Master of the Azzurri

The Enduring Legacy of Enzo Bearzot

The following is an extract from the book Master of the Azzurri: The Life and Times of Enzo Bearzot.  Subscribers to Cultured Football get a free copy of this book in their welcome mail.  Anyone else who wants to buy a copy can do so here.

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“As a decent person.”

Even among the greats of Italian sports journalism, Gianni Mura is considered a giant.  A writer rather than simply a journalist – he also penned several successful novels – Mura was known for his insightful commentary, deep knowledge of sport and an engaging writing style.  Those talents would have counted for little had they not been combined with a deep sense of empathy.  People knew that he wasn’t the kind of journalist who made his reputation by bringing down others; that he was interested in what truly went through players’ mind rather than an easy headline.

Because of that, they opened up to him.  They gave him deep answers to questions they usually replied to with cliches.  And so, when he asked Enzo Bearzot how he wanted to be remembered, the former Italy manager gave him the four-worded answer above.

Others probably remember Bearzot for different reasons.  He was the man who led Italy to their third World Cup in 1982.  His was the team that stunned Brazil in one of the greatest games in the competition’s history.  It was his tactical pragmatism, built as per Italian tradition on a solid defence, that allowed them to scale those heights.  For many, that made him a great manager above all other things.

Yet, Bearzot was more than merely that.  By his own admission, he had three loves in his life: football, the game he had discovered as a child; Luisa, the woman he met at a train station and who became his wife for five decades; and literature, which he first came into contact with at school with the Salesians.

Unsurprisingly then, Bearzot’s thoughts on his career reflected the soul of a writer.  “Happiness,” he said, “is like a breeze that occasionally caresses the face. But wounds, even moral ones, never fade away; they mark you for a lifetime.”

That he would say that decades after his success in Spain is telling, for they echo a thought that had been with him since that summer of 1982.

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Bearzot’s side arrived in Spain under a dark cloud.  Despite doing well and playing attractive football on the way to an unexpected fourth place finish at the 1978 World Cup, Bearzot had never won over his detractors in the media who rarely lost an opportunity to publicly call for his dismissal.

Much of their criticism centred on his refusal to deviate from a squad selection heavy with Juventus players.  The choice of Paolo Rossi, who had played just a handful of games before the 1982 World Cup as he sat out a two year suspension over match fixing, instead of Roma’s league top-scorer Roberto Pruzzo was seen as an affront to the national team.

The calls for Bearzot’s head increased in the first round of the tournament when Italy failed to win a single game in their group stages and only just squeezed through on goals scored.  Things got so bad that the players decided that they were no longer going to talk to the media, bringing about one of the most famous instances of a silenzio stampa (silence to the media as the press boycott is referred to in Italy).

This, and the resulting siege mentality, seemed to have a miraculous impact on the Italians and they were a different side from the next round onwards.  With Rossi finally finding his form they beat three of the favourites – Argentina, Brazil and West Germany – on the path to winning their third World Cup.

Bearzot was vindicated for his choices and those who criticised him now fell over themselves to praise him.

Decades after Bearzot led Italy to their World Cup triumph in 1982, as football data began being dissected and mined for information, it would emerge that the Italian great had instinctively understood what it took to achieve international success.

When the CIES Football Observatory decided to take a look at what the data said about the teams who did best in the World Cup, they discovered that the best-performing teams generally have more stable squads compared to less competitive ones. Turns out that achieving an optimal balance, with around three quarters of the same players retained rather than going purely for the most in-form players is vital for success.

If anything was to change, it was better to change the manager than the core members of the team because that held a lower impact on results.  The strength provided by team stability proves to be more important that other metrics such as league ranking, points, and goals scored.

Bearzot did not need data to tell him as much; his long experience with the national team had taught him that.  He knew that a team wins not merely through the quality of their stars but because of the unity of the eleven on the pitch and their willingness to work for each other.  He also realised that such team culture was impossible to build given the limited time that national team coaches have to spend with their players unless you kept a constant core of players.

“First of all,” he said in a later interview.  “I hold a fundamental principle in high regard: that of prioritizing the team over the individual, of forming a football “family” in the blue jersey, and not just bringing together many skilled football professionals.”

“It is only the strength of the group, only an absolute unity like the one demonstrated by my blues, that could give the National Team the energy for that sensational "crescendo" in Barcelona and Madrid, reaching peak performance a few days after many – even within – had buried us in criticism for the faltering start, for the three draws obtained in the first phase of the World Cup.”

“I often say that my National Team is born not only on the playing field and in the locker room, but also in the dining room, in the hotel rooms where we spend those long days before the game or the “retreats” before the most important matches.”

“When I think of my azzurri, it’s easy for me to draw a comparison with a musical ensemble, with a jazz orchestra. Maybe it’s because I like jazz, a type of music that is born from suffering, that must be performed with intense participation [...] Football is no different from music, even on the field harmony and heart matter, flair and determination: at the right moment a solo is fine, but everyone in the orchestra must know the score well and in the end the applause (or the boos) must be shared among everyone, in equal parts.”

It was this principle that dictated his actions.  He held no aversion to bringing in new players purely to protect the status-quo – his squad in 1982 included 18 year-old defender Beppe Bergomi – but was never going to bring in any player was going to hinder team harmony.

He also knew how to build relationships.  He helped Paolo Rossi as much as he could when his striker was suspended because of the football betting case, visiting him to let him know that he was still in his plans.  Even so, he then took the opportunity to let Rossi know that he was putting on weight.  For that was also how Bearzot managed.  Little emotion, plenty of discipline but above all loyalty.

“Rather than change, I prefer to die with them,” he had exclaimed weeks ahead of the 1982 World Cup.  Nothing summed him up more than that.

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