Healing the Rift

Roberto Mancini has been at the helm of the Azzurri since May 2018 and has compiled an impressive run of results. Italian author and journalist Francesco Caremani explains the Sampdoria legend’s complicated relationship with the national team.

April 2021

There is an iconic image which binds Roberto Mancini to the history of the Italian national team. In the opening match of the European Championships on 10 June 1988, between Italy and hosts West Germany in Düsseldorf, the Sampdoria striker put the Azzurri ahead with a low shot from six yards past goalkeeper Eike Immel. When Mancini reeled away in celebration, his joy turned quickly into an angry release of frustration at the criticism from fans and journalists that had built up over his thirteen games without a goal for Italy. Mancini ran towards the press box intent on making rude gestures, stopping only when his teammates got a hold of him. Just a few minutes later Andreas Brehme’s free-kick – from a foul apparently conjured out of thin air by English referee Keith Hackett – levelled the scores… but that is a story for another time.

Perhaps Mancini thought about that moment on 28 May 2018 as he took his seat on the Azzurri bench for the first time as head coach, for the 2-1 friendly win over Saudi Arabia. Perhaps he saw the two dates as the alpha and omega of his troubled relationship with the Italy shirt. Mancini’s playing career came between the generations of Paolo Rossi and Roberto Baggio, in the context of a national side that had always struggled to accept the atypical. His preferred role as trequartista, between a pure striker and an attacking midfielder, was rarely accommodated by the dogmatic national team coaches of the late 1980s and early 90s, Azeglio Vicini and Arrigo Sacchi, respectively. Yet Italian fans will remember a World Cup qualifier away to Estonia in September 1993, which the Azzurri won 3-0 with a brace from Baggio and a goal from Mancini, who replaced Attilio Lombardo (also of Sampdoria) at half time. Baggio and Mancini – considered incompatible by some media critics – played brilliantly together, demonstrating that talent and intelligence can prove superior to the rigidity of roles and tactical schemes. It was a successful experiment that Sacchi nonetheless did not wish to repeat, much less at the 1994 World Cup in the USA, for which he only selected Baggio.

Mancini’s international career started early. He was still aged seventeen when he moved from Bologna to Sampdoria, the club where he would stay for fifteen years. Under the guidance of Vicini, who would later succeed the World Cup–winning Enzo Bearzot as manager of the senior side, Mancini made his debut for the Italy Under-21s in October 1982 in a friendly with Austria. He went on to appear in two editions of the UEFA European Under-21 Championship, reaching the semi-final in 1984 and the final in 1986, and this part of the story deserves to be told in greater detail.

Without knowing it, Vicini was forging the future Italian national team, featuring players such as Walter Zenga, Riccardo Ferri, Fernando De Napoli, Roberto Donadoni, Giuseppe Giannini, and the attacking pair of Gianluca Vialli and Mancini. Indeed, after Vialli signed from Cremonese in 1984, this was the same strike partnership that thrived at Sampdoria and which earned the nickname i gemelli del gol (“the goal twins”). The young Azzurri comfortably won their qualifying group for the 1984 finals, scoring fifteen goals and conceding just two in home and away ties with Belgium and Luxembourg. In the quarter-finals they narrowly beat Sweden, before eliminating holders England in the semi-finals. A 3-3 aggregate scoreline after the games in Rome and Vallodolid meant that the final against Spain was decided on penalties. Italy finished empty-handed, foreshadowing what would happen some years later to Vicini’s senior side at a home World Cup. His under-21s played great football, but it was not enough to win a trophy. Costly misses from the spot by Giannini, Stefano Desideri, and Marco Baroni gave the cup to Spain, who in hindsight fielded a team of inferior talent to the Italians.

Mancini had by this time already made his senior debut, on 26 May 1984 in a friendly win over Canada, with Bearzot as coach. But his adventure with the Azzurri began in earnest when Vicini was called by the federation to replace Bearzot towards the end of 1986. Despite the success of his partnership with Vialli at club level and for the under-21s, chances for Mancini were few and far between, with Vicini preferring Giannini alongside Vialli and relying on the veteran Alessandro Altobelli to play in Mancini’s place or replace him during matches – seemingly, it was always up to Mancini to give way.

Vicini’s side qualified for the 1988 European Championships in Germany but lost in the semi-finals to Valeriy Lobanovskyi’s USSR. Italy’s qualification for the subsequent World Cup in 1990 was of course confirmed as hosts, and on this occasion it was not just Baggio but also Salvatore Schillaci, a late call-up to the squad, who would put Mancini in the shade. Mancini would never take the field in that World Cup, watching on as the Azzurri took the tournament by storm and looked set to capture a fourth world title on home soil until the dream died, again on penalties, against Maradona’s Argentina in the Naples semi-final. Schillaci finished as top scorer, emulating the great Paolo Rossi’s tally of six in 1982, but without the title of world champion.

The Vicini era ended there with a national team beloved by fans, playing beautiful football albeit in a losing cause. For Mancini there was one more chance to realize his potential in the national team’s colours, and he featured in most of Italy’s qualifiers for the 1994 USA World Cup under Sacchi. Come the tournament itself, not only Baggio was again preferred to him, but also Pierluigi Casiraghi, Giuseppe Signori, Gianfranco Zola, and Daniele Massaro; Mancini was frozen out of the squad after a dispute with Sacchi. Now cast your mind back to 10 June 1988 – to that match between West Germany and Italy, to Mancini’s goal (one of only four in 36 appearances for the senior team), and to his reaction, because there, in those moments, is the synthesis of his tormented relationship with the national team.

In a Serie A playing career that lasted until 2001, Mancini amassed a formidable haul of club honours: two scudetti, six Italian Cups, two Cup Winners’ Cups, and a European Super Cup, as well as numerous individual awards. His greatest successes came at Sampdoria, in the northern port city of Genoa, where he became club captain and enjoyed a near-perfect relationship with the fans, the city, the management, and his teammates. By the time Mancini’s strike partner Vialli departed for Juventus in a world record transfer deal, the goal twins had fired Sampdoria to three Italian Cups, the Cup Winner’s Cup in 1990, the club’s only scudetto in 1991, and even to the final of the European Cup at Wembley in 1992. Only Ronald Koeman’s famous extra-time free kick denied the Blucerchiati the greatest prize, as FC Barcelona instead lifted the trophy the first time in their history.

Mancini’s coaching CV, meanwhile, boasts three Italian league titles, four Italian Cups, a Premier League title and FA Cup, and a Turkish Cup from stints at Fiorentina, Lazio, Internazionale, Manchester City, and Galatasaray. In May 2018 he was chosen to succeed Gian Piero Ventura, whose Italy team had become the first since 1958 to fail to qualify for a World Cup and were in desperate need of new leadership. There was no lack of criticism at Mancini’s appointment – partly because of his, shall we say, less than accommodating character, but also because of his difficult past relationship with the national team. Yet the current coach of the Azzurri seems to be a different person to Mancini the player. More accommodating? No: if anything, more mature and aware of what it means to represent Italy in one of the most pressured and scrutinized roles in the country. The national team is not like a club; the national team belongs to everyone. We all rejoice in its victories and despair at its defeats; we all follow the team even when we claim not to, and we all get on the bandwagon when it wins a trophy. Mancini understands all this and has acted accordingly, perhaps because he already knew how from his experience as a player. It is as if a wound has finally healed; a wound that had long remained open for Italian football: how was it possible that a player of Mancini’s talent could not be effectively included in the national team? Whose fault was it?

It is still difficult to say, but now there is a new story to write, which began with that friendly win over Saudi Arabia in St. Gallen, Switzerland. There were two early defeats in 2018 – in a friendly against soon-to-be world champions France in Nice, and a UEFA Nations League tie away to Portugal in Lisbon – but Mancini and his team have not looked back since, building a 25-match unbeaten run. In the recent international break the team began qualification for the next World Cup with three straight wins, and this comes after a faultless campaign for this summer’s delayed Euro 2020 tournament and progress to the 2021 Nations League Finals, which will now take place on home soil in October because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This summer’s European Championship finals, as well as the Nations League semi-final against Spain, will show us what Mancini’s Italy are really made of – and whether they will go down in history alongside Vicini’s side, which played so well but ultimately lost, or those of Bearzot and Marcello Lippi, which played good football on solid foundations and won trophies.

Mancini has rebuilt around him a piece of that Sampdoria side that is his trademark of success in football. The technical staff includes Lombardo, Giulio Nuciari, Fausto Salsano, Alberto Evani, and, at one point, Vialli too. Mancini shared his best years at Sampdoria with these men, and with Lombardo, Nuciari, and Salsano he has also shared the burdens and honours of coaching for a long time, first at club level and now in the national team. Vialli and Lombardo also played together during the golden years of Lippi’s first spell at Juventus. Indeed, the only members of this group who never played together are Vialli and Evani, who arrived at Sampdoria from Sacchi’s Milan in 1993, a year after Vialli’s departure.

Mancini’s absence due to coronavirus from the 2-0 Nations League win over Poland last November allowed us to witness a beautiful scene: Lombardo and Salsano, in the stands, communicated with Mancini via radio link and reported everything to Vialli, who informed Evani. It was a dense network of communication to which the players responded well, as did those on the bench, and the head coach was not missed. There has never been so much Sampdoria in the national team, and in observing the coaching group, the players called up to the squad, and the run of results, we can only be happy about the bold and carefree attitude that Mancini and his staff have managed to create in these three years; an attitude which closely resembles that of Sampdoria’s golden years.

In football, however, to be validated a project needs a synthesis – that final victory and conquest of a trophy that Mancini has achieved so often as both player and club coach. As a player he never quite found that success with the Azzurri, but he now finds himself with a chance to correct the narrative. After a year to forget in 2020, many in Italy are hopeful for success this year, as the national team has a double opportunity of the European Championships and the Nations League Finals to make up for the failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Would success be enough to finally mend the rift between Mancini and the blue shirt? Maybe.

Words: Francesco Caremani | Imagery: Imago; Offside