did not hear the bell tolling, not at the time. As he pored over his choice of players to take to the 2010 World Cup, Lippi found himself picking the familiar names, the familiar faces over and over again. The core of the squad was much the same as the one that had won the tournament for him in Germany four years before. The coach chose the players, he would say later, out of “gratitude.”“I realized too late that some had given all they had,” he said.That moment of realization can be timed and placed with unerring accuracy: Ellis Park, Johannesburg, June 24, 2010, when Slovakia — appearing in a World Cup for the first time — beat Italy to send the reigning champion home, violet with indignity.That night, Lippi sat on a raised platform in a media center and described how his team had played with “terror in its heart and its head and its legs.” The responsibility for the national humiliation — there had also been a draw, a few days earlier, against New Zealand — was his, and his alone, he said. He would fall on his sword soon after.Young players like goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma have helped change the face of Italy’s national team.Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOver the last decade, Italians have grown accustomed to that sort of denouement in a major tournament. In 2014, when Italy was again eliminated at the World Cup’s first hurdle, the coach and the two top executives at the national soccer federation all resigned live on television. Failure to qualify for 2018 cost not only the head of Gian Piero Ventura, the coach, but that of his boss, too. Italy has spent a decade leaping out of frying pans and into fires.At the same time, the explanation offered by Lippi for that failure in 2010 has been internalized on a national level, automatically applied to every disappointment that has followed. “I did not think we would win the World Cup,” he said that night in Johannesburg, not far off heresy for an Italian manager. “But I thought we could perform better than that. This is clearly not a fantastic moment for Italian football.”Heads still rolled, but Italy accepted that its tournament performances were symptoms, rather than causes, of a broader malaise. Lippi suffered because the team that had won the World Cup had grown old. His successors failed because no new generation had emerged to replace them. As the shadow of that glorious team of 2006 grew longer, the darker and deeper the gloom became.There are any number of explanations for why that might be. Massimiliano Allegri, Juventus’s coach of the past and present, argues that youth soccer in Italy is, effectively, too tactical: Coaches are so worried about their jobs that they mask the individual shortcomings of their players with strategy.“Instead of letting kids learn how to defend one-on-one, they give them cover,” Allegri said. “They double up. But that means the kid doesn’t learn. So when they have to play one-on-one, they don’t know how.” That, in his mind, is why “Italy does not produce champions anymore.”Paolo Nicolato, the country’s under-21 coach, contends that Italy’s soccer culture is too intolerant of errors, which he labels “a necessary step of growth.” It suffers from a “bad relationship with the future,” he says. “We are very focused on the present.”That assertion is borne out by facts. Last season, of the 50 youngest teams in Europe’s top 20 leagues, only one was Italian: A.C. Milan. Only three Italian sides appeared in the top 100. More significantly, only five percent of all the minutes Serie A teams played last season were given over to homegrown, academy-reared players. Italian soccer remains a culture that is deeply distrustful of youth.“It is a strange championship,” said Maurizio Costanzi, the head of youth development for one of the few teams to buck the trend: Atalanta. He has spent four decades working with young players in Italy, and he has noticed a definite, incontrovertible change in both the quality and the quantity of emerging prospects.He wonders if that might be related, in part, to the demise of street soccer, or to the rise in athleticism in the sport squeezing out the sorts of players — playmakers and schemers — who long characterized the Italian game. But he is sure that those who do make it are not given a chance either quickly or reliably enough to succeed.“You get cycles in every country, and you can’t plan out when players come through precisely,” he said. “But in Italy one of our problems is that we only think about the result. It puts a limit on us. It means that our players seem to mature more slowly.”Striker Ciro Immobile has been a prolific scorer in Serie A.Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs a player, four decades ago, Mancini was an exception to that rule, making his debut at 16, rising to become an international long before he hit 20. Perhaps it was natural, then, that as a coach he should set about trying to change the culture.The problem, to him, was a lack of opportunity, not a lack of ability. “Maybe you are a little afraid to let the young players play,” he said not long after taking the job as national team coach. “It is just a matter of time. You just have to believe it.”Notti MagicheThe high-speed Frecciarossa train that collected Italy’s squad in Florence on Thursday had been specially painted, its bullet-nosed front decked out in a streak of bright blue. The journey to Rome would take only a couple of hours. When the squad disembarked, though, the plan was for the players to find themselves back in 1990.This is the first time since that year’s World Cup that Italy has hosted a major international tournament. Rome may be one of Euro 2020’s side stages — London has more games than anywhere else, including both semifinals and the final — but that has been more than enough to stoke the memory.The authorities have encouraged it: The opening ceremony on Friday will feature the tenor Andrea Bocelli, playing the role of Luciano Pavarotti and singing “Nessun Dorma,” the soundtrack of that Italian World Cup.The media has perpetuated it: Italy will play the opening game, La Gazzetta dello Sport noted this week, in the stadium that was home to so many of what, in 1990, became known as the notti magiche: magical nights. Even Mancini has embraced it, his decision to call up the unheralded Sassuolo striker Giacomo Raspadori seemingly an attempt to unearth his own Totò Schillaci, the captivating icon of that long, sweltering Italian summer three decades ago.For the first time in a long time, the country seems to have a team capable of wearing its history lightly. Mancini’s Italy has not lost in 27 games, since late 2018. At one point, it had won 11 consecutive games, a record. It may not have faced any of its putative rivals for the crown this summer — the Netherlands aside — but the sense of momentum is undeniable.Mancini has created an Italy refreshed and rejuvenated. In the three years of his tenure, he has given international debuts to 35 players. By Italian standards, there is youth shot through his team. Goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma and defender Alessandro Bastoni are both 22. Midfielders Manuel Locatelli and Federico Chiesa are a year older. Nicolò Barella and Lorenzo Pellegrini are 24.The 21-year-old striker Giacomo Raspadori played his first game for Italy last Friday.Darko Bandic/Associated PressThat the squad has the air of a team for the future, not the present, works in its favor. Italy feels young and daring, new and different. It feels like the sort of team a country might find fun. It is, though, a testament to serious, painstaking work.Ever since that defeat in 2010, Italian soccer has been trying to restore its course, to piece together some idea of how it might produce players again. To do so, it commissioned a series of reviews and assessments carried out by some of the sport’s greatest names: Gianni Rivera, Demetrio Albertini, Arrigo Sacchi, Alessandro Costacurta.The key figure in Italy’s reconstruction, though, is an unknown: Maurizio Viscidi, the coordinator of the country’s youth teams. It was Viscidi — initially hired by Sacchi a decade ago — who oversaw a revolution not only in the structure of Italian youth soccer, introducing an under-15 team and reorganizing youth competitions, but also in its mind-set.He has tried to wean the programs he oversees off an addiction to the result, to the here and now, and to make it think more about the players it is developing. He has instituted a policy linking Italy’s youth teams more intrinsically to the senior side, making the step up easier.And in Mancini, he has found a coach after his own heart. A few months after taking the job, Mancini organized a joint training camp involving Italy’s senior team, its under-21s, and its under-20s. The message was clear: Youth would no longer be overlooked. It would, instead, be front and center. The squad he has named for the tournament is made up of his children of the revolution.How that revolution ends is not yet clear. This summer may be the redemptive climax. It may have to wait until Qatar, next year. It may never come at all.To Mancini, though, that is not the point. What matters, now, is that his team and his country have a little fun in finding out. More

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    European Soccer Learns a New Virtue: Patience

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEuropean Soccer Learns a New Virtue: PatienceWhy have so few managers been fired this year? Pandemic economics play a role, but there are bigger forces at work, too.Some forces are immune to the pandemic: Sam Allardyce was hired last week by West Brom, his eighth Premier League club.Credit…Pool photo by Lindsey ParnabyDec. 23, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETLONDON — Enrico Preziosi could hardly have held Thiago Motta in higher esteem. As a player, Motta spent only a single season at Genoa, the Italian soccer team Preziosi owns, but he made such an impression that, a decade later, his old boss cited him as his ideal professional. “A smart and empathetic man,” Preziosi said. “He taught me many things.”Not long after that ringing endorsement, the men were reunited. At the end of his playing career, Motta had moved into coaching and was developing a glowing reputation in Paris St.-Germain’s youth system. Genoa, as is its default setting, was struggling. And so in October last year, Preziosi turned to Motta, the “player of his soul,” to arrest the slide.And then, two months later, he fired him. Motta, that smart and empathetic man, had lasted all of nine games.It was vintage Preziosi. This, after all, is what he does: He fires coaches. In the 17 years since he bought Genoa — Italy’s oldest club — he has changed his coach 27 times. He quite often churns through three in a single season. He once fired Alberto Malesani twice in the same campaign. He has fired one coach, Ivan Juric, three times. Italian soccer has a word — mangiallenatore — for owners like him: coach eater.The Genoa chairman Enrico Preziosi has a short leash with his managers.Credit…Simone Arveda/EPA, via ShutterstockPreziosi fired another manager this week, dispensing with Rolando Maran, whom he had appointed in August but who had not won a match since September. If all of that felt reassuringly familiar, though, the circumstances were unusual. This year, many of Preziosi’s peers in Europe’s top five leagues have discovered a virtue hitherto rarely associated with owners of soccer clubs: patience.More than a third of the way through the season, only one other Serie A team, Fiorentina, has fired its coach. In La Liga, only Celta de Vigo has changed managers. In the Premier League, Sam Allardyce had to wait until last week to be parachuted into West Bromwich Albion. His appointment was only the second time a Premier League team had fired a manager in 2020.In France and Germany, things are a little more familiar. Four managers — at Metz, Dijon, Nice and Nantes — have been fired in Ligue 1 so far this season. Four have also been dismissed in the Bundesliga, though the continuing implosion of Schalke accounts for two of them.Even there, though, most owners waited as long as they could before deciding on change. David Wagner, the first of the two Schalke coaches to be fired this season, lost his job after failing to win for 18 games; the club had been determined to give him a chance to turn the situation around. And of the eight dismissals in France and Germany this season, half happened this month.Much of this newfound restraint can, of course, be explained by the coronavirus pandemic. Clubs across Europe are facing immediate shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars in lost ticket revenue, as well as an uncertain commercial landscape in the coming years. In France, that has been compounded by the collapse of a television rights deal that would have provided the backbone of most teams’ budgets.Slaven Bilic was the first Premier League manager fired this season. He made it to December.Credit…Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFiring a coach, meanwhile, is expensive. At the elite level, that can mean several million dollars to pay out the contracts of an incumbent and his staff, and the commitment of millions more to appoint a suite of replacements.Fiorentina, for example, fired Giuseppe Iachini at the start of November, replacing him with Cesare Prandelli. The club is now paying the salaries of three coaches: Prandelli and Iachini as well as Vincenzo Montella, who was fired last year but is still officially under contract — paid, essentially, not to work. The club has the means and appetite to do that — the cost is borne by its owner, Rocco Commisso, the billionaire chairman of Mediacom — but most teams do not.“The mentality of team owners is just to get through this period,” said Stewart King, the global head of performance at Nolan Partners, an executive search and recruitment consultancy that works with a host of clubs across Europe to fill technical positions. “Teams that might want to be in the top 10 of their league are thinking that as long as they’re not bottom, what matters for now is that they survive and see what the world looks like on the other side.”As well as the cost, though, there is a unique practical consideration this season. Allardyce, after his appointment at West Brom, admitted that it “might take longer than normal” for his methods to have an impact because training time is so limited in a compacted, congested calendar. With so little breathing space between games this year, most teams are restricted to recovery and recuperation; a new coach simply does not have time to introduce a new tactical approach.But it is possible, too, that the pandemic — as it has in so many other spheres of life — has simply accelerated a change that was starting to occur naturally. “Most clubs now have a much more professional process when they hire a coach than they did 10 years ago,” said Omar Chaudhuri, the chief intelligence officer at the analytics consultancy 21st Club.Whereas typically owners in need of a new manager would scan the market for the latest flavor of the month, or use a network of agents to identify available and willing candidates, now many clubs conduct a much more extensive form of due diligence.Though Nolan Partners, for example, does much of its work identifying and recommending sporting directors, it is often brought in to source references and run the interview process for teams looking for a new manager. 21st Club is one of a number of firms that provide data and performance analysis not only on incumbents, but on their potential replacements.“Even when an owner or a chief executive has an idea of who they might want, they have to demonstrate a process,” King said. “It is much more sophisticated than it was.”David Wagner was the first manager fired by Schalke this season. It’s now on its third.Credit…Martin Meissner/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Chaudhuri’s experience, that sophistication in hiring coaches has made owners less impulsive in firing them. “Clubs are much more invested in their appointments,” he said. “Executives increasingly look at the underlying numbers, and often are reassured by what they see, even if results aren’t great at the moment. They have put the work into finding the right guy, and they want it to succeed.”King said at least a part of that shift is because of the increasing number of American investors — who tend, he said, to arrive with a “medium- to long-term mind-set,” and run their clubs along the general manager model common in American sports. “A sporting director lends a bit of air cover to the manager,” King said. “The days of the sporting director criticizing the manager because he wants the job are gone.”The patience demonstrated in the straitened times of the pandemic, then, may be rooted as much in inclination as it is in necessity. But for all that soccer is starting to change — to grow more sophisticated, more thoughtful, less impulsive — some things stay the same.Preziosi fired Maran on Monday, and replaced him with Davide Ballardini. The new man, at least, goes into the job with his eyes open: It is the fourth time Preziosi has hired him. There are no prizes for guessing how the other three turned out.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More