Luciano Spalletti’s summer will be stranger than hot. Strange as the feeling of finding yourself halfway across a ford, knowing where to go based on instinct, but no longer having the absolute certainty that it is the only right direction. A little less than ten months ago, after the victory over Ukraine, the coach felt “in heaven, wrapped in blue”, because there are phrases, among those selected as the best to say, that then come back to you like a boomerang. Today he will feel more like he is in purgatory, and he is surrounded by doubts: not about what to do, but about how to do it. It will be a summer of thoughts, as it is, it would have been even after a less poisonous European Championship: for those, there is nothing better than his estate in Montaione, maybe a bit of sea in Forte dei Marmi. But above all, good time with his family, his daughter Matilde credited with hugs after that “I love you”, the most detoxifying of the post-Swiss afternoon messages in Berlin. And of course the staff: he will “convene” them soon for new studies, new analyses, new strategies. Two months can be very few, when there is so much to do.
the passing
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Speaking of boomerangs, that “I will be the best Spalletti possible” said on his first day as coach will guide him on the journey to understand how to distance himself from a certain past. Not much will change, he made it clear. But something will change, and he said so. Not just by adding talented young players, one imagines. Even if the decisions on the chosen ones (and therefore the purged ones) will say a lot about the direction he will embrace between now and the World Cup, and he will have to decide whether to be “ferocious in his choices” as he announced at the beginning of his mandate. But this is an aspect of the job that goes beyond the tracksuit he wears. His short summer – Spalletti already knows – will not bring him the gift celebrated in the first few days (“Gravina bought me all the players I need and he can buy me others too”), but it could also indicate another transition: the one that would arise from clearly identifying the most concrete meaning of the differences between being coach and leading a club.
gambe e feeling
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A coach, especially at the end of the season, can hardly ask his players for the intensity, “the 80-meter runs”, which he works on continuously, and for a whole year, in a club. Now his football requires rhythm and legs that will be difficult to have already in September and that in any case are not always “readable” in their entirety from a distance, despite the collaboration with the club trainers and the use of GPS. Whose data up to now – he admitted – have not always been an indisputable comfort. A coach does not have the help of the daily relationship with the team to check the temperature of the feeling. Spalletti has years and years of experience and he has relied on these to “calculate” the degree of penetration of his messages into the hearts of the players. He has read their smiles as “not plasticized”, but in hindsight perhaps he will also be guided by the doubt of having hit too hard on the keys of self-esteem and of being up to the level of Italy’s football history; of having made that shirt – “which is a gift” – too heavy for boys who are not yet ready, at least not all of them, to be giants and heroes. He will meditate on the reason for so much surrender against Switzerland, on why not everyone raised their arm when he asked “Who feels like taking a penalty?”, but not necessarily making it a criterion for future choices.
the tactical knot
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A coach, above all, must feel not the obligation but the opportunity to choose a tactical continuity for his team. Therefore, based on the men he thinks of calling, he will also ponder whether to return to the 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 that he had considered gospel until March, or whether to give the 3-4-2-1 (or 3-5-2) that he had considered the best formation after a comparison with the team the license of definitiveness. The most urgent for a safer leadership of the team. At least as urgent – and this is not an alibi – the recovery of players that he has missed a lot. For these there will be no need to sift through unknown reservoirs: already in September Zaniolo and Udogie, perhaps the “too conservative” Locatelli; certainly further ahead Tonali, who will be available again at the end of August, but after a long stop; even further ahead Berardi and Scalvini. For Acerbi we will see, and that too will be a non-trivial thermometer to understand how Spalletti will have actually elaborated his thoughts, in this strange summer of his as a coach who is now asked first of all for one thing, and that is that he chooses the path: to change.
