Thiago Motta jokes about coveted Italian football coach – 04/14/2024 – Sport

Responding with commonplaces was never something Thiago Motta, 41, enjoyed.

On Brazilian soil for the 2014 World Cup, the then midfielder born in São Bernardo do Campo responded firmly when asked about the reasons for playing for the Italian team, not the Brazilian one.

“I never dreamed of wearing the yellow-green shirt. I feel like an Italian born in Brazil”, he explained, citing the fact that he changed countries at a young age.

Years later, already retired as a player — he was two-time champion of the Champions League and had successful spells at Barcelona, ​​Inter Milan and Paris Saint-Germain —, he said he felt more excited about his new career as a coach, restricted at that time to a job at PSG’s under-19s and just ten games at Genoa.

“I love this job. I even wonder if I don’t love it more than being a player. It’s more rewarding,” he told French newspaper L’Equipe in July 2020.

Motta, this season, is the face at the forefront of Bologna’s surprising campaign in Italy’s Serie A, the country’s top football division.

The team is in fourth place and occupies the qualifying zone to compete again in an edition of the main European tournament, now called the Champions League, after 60 years. It has not competed in any continental competition since 2002, when it lost to English club Fulham in the now-defunct Intertoto Cup.

Almost ostracized in recent times, Bologna has in the distant past the great reason for the respect it still receives in Italy. Six of the seven national titles were won between the 1920s and 1940s. The last of them was obtained in 1964.

“It’s a city that is passionate about football, with representation, but was missing its leading role. Hope resurfaced in 2014, when the current president, Joe Saputo, bought the team and promised to make Bologna return to Europe. It’s worth highlighting that we were in second division”, he tells Sheet former goalkeeper Ângelo da Costa, who played for Bologna between 2014 and 2021.

“They first restructured themselves and worried about keeping the team in the elite. Today the club has everything that the big ones have, and that gives peace of mind when it comes to work. The long-term vision serves as an example for the clubs here. The results are not happen from day to night”, he adds.

Motta arrived in September 2022 dreaming of recovering lost credit. Months earlier, he had saved modest Spezia from relegation.

A statement with enormous weight still reverberated from the passage through Genoa. He stated that his preferred formation was “2-7-2”, which, added to the goalkeeper — who is usually excluded from tactical numerical reductions — would give 12 players.

He explained at the time that the calculation was already made with the presence of the archer and due to the involvement and intensity required in his teams.

“No [são 12 titulares]. I count the goalkeeper among the seven in midfield. For me, the attacker is the first defender, and the goalkeeper is the first attacker”, he said at the time.

Months later, he would try to prove part of the idea in a 28-page work presented in the center of Coverciano, base of the Italian Football Federation (FIGC, its acronym in Italian), in Florence, available in the entity’s library: “The value of the ball, the working tool at the heart of the game”.

In the text, Motta explains that his emotional relationship with the object, and that of many players, was born as a child when he received “il pallone” (the ball) from his father. According to him, this feeling later matures with a better tactical understanding of the game.

“Only in this way can the player complete himself, through the constant presence of the ball”, he quotes in one excerpt. “Arriving in Italy allowed me to enrich and consolidate my technical and tactical knowledge”, he adds.

He also mentions in the work the influence of coaches such as José Mourinho and Gian Piero Gasperini, as well as a more in-depth analysis of teams such as Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds, who stayed at the club from 2018 to 2022, and Joachim Löw’s Germany, who played in the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Euro Cup.

“In a Euro 2016 game, I was very impressed by the difference in steals in the attacking half between the two teams: 5 for Italy, 22 for Germany.”

Bologna is a reflection of his thesis. According to the statistics website Sofascore, it is the second-leader in tackles, behind Genoa, and the second team that completes the most passes and has the most possession in the Italian Championship, second only to Napoli.

“I always say that [Thiago] He was one of the best players I played with. A great leader on the field, in the dressing room, and with an absurd reading of the game. He saw the game in a different way than others, so we always knew he had a great talent for being a coach”, he tells Sheet striker Lucas Moura, from São Paulo, his teammate from his PSG days.

In one of his most recent interviews, Motta said that his idea of ​​the game “is offensive, with a team that dominates the match, with high pressure with or without the ball.”

To do this, he needed to adapt. After the conclusion of last season, in ninth place, the Austrian striker Marko Arnautovic, the team’s main reference, lost to Inter Milan.

He bet on the development of young players in the squad such as Dutchman Joshua Zirkzee, acquired last year from Bayern Munich. The player scored 11 goals in 33 games this season.

“The satisfaction is not looking at the classification, but seeing the team playing very good football,” said Motta when asked about the surprising campaign.

His solid base today plays with the 4-1-4-1 formation and never tires of surprising. Since the beginning of February, in 11 games, they have won eight, drawn two and lost just one, 1-0, to Inter Milan.

Thiago Motta went from a joke in Italy, upon arrival at Bologna, to one of the most promising names of the season. In March, he received the coach of the month award, applauded by the entire audience at the Renato Dall’Ara stadium.

A huge symbol for a fan base that suffered along with its predecessor, Serbian Sinisa Mihajlovic, who died in December 2022 after years with leukemia.

The unlikely Motta just wants to complete the goal that seemed impossible at the start of the season. Then, think ahead. Barcelona and Liverpool are already mentioned as future homes.