SARRI’S EPIC TREK FROM A TUSCAN TOWN TO CHELSEA
The Italian manager cut his coaching teeth and honed his expansive approach at tiny clubs,
The road from Faella, down in the Arno valley, winds up and up into the hills, beyond the vineyards, with their military precision, beyond the tangled olive groves and into the woods, thick and dark and untamed. At Consuma, the highest point of the pass, the view stretches all the way west to Chianti; Arezzo lies south, Florence north.
Consuma is not where the journey ends. It takes an hour, and countless tight hairpins shaded by slender cypresses, before the road descends into the village of Stia, its terra-cotta roofs nestled in an ocean of green, a little Tuscan idyll nestled in the valley.
The football field, overlooking the river and screened by a chain-link fence, is the first thing you see as you arrive.
Most days, for more than a year, Maurizio Sarri made the trip twice. Usually, he would do it after a full day at work, leaving Faella at 5pm and not returning home until late.
Often, he would car-share with a handful of others based in the sleepy cluster of towns that line the Arno valley, to help spread the fuel costs.
Every other week, he would do it on Saturday for a brief training session, drive back, and then do it all over again on Sunday, game day. Stia, then, was the end of his journey. In hindsight, it is where it all began.
Sarri is now charge of Chelsea in the Premier League.
A 59-year-old Italian, he is the 13th managerial appointment of Roman Abramovich’s impatient tenure at Stamford Bridge, and he is hardly the first to lack a garlanded playing career: of his predecessors, much the same could be said of Jose Mourinho, Andre Villas-Boas and Rafael Benítez.
Sarri is, it is true, a little older than most of his peers: though hardly ancient by managerial standards, he had to wait for his chance among the elite.
He was 55 when he first coached in Italy’s Serie A, with Empoli, and 56 when he was given a chance by a major team: Napoli, the team he had supported from afar as a child.
He is, by the standards of his peers, an outsider: he spent the majority of his career not only working away from fully professional football, in Tuscany’s regional leagues, but doing so part time, while holding down a full-time job in wealth management for Banca Toscana and, later, Monte dei Paschi di Siena.
That background has, at times, been held against him: He has said that he has been witheringly referred to as “the employee” by some critics, simply because he did another job.
It is that unconventional route, though, that has defined Sarri. It was at all of those teams in quiet towns and sleepy villages, teams made up of enthusiastic amateurs and semiprofessionals, that Sarri the manager was shaped.
And it was in all of those places — all within an hour or so of Figline Valdarno, the town where he was born, and Faella, the town where he lived, all in and around the Arno valley, all in the Tuscany of romantic imagination and travel brochures — that Sarri honed his unique coaching style, the technical, expansive approach that no less an authority than Arrigo Sacchi, the former coach of AC Milan and Italy, has said is “immediately recognisable”.
Sarri has always said he does not “feel” Tuscan; just that he is Tuscan.
In a globalised, rootless game, he is a product of where he is from, of the places he has been. Tuscany is embedded in his politics — this was, for a long time, a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party — and in his sporting philosophy, too.
Vanni Bergamaschi, a former teammate and the man who set Sarri on his path into management, calls his friend’s journey through Tuscany’s minor teams his “Calvary”.
It was slow, meandering, winding, but it was formative, too. It was here that Sarri sharpened his eye for detail, here that he developed his style, here that he became the manager who would make it all the way to Serie A and, now, the Premier League.
Stia was simply the first stage. “He came here as a player in 1990,” said Bergamaschi, 60.
“He was a defender, but he had a lot of injury problems. That year, the coach was not so good, and the club decided that it wanted to change. I was captain, so they asked me what I thought. Maurizio was half a coach when he played anyway, so I suggested him.”
Sarri himself — as is traditional in these origin stories — was less than convinced.
“He asked me if he should do it,” Bergamaschi said. “I just told him that at least he knew all of us, so he stood a better chance than someone coming in from outside.”
Of course, he took the job, and thrived.
“He started to watch the games of the teams we were about to play,” Bergamaschi said.
“He wanted to know everything about everyone. This was at the lowest level, remember: We had never had anything like this. None of the other coaches, even the good ones, had anything like his vision.”
There is an image in Italy of Sarri as a chain-smoking, Bukowski-reading eccentric: He has become known as Mr 33, after the alleged number of setpiece routines he teaches his players, each one named after a member of his staff.
It is a characterisation he rejects: there are only, in reality, half a dozen or so, he says.
But that sort of planning has been a cornerstone of his approach from the earliest days.
“We had a few schemes for corners and for free kicks even then,” Bergamaschi said.
Sarri’s eye for detail stood him in good stead. After a year at Stia, he was poached.
“He had so many clubs,” Bergamaschi said. “But they were always small steps.”
The first was Faellese, based in the town where he lived, a team of slightly grander scale than Stia (and a shorter commute).
Its stadium has two stands, rather than one, both of them neatly painted in the club’s colours; even in the height of summer, in the searing August heat, when Stia’s field is locked up, there is someone tending to the grass at Faellese.
From there, he went to Cavriglia, Antella, Valdema and Tegoleto: small steps, small journeys. Only on his fifth job, at Tegoleto, did he decide — in consultation with his family — to give up work at the bank and pursue football full time.
At Sansovino, he finally won promotion from Italy’s regional fifth tier into Serie D.
And then, at Sangiovannese, 13 years after he started, he finally found “a really serious project”, according to Francesco Baiano, one of his players there.
Both Baiano and Bergamaschi use the same word to describe Sarri’s work ethic, its meaning obvious, flattering. He was, they both say, “maniacale” in his approach to soccer: a maniac.
That is what took him from Stia to Sangiovannese, to all the points in between, and on to Serie A, to Napoli, and now to Chelsea.
Everywhere he has been, they remember, takes a little pride in how far this son of Tuscany has gone. In Figline Valdarno, a friend has turned his coffee bar, Caffe Greco, into a shrine to the town’s most famous son. And Sarri remembers them, too. Bergamaschi turned 60 on June 1. He and Sarri have only been in fleeting contact in the last few years, but Sarri called him on his birthday, and they spent a few minutes wheeling through memories of their time together at Stia, of the little field by the bridge, of the little town in the valley, of where the long road ends, and where the journey began.