His faults have been well documented by former players....
Which former players?
If there comes a time on Sunday evening when Roberto Mancini stomps along the Wembley touchline repeatedly shouting, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you” at his Italy players, then we can safely say he hasn’t changed much after all.
But throughout the summer of Euro 2020, Mancini has cut a far more relaxed figure than the one anybody at former employers Manchester City might remember.
The now 56-year-old, tailored jacket slung over his shoulder, is the figurehead of perhaps the most urbane coaching staff ever to grace a football stadium, but more importantly he is the man who has guided Italy from their footballing “apocalypse” — failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup — to the final of this European Championship.
A line of 11 Italian players, arm in arm, belting out their national anthem, has been one of the sights of the summer, as it has been of so many others, and Mancini has rebuilt a team that had fallen apart under his predecessor, Gian Piero Ventura.
If he were to mastermind victory over England in their own backyard this weekend it might even top his most famous triumph to date, when he guided City to their first league title of the modern era on that crazy afternoon against Queens Park Rangers in May 2012. It was then, with his City side 2-1 down on the biggest day in their history, that he could do nothing else but berate his players for the world to see.
It was not unusual for that to happen privately, either. The fistfight with fellow Italian Mario Balotelli — one of the relatively few City players he actually had a good relationship with — is memorable, but there was also the time, earlier in that historic, title-winning season, that he told his stunned players that they were nothing without their midfield talisman Yaya Toure.
His renaissance with Italy has intrigued many of the people who witnessed those often unbelievable moments, and while there are not too many that would stick up for him now, there are some that paint the picture of a man misunderstood.
When Italy identified the man to lead them on from their World Cup failure three years ago, they wanted him to coach a team that would go after opponents in their own half. “You’ve come to the right man,” Mancini said. They have been one of the few teams this summer with an identifiable, club-like style of play, and at times they have been breathtaking.
Yet this is a man that City were keen to get rid of, in part, because they wanted a better brand of football.
One of the secrets to his success in Manchester was extremely repetitive work on team shape every single day. The centre-back would give it to the full-back, he would pass it to the holding midfielder and sprint down the touchline, the holding midfielder would find the attacking midfielder, he would find the striker, the striker would find the overlapping full-back and then set off towards the box for the return cross. Moves like that. Every. Single. Day. Some of his players at the time insist there were only ever a maximum of two options they could pass to. They do admit, though, that it made them fantastically well-organised.
Italy had lit up the group stage with the “Tikitalia” brand of football that had sent them into the tournament on an eight-game winning run, sucking teams in and cutting through them, not too dissimilarly to Maurizio Sarri’s maverick Napoli side, though that old commitment to resolute defending has become more apparent as the tournament has gone on, and it is a little easier to detect the typical Mancini approach in that.
They have different ways to win a game and — while it may be an extreme example — it is a far cry from the half-time team talk in Stoke when he ordered his City players to implement one specific passing sequence like the one above, and nothing else, because that would be how they would eventually break through. Some of those in the team that day point out that it was completely impractical.
Moments like that, when he said and did things that completely defied logic, or seemed just plain spiteful, were the other reason he eventually left City.
There are plenty of Mancini stories from the time and some of them are, quite simply, brutal. Like the time Jerome Boateng had returned to Germany for the birth of his twin girls in March 2011. It was believed he wanted a short period of leave to stay by his wife’s side. Mancini, though, wanted him back for a Europa League game away to Dynamo Kyiv.
Visibly unhappy according to a couple of team-mates, Boateng arrived at the team hotel at midnight on the eve of the match. At training on the morning of the match, the two men did not speak, and when the team was announced later that afternoon Boateng was named on the bench. He did not come on.
Stephen Ireland has explained how he became one of several City players suddenly out in the cold. “From the very first day I just felt he didn’t like me,” he told The Athletic previously. “I just felt he was always victimising me with things like making me go (and train) with the kids or in the way he spoke to me.”
Ireland thought he had earned his way back into the team after a fine pre-season in America, where he had been made captain by Mancini, but when he went to speak to the manager to state that he was ready to push on, things could not have panned out much worse.
“He just starts laughing. Hysterically laughing, and I’m like, ‘Fuck, what did I say?’
“He said, ‘Listen, you’re not getting registered in the Premier League this year at Man City, so if you don’t leave before the season starts you’ll play with the kids for a season’.”
Players often found out that they had fallen out of favour for reasons that defied belief. Nedum Onuoha, a promising sprinter in his teens, was believed to be too slow. Fellow defender Joleon Lescott’s calves, apparently, weren’t big enough. Neither of these things were explained directly, but at least they found out.
James Milner has said that the one time he has struggled mentally in his long carer as a player was at City under Mancini.
“I remember one year I broke two ribs and had six stitches in my head in a game, and then we had a Champions League game on a Tuesday and I couldn’t move. He’s come in and gone mad saying, ‘Why aren’t you out there?’ So I tried to catch the group up, they were jogging at 1mph at the start of the session and because of the pain I couldn’t do it.
“That was the only game I missed, two days after I broke my ribs, after that I was in every game with strapping, injections. He played me every game for about six weeks or two months. I was playing with broken ribs, playing really well, won player of the month. After that, he left me out, never said a word. Six games, I didn’t even get a sniff. No explanation, nothing, and I was just like, ‘What can I do?’”
Even as dedicated a professional as Milner found it difficult playing for Mancini at City (Photo: Stephen Pond – PA Images via Getty Images)
Onuoha’s podcast, where Milner was speaking, regularly serves as a safe space for former City players to get a few Mancini-related complaints off their chest, and it’s a common theory that the Italian’s superstitions were behind a lot of his often irreversible decisions.
Before an FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United 10 years ago, the team bus had been diverted, and because they had won the match — one of the seismic victories that made Mancini a club legend for many — he had demanded that the team take exactly the same route for the final, too. They got stuck in traffic and arrived less than an hour before kick-off. But they did win.
He famously believed purple to be an unlucky colour and, in a similar move to the Wembley diversion, had demanded City fly back from one European game on the same plane, at the same time and with the same food as the previous trip, because they had won the following league match. When he found out that meatballs were not available the second time around, he was incandescent.
“If he tripped over, you’ve come round the corner and you’re the first person he’s seen, you’re bang in trouble, bang in trouble,” Milner jokes.
The squad generally felt, for example, that Carlos Tevez did no wrong on that infamous night away to Bayern Munich, but it seems no one spoke up against the manager, presumably through fear it may be the last thing they ever did at the club.
Tevez and Mancini had to be pulled apart on one occasion, there was also one hell of a row with Samir Nasri; a day never seemed to go by without some kind of confrontation.
While Toure was away on international duty and City lost 1-0 at Everton, Mancini felt emboldened enough to castigate his entire squad at a stroke, telling them the Ivorian carried the team. Hardly man-management 101 but that was the year they won the title, a couple of months before that Boateng incident.
Other players would get the cold shoulder, like being told they had the week off during an international break only to receive a message asking them to go in and train with the under-18s, and on certain days even the under-18s wouldn’t be there.
One year, Mancini decided that several key members of his backroom staff, including the head physio, would not be travelling with the team for pre-season. He simply removed them from the travel list — on the day they were due to fly out.
Some around City now wonder if that’s one of the reasons why he has been such a hit with his country: he can pick and choose those he works with and there are far fewer opportunities for conflict.
Despite a lacklustre international playing career — one of his major regrets — he is revered in Italy thanks to his time as a player at Sampdoria, when he was so close to the president, Paolo Mantovani, that he was allowed to sit on the interview panel that selected Sven-Goran Eriksson as manager.
He delivered the team talk before some games, signed off on new kit designs, was invited to attend board meetings and had a say on transfer business, arranging for David Platt’s transfer from Bari. Platt became one of Mancini’s closest confidantes in Manchester.
Italy’s resurgence has been years in the making, in part a result of a decade-long commitment to youth development and a solid FIGC structure that survived Ventura’s disastrous tenure.
Mancini is fully supported. His coaching staff is made up of former team-mates and good friends, and if he doesn’t like a player, he can just leave them out and never see them again.
His staff and squad are people he is fully committed to, and when that’s the case things are completely different.
Like the time against Chelsea, in City’s title-winning season, when he substituted Balotelli at half-time, leading the striker to lock himself in a toilet cubicle in floods of tears. Balotelli, remember, was one of the players that Mancini was particularly fond of, and although that did not stop Mancini making such a ruthless decision, it did mean that the manager and his coaching staff abandoned their half-time discussions to console City’s lovable rogue. Most other players would have been left to it.
Balotelli and Mancini during a game against Manchester United (Photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
“I just think he is a great person, a great coach, and has everything,” former City full-back Micah Richards told the BBC earlier this tournament. “He would even ring me now to still see how I’m doing.”
Balotelli, Pablo Zabaleta and Toure would have similarly good things to say and there are those close to him who maintain that he was indeed misunderstood.
“Robbie is Robbie,” is Platt’s take. “A lot of things that were printed about him weren’t false. Some were a bit out of order, but others weren’t false. If you are turning round and saying somebody fosters a hard environment, a harsh environment, whatever word you want to put on it… yeah he does that, ticks that box.
“He can also be very humble and very forgiving. He will go out after lambasting his players and pick the can up for them. In many ways, he loved his players.”
Sources close to his staff at the time argue that he was not arrogant or aloof, but simply quiet, and they tell of how he would stay behind after senior training to coach the youth teams, grabbing the whistle, getting in the thick of the action to coach their technique and correct their body positioning.
He was incredibly loyal to the staff that he did like, and on one occasion, after a team of academy coaches beat their first-team counterparts 10-1 in a friendly by stocking their team with former pros, Mancini ordered a rematch for the week after, so he and Platt could put things right.
Part of his remit after taking over from Mark Hughes was to trim down a bloated squad and it could certainly be said that he made it clear that several players had to move on.
It was not an approach that was conducive to a long stint at City — if Milner says he struggled mentally then that is plainly a problem — but those who had more of an insight to his methods than the players argue that Mancini was simply trying to foster a competitive atmosphere within the squad, by pitting players against each other or against himself. If it created a winning environment — and it did — then he didn’t care about the rest of it.
He took on Sir Alex Ferguson and won, and for that, the City fans will forever be grateful.
That sort of thing was just in his nature.
“He knew what he wanted and he told everyone to do exactly what he said,” Garry Cook, the former CEO, told The Athletic in 2019. “The downside was, if he didn’t want you, he threw you away. He really didn’t like being told what to do and we struggled many times with the idea of having a director of football. Every transfer window Roberto would be in the media: ‘I can’t work with him (administrator Brian Marwood).’ Brian would come in and say, ‘Cookie, what am I supposed to do?’ But that was Roberto — he was a law unto himself.”
Transfers were indeed a thorny issue and not more so than in the summer of 2012, the year City had claimed their first title. They had gone into the summer with deals in place for Robin van Persie and Eden Hazard, but ended it with Scott Sinclair, Jack Rodwell and some not-so-notable others. Those sources say City’s Abu Dhabi backers “turned the tap off”.
And they describe Mancini as a “dead man walking” as soon as City turned to the Barcelona model. Txiki Begiristain, the sporting director that later landed Pep Guardiola, is on record saying he hired Manuel Pellegrini because they wanted a more attractive playing style than the one Mancini had implemented.
News of that appointment had leaked out on the very morning of the 2013 FA Cup final loss to Wigan Athletic and City fans at Wembley sang, in full support of their manager, “You can stick your Pellegrini up your arse”. They never wanted Mancini to leave and the outpouring of support for his work this summer highlights just how popular a figure he remains to this day.
It is no exaggeration to say that if he were ever to return to the Etihad Stadium he would be welcomed back as a genuine hero by fans, up there with the likes of Sergio Aguero, Vincent Kompany and David Silva.
It must be said that few others around the club would feel the same and the reality was that he had to go. City’s new decision-makers may have wanted a new playing style — they first approached Guardiola a year before Pellegrini took over — but by that stage, the vast majority of the club’s big players had made it known that if the manager didn’t go, they would.
For various reasons, Mancini had put himself on a collision course with players, staff, his employers — just about everybody, really — and it was unsustainable.
But he did change the culture of the club. He overhauled training schedules, the diet, the lifestyle. Many of the players could not stomach him, they found his repetitive methods laborious, but they played for him and they won. He had brought a little bit of Italy to Manchester and it delivered.
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This is an article from The Athletic. There are others I have seen as well, but I am off to bed shortly.
