Sacchi has urged the Roma directors, director Franco Baldini in particular, to stay the course: “If one wants to innovate but does not have the support of the club, then they will never make it in the world. Ditto if you don’t sign the best players, not in terms of ability, but in terms of functionality to the idea. If they are then among the most talented players then all the better. But, meanwhile, they need to be functional, and this is the hardest thing in a country where the teams, when changing coaches, are not teams - they are like the Tower of Babel, a club over which so many have presided but each with diametrically opposite results.”
And that is the crux for all clubs who become mired in a spiral of diminishing results. It is difficult to enact lasting change if there is a hesitancy and impatience. This isn´t just a matter of imposing foreign ideas like Enrique's pseudo-Barcelona approach or his apparent inability to understand Italian methods. These are players who have played under so many different tactical setups, styles, over 10 languages and dialects in the current squad alone amongst numerous cultures that it is just that, a veritable calcio Tower of Babel. Captain Francesco Totti debuted almost 20 years ago under the watch of Vujadin Boskov. In subsequent years he has played as a left winger in Zdenak Zeman's legendary attacking 4-3-3, as a trequartista in Capello's more defensive 3-5-2, and as a false-9 in Spalletti's 4-6-0. It's not just changing approaches and tactics that veterans like Simone Perrotta and Daniele DeRossi have played under, but both have featured for Cesare Prandelli, and are both World Cup winners. It is not easy to turn their eye to a different philosophy, something that other experienced clubs like Inter Milan and Chelsea FC have experienced, and that is essentially the real problem here.
The failure of Luis Enrique's model isn't the failure of a coach trying to inject a foreign model on a very peculiar, very insular club, but that of a club-culture that is unable or unwilling to invest the time and effort to better translate that model for players who are capable of playing it or buying players who are and unfortunately moving players who aren't suited for the project. It is better to adapt squads to tactics rather than the other way around, easier to fire a coach rather than turning over your squad, but sometimes as Sacchi urges, it is necessary to innovate, and innovation needs patience and nerve to succeed.
The new AS Roma under Thomas di Benedetto is trying to change that culture. Sporting Director Franco Baldini is willing to give Luis Enrique another year and as he says, Enrique is still their preferred first-choice, but the coach will make his decision soon. He's done with Italy I think, which is a shame, the experiment might have worked at another club ready for a new start, but Roma abides. They will hire Vincenzo Montella, who played with Totti, was caretaker manager after they fired Claudio Ranieri, and will now likely return to the squad he helped lead as a player. L'Aeroplanino or little Aeroplane, will take over and succeed more than likely, he has the credentials and the weight of the locker-room and the supporters, but there will always to me be that thought in the back of my mind, if only they had waited, what might we have seen.
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