ITALY CALLING
De Zerbi To Italy Is The Question We Refuse To Ask
We have done this bit before. We fall for a manager, build a little shrine, refuse to imagine him leaving, and then act personally wounded when a bigger name calls. The Italy job is open, the FIGC is circling, and Roberto De Zerbi is the exact profile of coach they will not leave alone. So no, I am not going to pretend this is just background noise. I am going to say the bit out loud, because somebody on this site has to.
The job is open and everyone can see it
The Italy head coach position is, as of this week, vacant. The FIGC has made that clear in the way these things always get made clear in Italy, which is a series of carefully placed leaks and one or two men in suits saying nothing is decided while everything is, in fact, decided. Luciano Spalletti's second act did not survive the autumn. The performances were flat, the dressing room was a story, and the federation wants a name that does something to a tactics board and to a back page. That name, in 2026, keeps coming back to ours.
Roberto De Zerbi is not a speculative answer. He is the practical one. The federation likes coaches who treat the game as a chess problem they are personally offended by. They like a man who will argue with a fourth official in three languages. They like someone the Premier League has already vetted, because it spares them the embarrassment of discovering six months in that their new man cannot handle a Tuesday night in Cardiff. De Zerbi has all of that. He has Brighton, he has Marseille, he has the accent, he has the aura. He has us, currently, which is the part we keep skipping over because it is inconvenient.
And we know what happens when Italy calls an Italian coach who is doing well abroad. They do not leave voicemails. They send a car, and the car arrives before the manager has finished telling his current chairman that he is committed to the project. That is how Ancelotti ended up at Coverciano after a single phone call in 2024, and how Mancini was prised out of a comfortable payday in Saudi Arabia with a handshake and a four year deal. The machinery exists. It is patient, it is polite, and it works.
Why De Zerbi is the exact shape of coach they want
There is a profile for this job and it is almost parody at this point. The federation looks for a tactician first, a personality second, a man in a suit a distant third. Antonio Conte, Spalletti, Mancini before them, even the doomed late Ancelotti experiment: the pattern is the same. A man who treats the ball like it owes him money. A man who can stand on the touchline at the San Siro and look like he has been there for forty years, not forty minutes.
De Zerbi is that man with a younger face. He built Brighton into the team that made Pep Guardiola change his press conferences. He took Marseille to a European final that nobody in England watched closely enough. He walked into our dressing room and, within a week, was calling James Maddison a special player in a way that made the whole room sit up. He has the language. He has the lineage. He has the look. If you were casting the next Italy head coach from central casting, you would hand the part to him and not feel embarrassed about it.
And that is the problem. The federation is not asking whether we want to keep him. The federation is asking whether he wants to come, and whether the money and the stage are big enough. Both questions answer themselves, because the Italy job offers something no Premier League club can replicate. It offers a national dressing room, a guaranteed place at major tournaments, and the sort of legacy that gets a man statues in his home town. We can offer him a wage packet and a new contract. They can offer him a country.
We have been here before and we still have the scar tissue
Let us not pretend our recent history with managers is a love story. It is a series of short marriages with bad prenups. We convince ourselves each new one is different. We carve out a little space for him in our heads, a place where he lives rent free and wears the badge with what we decide is the right amount of feeling. Then someone else comes along with a bigger stage and a longer contract, and we get to write the column about how we knew, we always knew, we saw it coming, we are not even surprised.
Conte did not even pretend. He did the work, took the money, and went home to his actual home. Mourinho did the work, took the money, and went home to his actual home. Pochettino, the one we will never fully get over, was a special case because he did the work and then the work got taken from him and we still have not healed from that either. The point is not that managers leave. Managers always leave. The point is that we keep acting like each one is a surprise, and the surprise is the bit I am tired of.
De Zerbi is a serial winner of dressing rooms and a near serial loser of jobs that go past year three. Italy would offer him a four year contract, a friendly qualifying group, and a nation that forgives almost anything short of a group stage exit. We can offer him another winter of VAR audio and a run to the Carabao Cup quarter final, which is not nothing, but it is also not a country. The arithmetic is brutal and it does not flatter us.
What the smart move actually is
I do not write this because I want him gone. I write it because I would rather see it coming than read about it. If the club has a succession plan that is not just a panicked call to a Sporting director's old mate in Seville, then this column is a waste of both our evenings. If the club does not, then we are doing what we always do, which is trusting the process right up until the process trusts somebody else.
The smart move, the one I would make if anyone at Hotspur Way were reading, is to be ahead of the story for once. Get the man a contract extension that is generous enough to make the FIGC blink. Get him a sporting director who actually exists in the way the role is supposed to exist. Get him a January window that looks like a January window and not a holding action. Build the thing he cannot walk away from. That is what the best clubs do when they have a coach the rest of Europe is sniffing around. Liverpool did it with Klopp. Manchester City did it with Guardiola. Even Arsenal, for all our mockery of them, built a project that Arteta could not bring himself to leave.
Instead, we will probably do what we always do, which is issue a bland statement about focusing on the next match and wait for the story to break on a Sky Sports news ticker at 11pm on a Tuesday.
The bit I will not say nicely
Here is the part the club accounts cannot pay me enough to soften. If we lose De Zerbi to Italy, and I think there is a real chance of that within the next twelve months, it will be because we treated him like a manager and not like the most valuable person in the building. Managers leave when the building is not worth staying in. That is not betrayal. That is recruitment. The federation is recruiting him. The only question is whether we are.
And if you have read this far and you are already in the comments composing a reply that begins with the words he wouldn't, then I have a small favour to ask. Save the line for the day he does. We have been the punchline enough. We can be the club that saw it coming for once, the club that had the conversation out loud instead of whispering about it after a defeat. That, in the end, is the only dignity left in this kind of football. We either name the fear or we let it name us.