Fabio Capello played for Roma, Juventus and AC Milan, before taking on the suit as a coach from the 1980s. Since then, the always elegantly dressed coach has built up legend status after working at AC Milan, Real Madrid, Juventus and the English national team. For Capello, it has been a suffering to watch Norway play with the Italian national team, both in Oslo and at the San Siro. Then Bodø/Glimt’s humiliation of Serie A leader Inter Milan. Then Bayern Munich’s 1-6 overrun of Atalanta this week. The coaching legend has the explanation.
In an interview with Gazzetta dello Sport , Capello paints a picture of today’s Italian football on the defensive.
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“There is a correlation between European flops and World Cup risks, and it starts with the quality of foreign players. In my time, when I played, I always studied Luis Suarez Miramontes, the best of them all, as well as Bulgarelli, who was a few years older than me. They were role models. They were champions. When I was coach, we had the best in the world in Italy. Today we have Modric, Rabiot and a few others. And we sell the really good ones, while once, at least until 2010, they all came here because we were a “reference”. Without that example, our players can’t improve. But that’s not the only problem, Capello begins.
-The absolute lack of Italian players in Serie A. Foreigners occupy these positions, even if they are modest. Do we really believe that they are all better than ours? Of course, if we were to fail in the third World Cup, I would have no doubt: it would mean that all the policies for our youth football have been wrong,” the coach continues.
Then to Norway.
-In 2006, we qualified for the World Cup in the group stage with Norway, and we were happy to have them there. Now I read in La Gazzetta that there (in Norway), up to the age of thirteen, results are abolished, so that children can play for fun. It is a cultural shift that is yielding results. Here (in Italy) the coaches want to win even with children. I see the ball moving slowly, I see our players running a little bit but never sprinting, I see that we play sideways and not vertically. We tried to copy Guardiola’s Barcelona and we did poorly, partly because our quality and technique are worse. We only think about ball possession, forgetting that ball possession takes away responsibility: all you have to do is pretend to pass to the player next to you,” Capello grumbled.
Read on Radiosporten: Allegri back on Real Madrid’s radar
Who surely noticed that the club that sent Italy’s best club out of the Champions League, also sent the Sporting players to the shower at Aspmyra with a loss. This time 3-0.
