The year was 2024, Roberto Donadoni had been out of action for four yearsduring a chat in a bar in Milan, about Italy leaving for the European Championship he had expressed a wish: «I still like coaching: I hope to still have the opportunity to do it and get back into the game with a team».
Let’s find out in these hours that that desire found its shooting star: La Spezia, last in the Serie B standings, hired him on the run. Roberto Donadoni is a decent manwho has never been afraid to put his face to difficult situations. Not least that of post-Calciopoli Italy. He took the world champions Italy, while Serie A was overwhelmed by the scandal, called by a federation under administration, he took the Azzurri and took them to the 2008 European Championship. In hindsight they were the last team capable of ensnaring Spain in a glue that was then destined to dominate football and to stop her from playing her legendary Tiki taka. Roberto Donadoni’s Italy lost honorably in the quarter-finals. But that wasn’t enough to save the bench of a coach left in the lurch, without the Federation behind him who had wanted him because it had changed in the meantime and perhaps the Restoration was in the offing.
«The Italy that I had found», Donadoni remembered that day over coffee, «was really in difficulty, with the Federation under administration and yet fresh from victory in the World Cup: it was difficult to do better. There was little time, we went from the World Cup won to the following European Championship, I knew it would be a difficult challenge, but coaching the national team is a source of prestige and gratification, for me it was an important experience. The national team has its strengths and weaknesses: being able to follow up on what had happened was difficult. But it was a good European Championship overall, in the quarter-finals against Spain we had some opportunities: in the ninety minutes and in extra time, we played on equal terms, even though we lost on penalties, taking into account that from then on that Spain won the impossible.”
We asked ourselves if the bench that was once the most coveted, perhaps less so today, was also the most uncomfortable: «In some ways yes, there are the famous currents: Milan, Rome, Turin, Naples which each push in their own direction and you are under a lot of pressure, if you lean in one direction the others make war on you a bit».
An expert named Michel Platini said of Donadoni as a player that he was the greatest talent in Italian football in the nineties. A dribbling that got drunk and skipped entire teams wearing the number 7 shirt like De Gregori’s Nino. But Donadoni, who is someone who knows how to say thank you for his talent and for the difficulties of Italian football in developing it, spoke like this: «I think it depends a lot on the politics of a club: Atalanta is proportionally the club that spends the most on the youth sector, which among other things gives excellent results in terms of return. Many others prefer to do it differently, they think that the money spent there can be saved by hiring already trained players, but I’m not convinced that it’s a political choice that always pays off and I welcome the flagship represented by Bergamo.”
That academy is still the only Italian among the best in Europe and when it comes to grass football, Donadoni has clear ideas: «If you have kids who train and play and aren’t happy, you have to do another job. The premise for teaching football and making the kids feel good together. When I was a boy I remember that when we finished training we stopped to fill a wheelbarrow with sand to plug the holes in a military field, where we played which wasn’t the best even though we were Atalanta. I have had great coaches, it is obvious to mention Sacchi, Capello, Liedholm, Carlos Alberto Parreira, but for me the coaches-educators at 12-13 years old in Bergamo, maestro Bonifacio, were fundamental who saw me for the first time: the Scalpellini, the Cadé, the Casati that I had later. If mother nature gives you skills and you find educators, I think that at the beginning they matter more than coaches, they help you express yourself and then you have advantages. Then tactics become decisive later at a professional level. We worked a lot on the basic technique, which is something that has been lost today. It has happened to me as a coach that I have found professionals lacking in technique, but at that point it is too late. When I was at Milan after training the second Italo Galbiati made us do individual technical exercises”
Franco Baresi put him in his ideal 11, among the strongest he had played with in his career. They shared the Milan of the 1980s and 1990s, one of the best teams ever seen, and the Italy of the World Cup final in Pasadena: «In 1994, the Milan that was the backbone of the national team was a dominant club in Italy and beyond, which gave a sense of security and solidity to the others too, today this is unfortunately much more difficult to achieve».
The image of the curse of penalties at USA 1994 and Italia 90 is still in everyone’s eyes and Donadoni was there and like Nino he learned the hard way that a player is not judged by missed penalties: «You can train the technical gesture, but then there are other determining factors: above all the heaviness of the responsibility you take on when going to take the penalty, the emotional part is preponderant, because that journey from the halfway line to the spot while going to kick is impossible to recreate in training and I don’t think there really is a player so cold as not to have butterflies in his stomachand it’s nice that they are there because they are emotions that you experience only a few times in life and that you can’t really imagine if you don’t feel them. But I have never experienced the mistake as a personal tragedy: at the ’90 World Cup I wasn’t on the list of those designated to kick, someone didn’t feel like it, I did. That’s how it went, it’s obviously sorry, because you played in the final and disappointed the fans, the penalties weren’t a lucky part of my Italian adventure, but that’s part of the game too.”
Over that coffee we also talked about football and cinema, another passion of his, and the fact that even a film can sometimes help to build a team, but he observed that it was difficult to give titles without being inside a changing room: «I have to stay on the generic-motivational side and I say Every damn Sundayfeaturing Al Pacino’s speech to his football team. But I know from experience that music and cinema have a value linked to the state of mind, to the spirit of the moment and you have to be in the locker room to grasp the right thing for the atmosphere that is there. I know that sometimes where motivations are already high, you need to be careful about overloading.”
Now he will finally have one again, with a film all to be shot. But he certainly won’t have changed his mind about a coach’s words that can change a game: «Today, like yesterday, making a team run doesn’t really differentiate a coach from another at a high level: human relationships are what make the difference. When you manage to create the right empathy with the group, words can make the difference. I’m not one of those who like to talk a lot: if you say things you aren’t able to maintain, you lose credibility. I have often told my teams that I prefer to be the master of my silences than the slave of my words».
The road with Spezia starts uphill, but Roberto Donandoni learned on the pitch to resist: he took an infinite number of them without ever giving them back. And Dino Zoff is right, you play as you are, because the pitch removes the filters. And Donadoni on the pitch without filters is like off: a true gentleman.
