Would you lie to help a friend get a job? Roberto Mancini did it about a decade ago for Marco Rossi, and thus actually saved the career of the man he longs to beat tonight (Monday, 21:45, Sport2). Rossi needs only a draw in Budapest for the Hungarian team to overtake Italy at the top of the Nations League and qualify for the semi-finals. All the local fans have admired him for a long time, but in 2012 he was a completely unknown coach, and considered retiring from the profession before his best friend agreed to make a jesta for him.
This friendship began in 1993, when defender Marco Rossi signed with Sampdoria thanks to a relatively successful tenure at Brescia. He was not a particularly brilliant player, and in the all-star squad in Genoa he was mainly assigned a place on the bench – nevertheless, it is very difficult to compete with Pietro Vierkovod, Riccardo Peri and Sinisha Mihailovic. Socially, the new player was accepted, and the relationship with Mancini blossomed. The dominant playmaker was the first to congratulate Rossi when he scored his only goal for the team, with a characteristic strike after a corner in a 0:3 victory over Roma. Rod Hulit, by the way, scored twice in the same game, and together with him, Attilio Lombardo, Vladimir Yugovich and David Platt gave performances. For Rossi, it was quite an honor to belong to such a group.
At the end of two years, the brakeman set out to continue his unique journey – he was the first Italian to sign in the Mexican league, and then also one of the first Italians in the Bundesliga in Eintracht Frankfurt’s uniform. At that time, towards the end of his career on the field, he had already begun to plan his professional future as a coach, but over time he learned first hand that the way up could be even more problematic than as a player. The number of jobs is limited, the competition is tough, and promotion is sometimes impossible without connections and dark agreements under the table.
Maybe Rossi’s situation would have been different, if the law had allowed him to partner with a boy named Mario Balotelli when he was working for Lumazana from the third division. “I’ve known him since he was 8 years old, and it was clear how talented he was. When I coached Lumtzana, he played in the youth division at the age of 15, and stood out above everyone else with his physical strength and technical abilities. He was amazing. I wanted to transfer him to the seniors, but it wasn’t possible before he celebrated 16th birthday. Balotelli was, therefore, given permission to join the senior team in August 2006, and shortly after that he already moved to Inter. However, Rossi was already fired in March 2006, so he did not get to guide him.
Later, the coach wandered between different teams in the lower leagues, and did not stick a peg anywhere. Typically, his employment ended within a few months, as is customary at such clubs, and his motivation waned over time. In 2012, when he remained unemployed for more than a year, Rossi considered ending the ongoing farce and converting to a more sane profession. “I had several offers, but I was supposed to give the management my salary in advance to get the position. In practice, it was necessary to pay to work. It disgusted me, and I didn’t want to be part of it. This is life in the Italian third league,” Rossi later said. Then, right before he abandoned football for good, he went to visit a friend in Budapest.
A friend owned a restaurant in the city center, and he knew the soccer scene in Hungary quite well. He heard that Honved, the former luxury team that deteriorated into crises, appointed a sports director from Italy. “Why don’t you contact him?”, he wondered. Rossi invited Fabio Cordella to a restaurant, the friend donated the meal for the purpose of persuasion, and the connection was positive. All that remained was to convince the American owners to give the job to an Italian no one had heard of. How do you get appointed to a club that considers itself respectable if you only have failures in the third division in Italy? This is where Roberto Mancini came into the picture.
“I knew Roberto personally, and it turned out that Marco was also his friend. We contacted him and asked him to recommend him. Mancini was supposed to testify that Rossi worked for Manchester City for three years unofficially. He agreed – and that’s how the Americans got the assurances they wanted.” Cordela said. Rossi was appointed coach of Honved in the summer of 2012, and this is how his rise began a decade ago. As part of the renewed friendship with Mancini, in 2013 his son Andrea also signed with Honved, who until then studied at the academies of Inter and Manchester City where his father worked. “I came to Hungary because there is an Italian coach here who played with my father, and I heard a lot of good things about him,” Andrea Mancini, who was an attacking midfielder like Roberto, said at the time. Unfortunately, he did not succeed beyond a few positive matches in Budapest, and hung up his boots already in 2017 at the age of 24.
Rossi’s path at Honved was not smooth, and in 2014 he resigned after a publicized fight with the management, but was reinstated in February 2015 and marched the team to a sensational championship against all odds in 2017 – its first title in 24 years, and also the last to date. At the end of the exciting celebration, the Italian left in favor of a more lucrative job in the Slovak Donyska Strada, but in 2018 he already returned to the Hungarian capital to receive the prestigious appointment as the coach of the national team. The esteem for him was enormous thanks to the achievements in Honved, and therefore he received extensive support in the media as well. Even in this position, Rossi knew quite a few crises, and many with significant factors, but in the end the stability paid off, because his adaptation to the Hungarian mentality is close to perfection.
As an Italian coach who learned from the best in the 90’s, Rossi places special emphasis on tactical discipline, and manages to cope especially well when his team is defined as an underdog. He engineered the magnificent comeback against Iceland in the Euro 2020 qualification playoffs, and there – in the house of death with Germany, England and Portugal, his humble group gave an excellent fight to all the majors. They were close to beating the Portuguese before conceding 3 very late goals and losing with an unfair result 3:0. She was close to beating France and led at the break, until Antoine Griezmann equalized 1:1. She was close to beating Germany as well, but Leon Goretzka equalized 2:2 in the 84th minute and allowed Joachim Lev’s team to qualify for the round of 16 at their own expense. In the final table, the Hungarians ranked last with two points, but were received as heroes in their homeland – and rightfully so.
This momentum continued even more strongly even after the impossible draw in the Nations League. Who would have believed that Hungary would beat England twice, 0:1 in Budapest and 0:4 away – an incredible result that reminded of the legendary 3:6 with Ferenc Puskas in 1953? Who would have believed that they would not lose to Germany, and even beat them 0:1 in Leipzig last Friday? Only Italy beat Hungary 1:2 in June, but for the new meeting against his good friend Mancini, Rossi arrives as he is above him in the table. Another point – and the Hungarians will qualify for the semi-finals, while the Italians will be left with their wounds after failing to qualify for the World Cup.
None of this would have happened without that help from Mancini a decade ago, but Rossi is really not going to return the favor just like that, thanks to the friendships from the happy days at Sampdoria. He wants to win, and he has a good chance of doing so.