Italian football has been going through an identity crisis for several years, especially with regard to its national team. The team, which changed some distinctive features under the leadership of Roberto Mancini and won Euro 2020 (played a year later due to the pandemic), lost its direction and was left out of a World Cup for the second consecutive time, being eliminated by Macedonia on the way to Qatar 2022.
It was then that last season they decided to take a turn and hire the coach who had revolutionized the game with an offensive, aggressive and always leading Napoli. Italy presented Luciano Spalletti, an extroverted and outspoken Florentine, who took the reins in August 2023 to guide Italy back to the place of power it abandoned several years ago.
They had qualification for Euro 2024 ahead of them, to be played in Germany, with discreet results: they won 3 games, drew 2 and lost the most demanding one, against England. However, they achieved their goal, as they surpassed Ukraine by goal difference and qualified second, behind the English.
Spalletti, 59, knows he must deal with a very different generation than the one he knew when he began his coaching career. And he made this known in a juicy interview with La Gazzetta dello Sport, in which he spoke about how he must deal with the customs of young footballers.
“I can handle cell phones, but not during massages and treatments,” said the coach, and continued: “I talked about video games because there were things that I didn't like. If modernity is playing Play until 4 in the morning with the game the next day, then it doesn't work.”
The coach believes that the footballers are not completely focused on the objectives and that they have many elements of dispersion.
“If modernity is playing Play until 4 in the morning with the game the next day, then it doesn't work.”
“Kids today prefer to put a photo on Instagram with their hair done before putting their heads down and working. They are not the values that my Italy should transmit. “You come to the Nazionale to win the Euro Cup, not to win in Call of Duty,” expressed in that sense.
Spalletti has a long career as a technical director, which highlights his achievements at the helm of Roma – with which he won three domestic cups in 2007/2008 – and Zenit of Russia – with which he also won several local titles.
However, his greatest work was the one he achieved as coach of Napoli in the 2022/23 season, when he formed a team that shone from start to finish to win a scudetto after 33 years.
Luciano Spalletti banned his players from Play Station.
“We come to the national team to win the Euro Cup, not to play Call Of Duty.”
Do you agree with the Italian coach?🤔🇮🇹 pic.twitter.com/CmVeCefTFy
— Pablo Giralt (@giraltpablo) February 24, 2024
His performance earned him the Italian Federation's call to guide the team's ship and bring it back to the forefront. It should be remembered that Italy did not participate in the 2018 Russia and Qatar 2022 World Cups, and that in South Africa 2010 and Brazil 2014 it did not make it past the group stage.
Ambition is not negotiable for the coach, and he reaffirms it with his speech: “I want to win the Euro Cup and win the World Cup. Then we can be eliminated immediately, but the speech must be that, the one that all Italians expect. We are going to Germany to win, not to participate. Our history asks us to do so. We can be on par with England, France, Spain and Germany, but with players who do well for 90 minutes, not just 20″, he stated.
In the Euro Cup, which will start in mid-June, Italy will share Group B with Croatia, Spain and Albania, a very tough area. The next friendly matches, in the March FIFA window, will be against Venezuela and Ecuador.
The Nation (Argentina)
GDA
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