The tsunami of the failure to qualify for the World Cup also hits the coach on the bench in Zenica. In the background two names that would mean entrusting the national team to great former players of the past.
Zenica night was the last dance of Gennaro Gattuso on the national team bench. There will be no future, almost certainly not even as a ferryman to manage the June appointments when the others have to prepare for the World Cup and Italy can at most act as a sparring partner. In any case, this is not the central theme of the agenda of Italian football after the third consecutive world failure, it comes secondary to the turnaround within the FIGC and is closely linked to who will lead the federation from the summer to start the new cycle.
It will be the next president of the FIGC, obviously, who will appoint the next blue technical commissioner. But now that the Zenica blow is still hot, the temptation to christen the return of a great ex as a solution that makes everyone agree is strong. For some time now there has no longer been a federal technical school from which to draw, coaches who have gone through the youth national team and are ready to take on the responsibility of leading the senior one: the last one was Azeglio Vicini at the end of the 1980s, then from Sacchi onwards the FIGC has always been on the market.
Because Roberto Mancini can become Italy coach again
There are two strong names and they refer to the last happy moments of the national team. If it had been for Gravina, probably, Roberto Mancini he would have returned to the national team bench as early as last June after separating from Spalletti. The former coach had done everything to signal his availability by closing the gap created in the heart of the summer of 2023 with the hasty escape to Saudi Arabia. Contacts and clarifications to overcome the waste left by the farewell, experienced in the federation as a betrayal. Then, however, the choice fell on Gattuso by Buffon’s will, to whom Gravina had given the task of indicating the most useful man to manage the moment.
For Mancini, who could be the perfect candidate for a president at this moment outside the perimeter of the FIGC (for example Giovanni Malagò), it would be a encore in the hope of reconnecting the threads with the extraordinary experience of the European Championship won at Wembley in 2021. Appointed in May 2018 at a time of great crisis, out of the World Cup due to Ventura, Mancini had technically rebuilt the national team until the European triumph.
Then, however, the rapid fall with Qatar’s failure to qualify for the World Cup with the defeat in Palermo against North Macedonia, the choice not to resign also supported by Gravina despite the controversies and progressive difficulties until his farewell in August 2023. In short, there were two left-handers in the Azzurri: one perfect and successful and the other confused and increasingly detached from national affairs. Whoever thinks of him, however, imagines being able to find the visionary of the first reconstruction.
Antonio Conte and the suggestion of the European Championship 2016
The other track leads to Antonio Contethe man wanted by Tavecchio in 2014 after the tsunami of early elimination in Brazil which had led to the immediate resignation of Abete (FIGC president) and Prandelli (head coach). The current Napoli coach had been the protagonist of a short but intense season, which culminated with a European Championship in France which had thrilled everyone despite the poor quality of one of the least performing squads in recent history.
Today Conte is under contract with Napoli, an agreement that expires in June 2027 but which will have to be subject to evaluation at the end of this championship. The Neapolitans are back in the running for the Scudetto after Inter’s slowdown, but not everything in the relationship between Conte and ADL has worked in recent months and it is not impossible to imagine that both want to move on.
Conte has always said that he has maintained a special bond with the national team and has made it clear that he imagines himself still on the Azzurri bench in the future to close the circle. The moment could have arrived with the paradox of giving him an expanded group with values higher than those of 2016. The bet is that this team, in the hands of the Lecce native, could immediately grow and become competitive for the goals it has ahead of it starting from the qualifiers for the 2028 European Championship, thus leaving the FIGC time to plan the future technical re-foundation.
