Gaetano Berardi: Football Manager. Not something I might have expected five years ago, having ended the 2017/18 season with three red cards, but he’s following one of the most proven paths to success in coaching. Having studied for his coaching badges at Coverciano, Berra is now heading to Brescia to work as assistant manager with their Primavera team. Our Under-21 level, but U19 in this case.

Coverciano is to football coaching what Greggs is to a chicken bake. It’s the footballing nerve centre of Italy, where the national team train and home to the Scuola Allenatori, or coaching school, that has shaped the careers of most Italian coaches.

The good people at the Scuola would have you believe that it’s their unbeatable education that means more Italian coaches have won the Premier League than any other nationality since 1992, when Sky invented football.

An invention of Luigi Ridolfi, the founder of Fiorentina, the facility at Coverciano was built as a copy of the Medici villas in the hills that surround the town of Coverciano, a few miles east of Florence. It was on those hills that Leonardo Da Vinci tested his ‘flying machine’, four hundred years before the Wright brothers, so it’s obviously a logical spot to build a football coaching school, where ideas flow much more easily than they might on an evening huddled around Neil Warnock’s barbecue.

At the Scuola Allenatori, coaches study the game and earn their UEFA B and UEFA A badges, before working their way to UEFA Pro at the finishing school, much like the FA or any other association work, but the UEFA Pro Licence exam requires a thesis and a follow-up ‘oral exam’ in which you explain the merits of your thesis and how it relates to the present and future of football.

Reading the titles of some theses produced at Coverciano, I can imagine Marcelo Bielsa has read every single one. Roberto Mancini wrote about the role of the attacking midfielder, Carlo Ancelotti presented the future of football in 1997, titled ‘More Dynamism’, and Antonio Conte spoke of the importance of video analysis in his 2006 thesis. That’s great, but it’s not quite ‘The Goal is in the Middle’ by Jesse Marsch, is it?

Today’s young Italian coaches are doing the same. Roberto De Zerbi wrote ‘My Model of the Game’ about his tactical beliefs; Fiorentina manager Vincenzo Italiano spoke about the importance of all players being ‘directors’ in his team’s play. It’s all sounding very Bielsa-ish, which is to say that it sounds smarter than what we’re used to.

Brescia’s academy has produced legends like Andrea Pirlo, Marek Hamsik and Gaetano Berardi, as well as Newcastle’s Sandro Tonali. Despite having to work with Massimo Cellino at a club whose fans have protested their owner’s presence in the city, Berardi has a wonderful opportunity to follow in the footsteps of several current Serie A and B managers.

Inter’s Simone Inzaghi progressed along the same path, coaching in Primavera before making the jump to manage Lazio. Monza’s Raffaele Palladino and Genoa’s Alberto Gilardino were taken directly from their club’s Primavera teams in 2022 and thrown into first team management in a moment of crisis, learning to swim quickly and proving to be real successes.

I’ve been to Coverciano on a trip to Florence and accidentally stumbled into the presentation room, a result of being allowed to wander freely around the national football museum there, but all I got was a startled look from members of Roberto Mancini’s staff as they ran through their morning meeting. No coaching jobs, not even a lecture.

Bielsa gave a presentation there last December, talking about the approach to coaching players and what tactical systems mean. I’d love to have sat through (and not understood) that, just as coaches like World Cup winners Daniele De Rossi and Andrea Barzagli did. I’m sure they got a lot more from it than I ever could, but I’m still jealous.

Berra has started out on a road that leads to elite coaching, one with a reference list longer than your arm. He gets to do his badges at Coverciano after spending three years learning from Bielsa, an education that most players going into football coaching would kill for. Inspired by the great man, and ‘taught’ in the great school of the game, I have every faith he’s heading for the top. I look forward to him winning the Champions League with Leeds in 2030. No pressure, Gaetano, of course. ⬢