Roberto Mancini, who unexpectedly resigned as coach of the Italy national football team on Sunday, spoke about his decision for the first time in an interview with Republic. His resignation came less than a year before the European Championships kicked off, with two games to go in September and a few days after his appointment as manager of the Under-21 and Under-20 national teams: a post which broadened Mancini’s influence and which it seemed to give him confidence in his long-term role.
In the interview, Mancini basically attributed his resignation to a bad relationship with Gabriele Gravina, the president of the Italian football federation, the FIGC. In the interview he complained about Gravina’s recent decision to appoint a new staff, sending away a group of his historical collaborators that he did not want to give up. In fact, Mancini unloaded all the responsibility for his decision on the FIGC president: «If Gravina had wanted to, he would have kept me. He didn’t do it,” he said. And he explained that the deterioration of their relationship was not sudden:
He’s been thinking opposite things to me for some time. But then why intervene on the staff? What does it has to do with it? At that point he had to send me away. Instead he took the opportunity because some of my collaborators were due and he played on this. I could have been tougher, sure, but I thought he figured it out on his own.
Mancini then added that he does not feel that he has betrayed the national team, which many have accused him of in recent days. “I’ve always been fair,” he said, “when I arrived at the blue I gave up on more profitable opportunities, I made a choice and it was the most important job of my life.” He admitted that the timing of his resignation was not ideal, given the upcoming commitments of the national team, and that he could have done it sooner. But he also complained about the many criticisms he received after his decision: “I didn’t do anything to be massacred like this”.
In five years as manager of the national team, Mancini has achieved both great successes and great disappointments: he won the European Championships in 2021, but then did not qualify for the 2022 World Cup. He also said that if it had been up to him, he would have left earlier. right after he missed qualifying for the World Cup, but the federation asked him to stay.
In these two days many rumors circulated about the possibility that Mancini had resigned to accept a much more lucrative job as coach of the Saudi Arabian national football team, with a salary of tens of millions of euros a year. In recent months, the football clubs of Saudi Arabia, a country that has so far had a very modest football tradition, have convinced many important players and coaches to move from Europe by offering them a lot of money. When questioned directly on the matter, Mancini did not deny this possibility, but only specified that the reason why he resigned “is independent of what could happen in the future and where I will go from”.
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