Bologna has returned to Europe, after 60 years. A dream come true. The whole city celebrated as if he had won a championship. The return to the Champions League rewards a team that this year has amazed for its consistency, for the talents on display, for the liveliness of its play. A new team with new football, created by an emerging coach like Thiago Motta, by a finally solid club, by a player base with very few weak points.
The joy of all of Bologna
Bologna took to the streets at night as it hadn’t happened for years, supported by its most famous fans, starting with the eternal Gianni Morandi. It’s true, Bologna has always had excellent, well-known, popular fans, capable of a notable following. Think of Lucio Dalla, then Vasco Rossi. Today to Cesare Cremonini. But over many years also artists, painters, writers, protagonists of the world of cinema, politicians. A loyal audience, never resigned, rarely violent.
Bologna’s red and blue flag flies
It had been many years since Bolognese pride had raised its flag so high, since in 1964 Dall’Ara’s Bologna coached by Fulvio Bernardini won the scudetto in a straight play-off against HH the Magician Herrera’s Grande Inter. It was played at the Olimpico and ended 2-0 for the rossoblu, goals from Fogli and Nielsen. And the formation entered the legend of the small first collectors of Panini albums, a tongue twister as it had been for Grande Inter. And here are the Bologna players, with wide red and blue striped shirts, ready to host the seventh scudetto in their history. The other six had arrived in the 1920s and 1930s when Bologna also had European fame and was called “the squadron that made the world tremble”.
And here is the nursery rhyme of that Bologna coach from “Doctor Pedata” like Gianni Brera called Bernardini: Negri; Furlanis, Pavinato; Tumburus, Janich, Sheets; Perani, Bulgarelli, Nielsen, Haller, Pascutti.
The adventure in the European Cup, as it was called then, did not last long: beaten OFK Belgrade (1-0 at home and 2-2 in Yugoslavia) and defeated by Spartak Prague (2-2 at home and 3-0 away ). 60 years have passed since then.
An episode dedicated to Bologna
We dedicate our episode to this Bologna, with cameras focused on the party, on the night, between champions and fans of yesterday and today.
Sunday evening we were in Casteldebole, at the exit of the Bologna players who were celebrating the Champions League won two weeks early.
Meanwhile, the video story, with the anticipation of the fans, their shouting as Zirkzee, the lanky center forward, of Ferguson, of the blue Orsolini, deserving of the starting place, on the right, at the European Championships, appears.
Bologna’s dark moments
One of the oldest among those present tells us about his darkest moments, following the team that once made the world tremble. “I was there when the Sardinian Walter Porcedda went out with a small car, he was a president with no money. And also in Serie C, in the away match in the Bergamo area, with Leffe, which wasn’t even called Albinoleffe at the time.”
In the meantime the party had already started in Piazza Maggiore
These videos are in-depth, in which we let the square scroll for a long time, leaving the phone in the hands of supporters and also gathering some opinions on the new Champions League.
In the last two there was the attack due to the contact with Orsolini, with the goalkeeper Skorupski who had lost among other things the keys and with Urbanski, one of the reserves valorized by Thiago Motta.
Thiago Motta from Bologna to Juventus?
The Brazilian coach will certainly accept Juventus, only the last year of Massimiliano Allegri’s contract is in the balance at 9 million, or 18 gross. It is almost impossible for him to imitate Gasperini, who remained at Atalanta because he was more convinced of the project of Naples and Rome, who contacted him in recent years. Furthermore, Gasperini is 66 years old, Thiago Motta is 41 and is now third in the standings.
The merits also and above all go to Giovanni Sartori, king of sports directors
As reported by Rivista Contrasti, with debutant Pino Caligiuri.
“At the presentation – and we were present – he remembers his father, a Bologna fan, who took him, as a child, to the San Siro stadium to see the great Bologna, the team of Pascutti, Perani and Bulgarelli who won their last scudetto in 1964. He talks about work, time, passion, commitment but also about enthusiasm and gratitude for those who chose him to achieve important goals. Also because, while in Bergamo they were collecting qualifications in Europe and in surplus, in Bologna a red of 112.9 million was accumulated. This is why Saputo was looking for a turning point, and he found it by choosing the right man.
Sartori builds a well-structured scouting area in Bologna and continues his work of discovering and enhancing talent around the world. Apart from Zirkzee, the cover name, taken from Bayern Munich via Anderlecht for 8.5 million – and which has now increased his value fivefold – Sartori draws Ferguson (Aberdeen) from Scotland, the Austrian Posch from Germany (Hoffenheim), and the Austrian Posch from Russia (Dinamo Moscow ) the Croatian Moro, from Switzerland (Basel and Young Boys) respectively Ndoye and Aebischer, from Belgium (Genk) the Colombian Lucumì, from Holland (AZ Alkmaar) Beukema and Karlsson. So he relaunches Calafiori and Fabbian, today certainties of Italian football on which Roma and Inter had decided not to focus. Finally, the most important of the choices: the coach, Thiago Motta.
«I was very curious. I was impressed by the football he played, courageous, proactive. Thiago is a great worker and a great communicator, very direct and decisive with the team, he gets to the boys straight away. I can say that he improved my thinking.”
Zara describes Sartori’s work at Bologna perfectly
Furio Zara, a Paduan who lives in Ferrara, writes in the Gazzetta dello sport: «You will never hear Sartori credit himself with any credit, he has never done it and never will. The man who built the surprise team of Serie A is elsewhere, out of sight, away from the spotlight. It’s not even true that he works in the shadows as is commonly said in football clichés, because in the shadows people plot, plot and devise dark strategies. Sartori works in the sunlight, except that the sun can be that of Groningen or Aberdeen, Genk or Bern. To outline the figure, Sartori could easily be the manager of a club in 1973 or 1965, when – apart from the two or three well-known faces – the men who built teams in the provinces did not have a face, but not even a name on the organizational chart of the club in the Panini almanac”.
Zara is among the authors of La Domenica Sportiva, therefore Raisport. Of which, at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, a Bolognese man, Gabriele Romagnoli, whom we met at the Dall’Ara, was director. He returned to Repubblica, with the Sunday column but also with this article, published on Tuesday. We report extensive excerpts, underlining that the head of sport of the Roman newspaper, Francesco Saverio Intorcia, also lived in Bologna.
Morandi and “his” Bologna
In the city that had to go the slowest of all, at 30 mph, the football team sang the refrain of its number one fan, Gianni Morandi, and went at 100 mph. He thus overcame defending champions, companies from the capital or with capital, old ladies and young goddesses. Only Milan is far away, but from the San Luca hill, behind the Dall’Ara stadium, someone can see it. And he doesn’t believe it.
The truth is that, with the qualification for the Champions League, Bologna did not realize a dream, but something that no one had dared to dream of. How to win the lottery without buying a ticket. Forty points quickly, the club wanted. Europe, he invoked the public, imagining that of the ground floor, where Miss Mitropa once lived: the Conference.
Joey Saputo’s project
The president who came from Canada ten years ago, Joey Saputo, had a project and an unusual patience for the world of football. The point is to find someone to build it for you. He had never been very well advised by the coaches. Donadoni in a declining phase (who would have done better to concede to Tavecchio for the national team), Pippo Inzaghi as such, Mihajlovic first happy then very sad. In the troubled days of the choice to replace him (which almost everyone understood only in hindsight) some safe used players and a slightly scary new one emerged: Thiago Motta. Then defined as “strange”, which in Canadian means: dispenser of a gentle intransigence that flirts with arrogance. Someone who shares education and moderation with the president, then doesn’t share the rest with anyone. He has a family in Portugal, works and studies all day at the technical center and solves problems. As? Bologna am (ahead of Motta) had come close to breaking the European record for consecutive matches by conceding goals (41, Bordeaux, holders, had 42). There is no business without defense. The one in the current championship (pm, post Motta) has conceded 27 goals in 36 games, average 0.7 (exactly half of the goal average).
Motta has valorized 4 central defenders, but there was one who plays like he did
Posch is the first one he moved, to right back. Calafiori comes from the left wing and often plays as an added midfielder. In Lucumi he often changes position with respect to the foot. Beukema does it all. In the last part of the championship he had reinvented a defender who had previously been unwatchable: Cambiaso. By inertia he also works in Allegri’s Juventus, doing the things he learned in Bologna. As in American football there is a defensive and an offensive line-up, players who screen their opponents but never leave one or a passing line free. The roles are possible: Ndoye and Saelemakers are the ambiguous wingers, Zirkzee the 9 and a half, Aebischer the all-court equalizer. The defenders move forward, the midfielders move back (and since Motta understood Freuler the season has turned around).
The memory of Mihajlovic
In the unpredictable formations, a goalkeeper who was a reserve in Serie B (Ravaglia) emerges and saves a penalty or one reported missing in the locker room (El Azzouzi) and scores with an overhead kick. Of course, but there is also much more. There are those votive processions along the porticoes of San Luca to demonstrate closeness to Mihajlovic. That inexplicably red-blue sky behind the curve (always San Luca) after a victory against Atalanta. Saputo’s strange sense of snow, which finally pushed him to leave Montreal and spend the winter in Bologna and fall in love with it. The appointment never made and yet respected with the presence of Giacomino and the others, sixty years after the playoff won: if you have faith, someone will arrive. It’s not the eighth championship, it’s just something that resembles it.
Our final thoughts
With 5 Italian teams in the Champions League, the achievement is extraordinary but less than in the past. Let’s think about when in the Champions Cup only the championship went, then the second in the preliminary round (and many Italians went out), then 2 plus 2 others who perhaps went out in the preliminary round (it happened to Francesco Guidolin’s Udinese twice, once also in the Chievo), then 4 and now 5 thanks to the ranking.
Here, Bologna with Saputo is trying to be what Udinese is, having been in Serie A for 29 seasons in a row and now in the balance for salvation. Or simply Atalanta. We were convinced that in the last quarter of the season he would have run aground, perhaps he would have finished 8th, but instead he held up, despite the final slowdown, with 4 draws in the 5 games that preceded the blow in Naples. And on Monday there is the challenge against Juventus, to defend third place, and then the open-top bus trip to the city.
