Roberto Mancini named head coach of Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, which bought a lot of football stars this summer for its club championship, has found a star coach for the national team. It was headed by Roberto Mancini, who has a track record of working with several top clubs and the Italian national team. With her, he won the gold of the European Championship in 2021, but failed in the selection for last year’s Qatari world championship.

The Saudi Arabian Football Federation (SAFF) has announced the appointment of an Italian as the new head coach of the Saudi Arabian national team. Roberto Mancini. He signed a four-year contract with the structure. According to The GuardianMancini’s salary will be €25 million a year.

This contract very organically fits into the trend that emerged this summer. Saudi football, which has so far kept a low profile, suddenly finds itself in the spotlight thanks to the amazing generosity of local clubs and their skyrocketing financial capacity. The first superstar – Cristiano Ronaldo – appeared in the championship of Saudi Arabia in the winter. As part of the ending transfer campaign, Ronaldo was followed by a whole group of expensive and famous players who played in strong European leagues, such as Neymar, Karim Benzema, Ruben Neves, Malcolm, Fabinho, Sergei Milinkovic-Savic, Sadio Mane, Riyad Mahrez, Otaviu, Kalidou Koulibaly , Aymeric Laporte, Marcelo Brozovic, Edouard Mendy, Jordan Henderson. Transfermarkt estimates the total amount of summer investments of Saudi clubs in newcomers at €843.8 million. More – €2.36 billion – only the English Premier League spent on them.

Now a superstar trainer has joined the collection of prestigious Saudi purchases. The national team of Saudi Arabia and before Roberto Mancini was led by foreigners. The Argentine Juan Antonio Pizzi took her to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and the Frenchman Herve Renard took her to last year’s Qatari championship. But, of course, in terms of fame, both are not even close to the 58-year-old Italian.

Roberto Mancini, once a popular striker, during his coaching career managed to work hard with several top clubs: Lazio, Inter, Manchester City, Galatasaray and even Zenit.

In the list of his awards – the gold of the championships of Italy and England. And Mancini spent the past five years as a coach of the Italian national team. He took it shortly after the Italians were cut off in the selection for the World Cup in Russia in 2018, with the task of carrying out a personnel and stylistic restructuring of the team. Already at the next major tournament, the Roberto Mancini team took off, getting the gold of the European Championship held in 2021.

However, the rise was followed by a new fall. In March last year, the Italians again unexpectedly misfired in qualifying for the World Cup. They lost their chances to get to Qatar, losing in the play-off match to the North Macedonia national team, which seemed against their background as a hopeless outsider. Soon, another one was added to this painful defeat. In June last year, the Italian national team in the Finalissima match between the strongest teams of the two leading football regions – Europe and South America – was beaten 3-0 by the Argentines.

At the same time, until recently, there were no clear signs that the leaders of Italian football were disappointed in Roberto Mancini. It seems that his sudden resignation in mid-August came as a surprise to them as well. In Italy, Mancini has already found an interesting replacement. Now her national team coached by Luciano Spallettiwhose Napoli excelled in the previous Italian championship with a colossal margin of safety.

Commenting on his deal with SAFF, Roberto Mancini said he expects the “presence of top players” in the Saudi league to “provide potential for growth” in the level of football in the country as a whole, bearing in mind, of course, the progress of the national team.

In fact, she wasn’t that bad before the arrival of Mancini, who will make his debut as her mentor on September 8 against Costa Rica. By the standards of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), the Saudis are actually a full-fledged grandee. They won the Asian Cup four times, that is, the regional championship, and regularly make their way to the final stage of the world championships. In Qatar, under Herve Renard, the Saudi team almost made a breakthrough. In the opening meeting of the tournament, she coped with its future winners, the Argentines, but after that she lost to the Poles and Mexicans, having retired from the race, as she had four years before in Russia, immediately after the group stage.

Alexey Dospekhov