Football evolves at lightning speed.
What works one week doesn’t work the next week. A merit soon fades away. Trends seem as short as the TikTok videos that post them. Positional game. Relationism. Stick to it. This is where the game is intended to take place. Stay still and you will be left behind.
Nowadays, when clubs hire coaches, decision makers need analysts to review a file that explains why the candidate’s concepts are new. They don’t need yesterday’s guy. They usually need a Gerguy in his thirties or a Basque from an unpronounceable town with the letter X in his name.
Advertisement
Claudio Ranieri, on the other hand, turned 73 a couple of months ago. When he left the Cagliari job last summer, everyone assumed it was to retire, collect his pension and play with his grandkids. But football won’t leave Ranieri alone. “I had more offers in the last few months than when I won the league with Leicester,” he said. Ranieri turned all of those offers down. Except one.
In November, he boarded a plane to London — a regular flight, with ordinary people like you and me — hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to Claridge’s, the luxury hotel where Roma’s owner Dan Friedkin was staying. The Texan wished to know: would Ranieri come out of retirement for a third spell with the club he had supported as a boy?
Vincenzo Montella, a member of Roma’s last title-winning team (2000-01), was also in the running for the job after resurrecting his career with the Turkish national team. But no one else would settle for that. It seemed like a hiding place for nothing. Whoever accepts Roma’s fourth coach in 2024 would need courage, intelligence and a great center: everything Ranieri had in his hands when he was a butcher’s boy in the San Saba community of the Italian capital.
At the time, Roma were 12th in a 20-team Serie A and in disarray. It was experiencing its worst start to a season since 1979. The fans, among the loudest in the world, were in open rebellion. They intimidated the general. Coach Lina Souloukou made her resign and harassed captain Lorenzo Pellegrini and fellow veteran players Bryan Cristante and Gianluca Mancini. It is the lowest point of the Friedkins property.
Three years of underperformance in the league had been covered up by Jose Mourinho’s charisma and controversies, the conquest of a first trophy in 14 years and back-to-back European finals, albeit in UEFA’s second- and third-tier competitions.
Advertisement
The monetary losses caused by repeated mistakes to qualify for the Champions League and Mourinho’s net investment of €115m in Mourinho’s first summer mattered little to enthusiasts as long as big names Paulo Dybala and Romelu Lukaku were still playing. He arrived and the Friedkins showed respect for the club’s history and culture. He sacked Mourinho’s successor, club legend Daniele De Rossi, after 4 games this season, months after a new three-year contract and after spending €100m, he terminated this contract.
Ivan Juric, his replacement, was confident that his appointment responded to the owners’ ambitions to win trophies. The pale Croatian was fired after six weeks, after denouncing “a shitty situation. ” What do you think of Southampton, your last employers?
Anyway, Ranieri wasn’t afraid to jump in.
Five years ago, he answered the club’s call in a time of need. Roma, Champions League semi-finalists in 2018, were in sixth place at the time and were at risk of missing out on Europe’s premier festival for the first time in six seasons when they took the place. Monchi, his brief stint as sports director, had left the club in disarray; However, that actually means that Roma were in better shape at that time than they were in November. But the context was eerily similar: a palpable antipathy toward the owners manifested in scathing banners inside the Stadio Olimpico on good days and outside the team’s educational complex in Trigoria.
Ranieri himself had criticised the club’s performance in an interview with RAI Radio Anch’io lo Sport. The (less) structured appearance of Rome seemed to him “cold” in “spirit” and “without character”. He “didn’t understand” De Rossi’s dismissal, which made him hesitate before judging the Friedkins about the amount of money they had invested. Almost a billion. He remembers a moment in his formative years when the fans of the Curva Sud de l’Olimpico (south stand) organised a strength excursion to help a club in difficulty. In fact, Roma have been redder than the Giallorosso with Friedkins: in the red. But his family is not short of cash, as evidenced by Everton’s recent acquisition.
Advert
So Ranieri put aside his scruples about De Rossi and listened to them. In addition to a transitional role, he was presented with the opportunity to move up to an executive position at the end of the season. However, cleverly, he left enthusiasts with the impression that it wasn’t about strength and that he would do the task for nothing.
Football, as a game, deserved to have surpassed Ranieri a long time ago. His Sunday night rival, Lazio coach Marco Baroni, played with him in Naples. . . in 1991. It’s been so long since goalkeepers can still reject passes.
But, as in a Roman trattoria, the old recipes such as amatriciana, carbonara and gricia still work. For all the Michelin stars given out for molecular gastronomy and plates served with micro-herbs tweezered onto them, a classic will always be a classic.
Keep it simple.
That’s what Ranieri has done.
He played in the gallery without ruling out returning to Francesco Totti’s club in one way or another. He faced his most productive players. Mats Hummels, Leandro Paredes and Dybala are all World Cup winners. Juric inexplicably missed the first two. Meanwhile, Dybala was asked to chase down defenders instead of forcing them to chase him.
Ranieri has rectified this and does not seem to care that as long as Dybala continues to play, his contract will be automatically renewed with a salary increase; everything that De Rossi and Juric had in mind. He also ignored the much-maligned players Pellegrini, Cristante and Nicola Zalewski, protecting the captain (a Roman like him) in the press and excluding him from the starting eleven, so neither he nor the team had to play under a cacophony of whistles. each. and every time he touched the ball.
On Sunday, however, Ranieri recovered for the biggest attack of the year. It is said that Pellegrini had a “crazy desire” to play, and it showed. He scored the first goal in the 11th minute, shooting from the edge of the area after an impressive transition. It brings back memories of some other derby from 14 years ago. Ranieri was also in the groove at the time, as Roma won again after daringly cutting off his figli di Roma, or sons of Roma, Totti and De Rossi at half-time.
This move through Pellegrini marks a new twist in Ranieri’s man-management, a skill far more important than any tactic trending on social media.
Roma soon found a second, transitioning cutely again, this time from a goal kick with Alexis Saelemaekers pouncing on his own rebound to clinch a 2-0 victory. The Belgian’s return from injury has been another reason for Roma’s upturn in form.
Dybala, who according to Ranieri is “worth what he’s worth on his own”, was involved in both goals and spent the rest of his time on the pitch receiving warnings from Lazio players. Ranieri even vibrated the rigid Artem Dovbyk, who acted as a backboard in the preparation of Pellegrini and Saelemaeker’s plays.
Advertisement
The Ukrainian striker, who has only scored one league goal since Ranieri’s arrival, remains a work in progress. The fact that he turns 28 in June and is earning €30. 5 million (almost as much as Lazio’s entire summer transfer window) has raised doubts about sporting director Florent Ghisolfi. His other big signings, such as Matias Soule (€25. 6 million) and Enzo Le Fee (€23 million), have had little or no impact, unless you count the news that the latter was attracting interest from Sunderland in the last hours. before Sunday’s game. Array Saud Abdulhamid, a Saudi winger signed from the Saudi Pro League, plays as a Saudi winger signed from the Saudi Pro League. It’s undercooked and has a cult figure for all the wrong reasons.
Beating Lazio will help Roma forget, at least for one night, that they are still in 10th and 12th place with respect to their main rivals, who currently sit in the last Champions League qualification spot. It’s harder to forgive that, and a banner on the Curva Sud before kick-off reminded us of that. “Noi symbols and colors of this city. Voi feccia della societa,” it reads – We are the symbols and colors of this city. You are the scum of a club.
Only Ranieri is beyond reproach. A fifth victory out of seven in all competitions gives him the certainty that the worst is over. “We are a team now,” he told television channel DAZN. “Everyone knows what to do. ” And it’s undeniable that Roma look a more credible proposition in what is still a championship position for a team with this level of payroll and skill.
Ranieri has been informed of the selection of other people who will be hired to coach Roma next season. The questions Ghisolfi is asked are: “What if he chose himself?” and “What if the Friedkins let their feelings get the best of them?” As they seemed to do by making De Rossi’s interim appointment permanent?
Let’s leave all that for the day. But as everyone passes and football moves forward, have confidence that as the game changes, or at least appears to change, Ranieri will continue to make it look the same.
His relatively ancient set of skills for managing football teams is as eternal as Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.
GO DEEPER
Derby Days, Rome: Derby della Capitale
(Top photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images)