Is Thiago Motta the next great coach? From mocked ideas to transforming Bologna
Dated Feb 2023
[article]It’s 20 years since The Da Vinci Code, a novel peddling a conspiracy of Jesus Christ establishing a bloodline that apparently lives on (we’re guessing it does so in Zlatan Ibrahimovic, given how much he talks about being God), hit the shelves.
A page-turner that sold some 80 million copies, the book’s release more or less coincided with the last time Bologna played in Europe only to improbably lose an Intertoto Cup final to Jean Tigana’s Fulham courtesy of that Junichi Inamoto hat-trick.
If you feel this intro is stretching credulity as much as Dan Brown’s storyline, then make like a monk in Opus Dei and strap on a cilice because it’s about to get even more painful.
Rather than reminisce about how Ibrahimovic, who, aged 41 and 146 days, became the oldest player to appear for AC Milan at the weekend, almost joined Bologna three years ago to play under his friend, Sinisa Mihajlovic — “You don’t have to run. You only have to score. The others will run for you,” Mihajlovic had told him — The Athletic would like to delve into Brown’s taste in music.
When he wasn’t at the same prestigious boarding school as Mark Zuckerberg, the novelist holidayed in Europe as a child. “You won’t believe me but I grew up listening to Lucio Dalla,” Brown revealed.
Ragno, as the Bolognesi nicknamed him, was arguably the city’s greatest songwriter and even penned a lyric about Christ coming down from the cross — presumably, in Brown’s imagination, to marry Mary Magdalen, have a daughter and go into hiding in the south of France.
That same song, L’Anno Che Verra, gets played at full-time at Bologna’s Renato Dall’Ara stadium, and for Bologna fans perhaps the line that has resonated the most in recent years is another: “The old year is over now/but something is still wrong here.”
Historically Italy’s fifth most successful club, with seven league titles (more than Roma, Lazio, Sampdoria and Verona combined), Bologna were languishing in 17th, fourth-bottom, at the beginning of October.
Head coach Thiago Motta had barely been in the red-brick, university town a month, flunking one exam after another when the local media began speculating about an early expulsion. Winless in his first four games, the crowd booed the team off after a 1-1 draw at home to stricken Sampdoria. “I understand and respect the whistles,” Motta brooded. “They have the right to do it.”
A banner outside Bologna’s training ground asked in English: “Where the hell are you, Mr President!?”
Joey Saputo, Bologna’s owner, a Canadian of Italian descent and the longest-standing foreign investor in Serie A, had planned to be over in Italy but his other team, CF Montreal, got through to the quarter-finals of the MLS title play-offs. It meant he had to put off his flight for a few days.
Still, Motta could count on Saputo’s “total confidence”. But if patience is a virtue discernible in Saputo, it was less apparent among a restless fanbase and critical local media. “Something has changed, for the worse,” Guido De Carolis observed in the Bologna edition of Il Corriere della Sera. “If Serie A were the NBA, without the risk of relegation, then fans would go to the stadium lighthearted. But it’s different. Motta maybe thinks he is in the NBA.”
The now 40-year-old member of Inter’s treble-winning team is no stranger to scepticism.
Motta was born in Brazil, raised by Catalans (he is a graduate of Barcelona’s La Masia academy) and adopted by the Italians, even wearing the No 10 shirt as he won 30 Italy caps.
An intelligent, metronomic filter and facilitator of a midfielder, it was never in doubt that Motta would one day become a coach. But upon exposing his ideas to La Gazzetta dello Sport in 2018, he was misunderstood and mocked for having a different perspective on the game.
“I don’t love the numbers associated with formations,” he said. “They can be deceiving. Calcio is not table football. Movement matters. You can be super-attacking in a 3-5-2 and defensive in a 4-3-3. It depends on the ability of the players and their attitude. I have seen a world-class player like Samuel Eto’o play full-back, setting an example that was the secret behind Inter’s treble.”
The way he saw it from his position on the sideline, teams could be read from right to left rather than back to front. “What about playing a 2-7-2?” he asked.
No sooner did the quote hit the pink paper in Gazzetta’s printing press than it was decontextualised, tweeted out and roundly laughed at.
But Motta’s thinking, explained in the video below, was nothing out of the ordinary.
“I count the goalkeeper as one of the seven players in the middle of the pitch,” he said. “For me, the striker is the first defender and the goalkeeper the first attacker.”
Nevertheless, the stigma followed him around and when
Genoa fired him just nine league games into his first top-flight coaching role in December 2019, it inevitably came up again.
A complicated job at the best of times, Genoa were already circling the drain of relegation and no shame should be attached to being sacked by their then-owner Enrico Preziosi who, in total, said: “You’re fired” 26 times in 18 years as club president.
Motta would take only limited satisfaction in keeping the lesser-spotted Spezia up at Genoa’s expense last season, such was the gratitude he still felt for the role Genoa and Preziosi played in saving his playing career. He’d undergone three knee operations and had been on trial at, only to be rejected by, Harry Redknapp’s Portsmouth in 2008. Within a year, he was using Genoa as a stepping stone to Inter and a place in history. Talk about Sliding Doors.
The pesto-dappled hills of Liguria have regenerated Motta twice. First as a player, then as a manager.
Surviving with Spezia when the club appointed him late in the summer of 2021 and signed 23 players in anticipation of a transfer ban (challenged and overturned by the club) was a minor miracle. They upset Napoli at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona and champions-elect Milan at San Siro essentially with one hand tied behind their back after Motta left 2020-21 top scorer Mbala N’Zola out for most of the campaign.
The situation he walked into at Bologna just before last September’s international break was not easy: “He took over a team that wasn’t built for him, with a different mentality,” Saputo said.
Bologna had been deeply conflicted about sacking Mihajlovic after taking six points from the opening six games. “I’ve never been a hypocrite,” Mihajlovic wrote in an open letter. “I won’t be one this time either. I don’t understand this dismissal. I accept it, as a professional must do, but I felt the situation was absolutely under control and could be improved.”
Mihajlovic had been made an honorary citizen of Bologna.
Four years ago, he arrived in the January and spectacularly saved the team, lifting them from 18th to 10th — the highest finish in Saputo’s near decade-long tenure as owner. Mihajlovic’s record over those 16 games, the fifth best in Serie A, hinted at the latent potential within the squad and a challenge for Europe in his first full season of 2019-20.
What nobody foresaw was a global pandemic interrupting that campaign and, sadly, Mihajlovic’s diagnosis with leukaemia early on in it.
He was nothing short of an inspiration with how he faced the illness. Bologna fans made pilgrimages to the city’s Sanctuary of San Luca church to pray for him and the players made sure to pass by the Sant’Orsola hospital during his treatment to celebrate wins underneath his window. The club rallied behind him and Mihajlovic continued to work.
So sacking him was always going to be sensitive.
“It wasn’t easy,” chief executive Claudio Fenucci said. “First and foremost because Sinisa is a friend.
“Football-wise, we’d seen the team win only four times in the calendar year, so it was difficult. If things aren’t working, you need to intervene regardless of the personal relationship you have. It was a very painful decision. I was disappointed some people took the moral high ground, not knowing the relationship I had with Sinisa.”
It left a city torn and, tragically, not long thereafter in mourning after the death of Mihajlovic in December.
Moving on has not been easy for anyone connected with the Serbian, including former employers Bologna, and gaining acceptance among the club’s fans has been gradual for Motta. Support from Saputo has nevertheless been unwavering. “As a fan, I’m disappointed too,” he said in the autumn. “But looking at the material available to the coach, I’m confident the season will end well… I’m sure we’ll see a different team after the World Cup break.”
The turnaround actually began sooner than expected, with a 2-0 home win over Lecce at the end of October.
Since then, Bologna’s record has been the third-best in the league and they’ve leapt from 17th to seventh, a run made even more remarkable by the prolonged injury absence of Marko Arnautovic up front. Sunday’s win over Inter, returning to the ground where they threw the Scudetto away in a 2-1 defeat late last April, was the high point of the season so far.
According to StatsBomb’s data,
Bologna lead Serie A in counter-pressure regains since Motta’s appointment and the way Nicolas Dominguez harried Inter centre-back Danilo D’Ambrosio proved crucial to the late winner scored by Riccardo Orsolini — a player reborn under his management.
Eclectic line-ups with wingers as centre-backs and midfielders as strikers have been true to Motta’s story as a coach. In 2018-19, his first post-retirement role with Paris Saint-Germain Under-19s ended with the team’s No 9 and No 10 as the full-backs.
Positions are less important to him than roles and a player’s function within a system that has changed from the back three Mihajlovic used, upping the team’s number of passes and share of possession on the one hand and disrupting opponents without the ball on the other.
Arnautovic’s period on the sidelines with a variety of issues has been mitigated too by goals from corners.
Only runaway league leaders Napoli have scored more of them in Serie A.
Asked if he is thinking about finishing in the European places, Motta deflected and said: “I’m thinking about enjoying this win and the next game.” Qualification for the Europa Conference League is now in sight, though — only six points in the distance with 14 games to go and fans are beginning to wonder if it’s different this year.
Saputo brought in Giovanni Sartori, the recruitment mastermind behind the recent successes of Chievo and Atalanta, as the club’s new sporting director in the summer. He isn’t the first blue-chip talent identifier to work under the current ownership, as Walter Sabatini and Pantaleo Corvino both had spells at Bologna.
It remains to be seen if Sartori can emulate what he did in helping Atalanta make the Champions League three years running, but for now, this Bologna team gives off the same optimistic sentiment for the year to come as Dalla does in L’Anno Che Verra.
“E come sono contento/di essere qui in questo momento.” — And how happy am I, to be here right now.
Bologna and Motta are living in the moment.[/article]
