There’s a lot of Fabio Grosso chatter around Fiorentina

That’s the other oddity. Grosso’s done well with Sassuolo the past couple years, getting the Neroverdi back into Serie A last year and leading them into the top half of the table this year, but I’m not convinced that’s all him. Sassuolo’s one of the smarter teams in Italy in terms of recruitment and long-term vision, creating an environment that brings the best out of most coaches. He got Frosinone promoted to the top flight in 2023 but every other job’s ended with him getting sacked after a poor run; his biggest post was at Lyon, which ended with L’OL in last place when he was relieved of duty after 2 months in charge.

That’s not the kind of manager worth destabilizing an already-fragile team over. Indeed, the fact that he’s the top candidate in the minds of the media and the fans at the moment indicates a bigger problem to me, one that Italy’s recent failure to qualify for the World Cup yet again laid bare: calcio remains stuck in the past. The insistence on cycling through the same stale for the biggest positions—look at the FIGC election, pitting 67-year-old lifetime sporting insider Giovanni Malagò against 67-year-old former president Giancarlo Abete—has left the nation miles behind its competitors.

That spills over to coaching, too. Of that 2006 team, 7 players have coached in Serie A: Grosso, Andrea Pirlo, Gennaro Gattuso, Daniele de Rossi, Fabio Cannavaro, Pippo Inzaghi, and Alberto Gilardino. None of them have succeeded. They’re relatively young as managers but de Rossi’s the only one who might become more than a journeyman. Roberto de Zerbi, Vincenzo Italiano, Francesco Farioli, and Raffaele Palladino are probably the brightest young Italian coaches; Palladino was a fairly average top flight player but de Zerbi and Italiano mostly played in the lower leagues, while Farioli never played professionally at all. The best innovators aren’t coming from within the established system.

Fiorentina’s spent too long on the treadmill of mediocrity to fall into this trap. Grosso’s only 48 and could well improve as a coach but I’m not convinced that he’s the guy to lead this team out of its self-imposed misery. If Paratici is going to restart this project in the summer and bring in a new manager, I’d rather he avoided the echoes of glories from decades past. That’s the thing about echoes, after all. At every turn, they fade. And the Viola have spent all year fading.