That sense of openness was echoed by Gianni Leali, head of Coverciano during the mid-1990s. ‘We don’t teach one system,’ he said. ‘We teach them all, and then show the advantages and disadvantages of each one. There’s a variety here, and that makes Serie A a lot more interesting.’ Whereas Dutch football was fixated on 4–3–3 or 3–4–3, Italian football featured almost every possible formation, and just as Juventus’s versatile defensive players had no defined position, Lippi and other Italian coaches had no defined system. They reacted to the opposition’s tactics to a greater extent than coaches elsewhere, and they routinely substituted star forwards to introduce defensive reinforcements.
Lippi’s Juventus defined Italian football during this period. They became European and World champions in 1996, won Lo Scudetto in the next two campaigns, while reaching the Champions League Final in both years too, being beaten by Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid in turn. Juve had long maintained a reputation for losing superstars yet continuing to prosper, sacrificing World Cup winners like Paolo Rossi and Marco Tardelli in the 1980s without suffering, while the players themselves declined after departing Turin. After the 1996 final it wasn’t just their defeated opponents Ajax who suffered because of the Bosman ruling; Juve lost Ravanelli and Vialli to newly monied Premier League clubs. Ravanelli had finished as Juventus’s top goalscorer that season, while Vialli had been named Player of the Year by World Soccer magazine, who commended him for being ‘equally at home on the right, the left or the centre of the attack – he defends like a tiger and attacks like a lion’. In other words, in keeping with the Juventus ethos, he could do whatever job Lippi demanded.
Juve still had Alessandro Del Piero, their golden boy, and replaced the outgoing duo with three players: Alen Bokšić, who led the line effectively but rarely scored; Christian Vieri, a complete striker who changed clubs every summer; and youngster Nicola Amoruso, who didn’t quite fulfil his potential, although his arrival was certainly appreciated by Del Piero, who married Amoruso’s sister. Veteran Michele Padovano was still around too, and proved a useful supersub.
Lippi therefore had five good options up front, and the nature of Juventus’s goalscoring throughout their 1996/97 title-winning campaign underlined how he used different strikers in different situations. Bizarrely, for champions, none of the five strikers recorded more than eight goals: half as many as Sandro Tovalieri, who played half the season for Reggiana and half for Cagliari, both of whom were relegated. Lippi had fully embraced rotation, and his five centre-forwards all played a similar amount: Bokšić scored just three goals from 51 per cent of Serie A minutes, an injury-affected Del Piero managed eight from 48 per cent, Vieri eight from 43 per cent, Padovano eight from 39 per cent and Amoruso four from 36 per cent. There was no grand hierarchy, no divide between untouchable first-teamers and frustrated back-ups, and everyone provided different qualities. Bokšić offered hold-up play, Del Piero provided invention, Vieri lent his aerial power, Padovano was a good poacher and Amoroso brought speed.
Significantly, Bokšić was the least prolific striker and yet also the most used, because he consistently worked hard and brought the best out of others. ‘No prima donnas, no privileges,’ declared Lippi. ‘If a player doesn’t agree with that, he can walk. You might like the antics and the eccentricities of a champion, but I believe people appreciate things like humility and intelligence.’ Lippi’s tendency to rotate forwards by using them tactically remained one of his trademarks throughout a long coaching career. When leading Italy to World Cup success in 2006, Lippi named six forwards in his 23-man squad: Francesco Totti, Pippo Inzaghi, Luca Toni, Alberto Gilardino, Vincenzo Iaquinta and his old favourite Del Piero. All six found themselves on the scoresheet.
When Ronaldo, the world’s most exciting striker, was destined to leave Barcelona and move to Serie A, Juventus declined to become involved in a bidding war, not because the sums of money were too vast, but because Umberto Agnelli, the club chairman, believed such an overt superstar would ruin the club’s spirit. Even Zinedine Zidane, who joined in 1996 and soon became Europe’s most celebrated player, was diligent, introverted and hard-working, a world away from the self-indulgent galáctico that he would later become at Real Madrid.
Zidane was shocked by the intensity of Juventus’s fitness sessions, led by the notorious Giampiero Ventrone. ‘Didier Deschamps told me about the training sessions but I didn’t believe they could be as bad as all that,’ he gasped. ‘Often I would be at the point of vomiting by the end, because I was so tired.’ Ventrone was nicknamed ‘The Marine’ by the Juventus players, and he had three terrifying mottos: ‘Work today to run tomorrow’; ‘Die but finish’; and ‘Victory belongs to the strong’. The players had a love–hate relationship with him; Ravanelli said he couldn’t cope without him, while Vialli once became so incensed by Ventrone’s approach that he locked him in a cupboard and called the police, not the last time the Carabinieri would take an interest in Juve’s methods of physical conditioning. It was Lippi, however, who remained Juventus’s most important asset. ‘He was like a light switch for me,’ Zidane said. ‘He switched me on and I understood what it meant to work for something that mattered. Before I arrived in Italy, football was a job, sure, but most of all it was about enjoying myself. After I arrived in Turin, the desire to win things took over.’
This is essentially what defines Italian football: the absolute primacy of winning. In other major footballing nations, to varying extents, emphasis is placed on the spectacle; attacking football is respected and sometimes considered an end in itself. But in Italy the result is paramount and the end justifies the means, which largely explains why Italian sides are content to win tactically rather than through finesse and panache. There’s certainly a reverence towards certain types of stylish player, particularly classy liberos and gifted trequartisti, but teams are under little pressure to provide dazzling collective performances like Ajax or Barcelona. Italian football therefore places huge emphasis on workmanlike players performing functional roles.
‘To Italian players, it’s a job. It’s not fun, not a game,’ said Fabio Capello. ‘When I was coaching Real Madrid, training would end and everyone would stay and eat, get a massage, go to the gym together … in Italy, they’ll stay as long as they have to, then they’ll go. We don’t have this joy inside us. It’s almost as if they don’t like being footballers.’ Capello was another celebrated Italian tactician, and his experience at Real Madrid during 1996/97 was particularly enlightening.
Capello had succeeded Arrigo Sacchi at Milan in 1992 and won four Serie A titles in five seasons, strung together an unprecedented 58-game unbeaten run and won the Champions League in 1994 with a memorable 4–0 thrashing of Barcelona. Capello was less ideologically attack-minded than the revolutionary Sacchi, but he provided creative players with more licence to express themselves, usually from wide roles in a 4–4–2. After Real Madrid slumped to sixth place in 1995/96, their worst season in nearly two decades, they turned to Capello. President Lorenzo Sanz declared him ‘the greatest manager in the world’ upon his appointment. Capello won the league in his first season. He then promptly returned to Italy.
While Capello brought success to the Bernabéu, that wasn’t enough for Real’s supporters and president, none of whom appreciated Real’s style – or lack of it – under Capello. While Barcelona showcased speed and trickery courtesy of Ronaldo’s legendary single season at the Camp Nou, Real were boring, functional and tactical; essentially, Capello had made them Italian. Raúl González, Spanish football’s new superstar forward, was asked to play from the left, with new signings Davor Šuker and Predrag Mijatović preferred up front. Real’s most common tactic involved centre-back Fernando Hierro launching long balls for overlapping left-back Roberto Carlos, a perfectly legitimate tactic that Real supporters nevertheless considered