The sage of Italian football strode back into the capital on Friday, cast his twinkling eye across the state of the game in his native Rome and, being Claudio Ranieri, did his best to sound positive. Roma, who have called the 73-year-old Ranieri out of retirement to coach them for a third time in his storied career, need some of that optimism. They have worked their way through three other managers already in 2024 and are experiencing a distressing form of FOMO. All around them, there’s what might be termed an Italian renaissance afoot and Roma are not keeping up.
They sit in the bottom half of a Serie A which, to Ranieri, veteran of title jousts as manager of Juventus and Roma in the past and of a fairytale title triumph at Leicester City, has been tempted back just when the upper storey of the league is especially compelling. Its top six places are separated by two points. Italy is entitled to feel patriotic about that. Those half dozen clubs are all coached by Italian citizens, a uniformity of local influence you won’t find around the summit of any other of Europe’s top five domestic divisions.
There’s a parallel pride in the national team, as another sage of Italian management, the former Italy head coach Arrigo Sacchi, observed in Gazzetta dello Sport: “The domestic game is getting stronger, and the Azzurri confirming those encouraging signs.” Thursday’s victory for Italy in Belgium that clinched a place in the quarter-finals of the Uefa Nations League, advertised the buoyancy of Serie A in that nine of the ten outfield players who started the 1-0 win are employed there, and apparently not so distracted or sapped by the demands of an exacting club programme to regard international breaks as a time for taking a breather. From the original squad picked by Luciano Spalletti for the games against Belgium and, on Sunday, at home to France, only one, Samuele Ricci, injured playing for Torino in last weekend’s derby at Juventus, withdrew after the naming of the squad.
Here, perhaps the difference between a league A assignment in Uefa’s not-so-flagship event with qualification for the final stages at stake, and, say, a league B promotion skirmish of the sort England were involved in, in Athens. And here, a measure of the importance to Italy of actually making progress in an international event. A quarter-final of the Nations League may not be something the four-times world champions would normally put up the bunting for, but when a country has failed to reach either of the past two World Cups, and a little more than four months ago ended their defence of the European championship crown at the last 16 stage via one of the more wretched performances of the summer’s Euros, evidence of real revival is eagerly grasped.
There has been significant rejuvenation since Switzerland outclassed and eliminated Italy at the Euros. Only three of Spalletti’s XI from that day in Berlin — a line-up with an average age of almost 28 — started against Belgium. In Brussels he put faith in eight players of 25 or under, turning irritable when, after the match, a television reporter suggested he reflect on the startling difference between the insipid, blunt Azzurri of then and the front-foot, proactive Italy of now — a team who, going into Friday night’s fixtures, were the leading goalscorers of the Nations League’s top division. Circumstances had changed, insisted Spalletti, who in June bemoaned the residual fatigue of a long club season. “We are Italy, and there will always be 30 players we can call on to build a strong national squad. We just had to find the right way of working to make it happen as a team. These players have done that because they are good, strong lads.”
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He was especially pleased with Nicolò Rovella — “he was wonderful” beamed the coach — who, at 22, made his senior debut at the heart of a five-man midfield, a promotion motivated by Rovella’s recent impact at Lazio, who lead the Europa League table and are among a group of four clubs locked a point behind Serie A pacesetters Napoli. The centre back Alessandro Buongiorno, 25, impressed, marshalling Romelu Lukaku, his Napoli team-mate, effectively. Although a back three missing the injured Arsenal defender Riccardo Calafiori had some anxious moments, Italy registered a first clean sheet in nine competitive games. Repeat that against France in Milan and they will finish as winners of group 2 of Nations League A. France, also guaranteed a place in the quarter-finals, need to win by two clear goals to leapfrog Spalletti’s young braves.
Above all, it had been a landmark night for Sandro Tonali, the one outfield starter employed abroad, and still the most expensive Italian ever exported thanks to the €59million (£49.2million) deal that took him from AC Milan to Newcastle United in 2023, three months before he was banned, for breaching betting rules, from all football, sidelining him for most of his first season in England and from the Euros. Eleven minutes into the Belgium game, Tonali scored his first goal for Italy, completing a move fluently engineered by Nicolò Barella and Giovanni Di Lorenzo. It was his first goal for anybody since marking his debut for Newcastle United with one in what, at the time, looked a very auspicious arrival in the Premier League.
That was 462 days ago; 312 of those days had been spent under suspension, out of action. The goal evidently meant a great deal. Tonali celebrated by forming the letter G with his hands, a gesture to his partner, Giulia, who had shared with him so many housebound matchdays during his suspension and who has since seen him galvanise Italy with what Spalletti detects is a pent-up desire to make up lost time. With each cap, the coach finds himself reaching for new figures of speech to praise Tonali’s horsepower. Last month, he was the car whose “engine is still roaring when he drives it back into the garage”; this week, he was the “wild stallion” of his midfield.
Tonali’s personal comeback neatly casts him as the emblematic figure of Italy’s renaissance, although, this being Italy, the term should be used warily. “We are on the right path,” noted Sacchi, “but we shouldn’t delude ourselves. Unfortunately, a relapse is always possible.”
