Following Italy’s failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, the Italian Olympic Committee
-sport’s supreme governing body in the country - reacted by effectively staging an intervention.
Two high commissioners were selected to conduct a root and branch review of the
Italian Football Federation (FIGC), one of which was the sharply-dressed
former Milan centre-back Alessandro Costacurta.
And painful as it was for him to sit down and re-watch Italy’s ill-fated World Cup qualifying
playoff with Sweden, he did so – and with Roberto Mancini do it, from whom he wanted a post mortem.
“Andrea Belotti and Ciro Immobile were in their own half the entire game. It was an invitation
for Sweden to come at us,” Costacurta said. “So, I told Roberto: ‘Look, I want a team that goes after
our opponents in their own half’.” Mancini pretty much replied: “Then you’ve come to the right man.”
Is he that man though? Mancini wasn’t the first person to come to mind when reviewing candidates
who implement a high press and incisive possession football. At least you wouldn’t have thought so
but the style and panache — or Tiki-Italia — with which Italy have played over the last three years
has come as a pleasant surprise. Some attribute this to the coaching Mancini
was exposed to as a player, which was mostly under outsiders like Vujadin
Boskov and Sven-Goran Eriksson rather than old-school Italian tacticians.
Others highlight the amount of time he has spent working abroad,
first at Manchester City, then Galatasaray and Zenit Saint Petersburg where he was
coaching when Costacurta picked up the phone. Although his teams,
particularly at Inter and City, were full of skill and capable of entertaining the fans,
they were rarely as expansive or as fluid as his Italy, where the fine work done below him at youth
level, where the country had been increasingly successful, has meshed nicely with his own ideals.
It has allowed Mancini to relaunch his career and become relevant again.
In many ways, he needed the national team as much as the national team needed him.
Mancini drifted since leaving Man City and is only now offering a reminder of what a
force he was when his coaching career began. Fresh from signing a new deal until 2026,
one of the reasons the FIGC’s president Gabriele Gravina was so keen to tie him down
was easy to understand. Mancini was beginning to be linked with elite club jobs once more.
Italy qualified for the Euros with three games to spare and will play the final four of the Nations
League in October. They have gone from 21st in the world behind fellow Group A participants
Wales to seventh, breaking the record winning streak on an encouraging 27-game unbeaten run.
There is a serenity about this Italy team that was lacking before, with Mancini knowing not
only how to make better decisions, but also how to better handle star players.
He has built this team around the quality of Verratti, Insigne and Jorginho, all of whom
were available to Ventura but were either played out of position or called up sparingly. Two-thirds
of that trio has experience of recent Champions League finals with PSG and Chelsea and as their
twenties draw to a close they have reached a maturity that shows on the international stage.
Mancini also wanted to send a message to coaches in Serie A that it was time to put faith in the
country’s youngsters. He called up Nicolo Zaniolo before the dynamic Roma midfielder had even played
a single minute for his club. Thirty-five debuts later, Mancini has continued to freshen Italy up
and is giving the players the confidence they need to represent their country. Before he came along,
the Azzurri had not scored six or more goals once this century. They’ve now done it X times
The team has come together on and off the pitch too, mirroring the band of brothers that is
Mancini’s staff with Gianluca Vialli, Alberigo Evani, Attilio Lombardo and Fausto Salsano,
reunited 30 years after winning the Scudetto together at Sampdoria,
and presumably hoping that, in the event they do make it to Wembley, they will be able to put
the ghosts of 1992 to rest, when they lost the European Cup final to Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona.