After bowing out of Europe with far more dignity than anyone expected, Fiorentina’s season is effectively finished. With that unlikely outcome—a 3rd Conference League final in 4 years—evaporating and relegation diminishing in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look ahead to the summer. It’s completely unfair but the biggest question facing DS Fabio Paratici is who the manager will be next year. Paolo Vanoli has performed a minor miracle in getting the Viola out of danger but the consensus seems to be that he’s
gone come July, with Fabio Grosso the name I’ve heard most often as his replacement.
First of all, it’s obviously a bit early to worry about the summer. Sure, Fiorentina may seem safe from relegation, boasting an 8-point lead over Cremonese and Lecce with 6 games left, but despite the improvement in the past few months, I won’t rule out yet another collapse to make this final month far more interesting than I’d like it to be. Until the Viola have mathematically secured a berth in Serie A next year, it’s too early to worry about the next step.
It’s also deeply unfair to Vanoli: the only reason the narrative has shifted to the future is because he’s secured the present. He hasn’t been perfect but the job he’s done dragging this disaffected bunch out of its historically bad malaise and into competency can’t be overstated. If he’s raised the floor of this team so much in so short a time, he deserves a chance to raise the ceiling as well. That means giving him a full offseason, a training camp to instill his principles in the squad, and a few moves in the player market to support him.
These aren’t normal circumstances, though. Rocco Commisso’s death earlier this year threw Fiorentina’s future into uncertainty, and although his widow Catherine and son Giuseppe have said all the right things but the arrival of Paratici is enough to set the gears turning, gears that, at least in my smooth brain, are turning despite Joe Commisso’s recent exultation in the aftermath of the win at Hellas Verona. He didn’t sound like he planned to sack the coach then.
That’s the other oddity. Grosso’s done well with Sassuolo the past couple years, getting the Neroverdi back into Serie A last year and leading them into the top half of the table this year, but I’m not convinced that’s all him. Sassuolo’s one of the smarter teams in Italy in terms of recruitment and long-term vision, creating an environment that brings the best out of most coaches. He got Frosinone promoted to the top flight in 2023 but every other job’s ended with him getting sacked after a poor run; his biggest post was at Lyon, which ended with L’OL in last place when he was relieved of duty after 2 months in charge.
That’s not the kind of manager worth destabilizing an already-fragile team over. Indeed, the fact that he’s the top candidate in the minds of the media and the fans at the moment indicates a bigger problem to me, one that Italy’s recent failure to qualify for the World Cup yet again laid bare: calcio remains stuck in the past. The insistence on cycling through the same stale for the biggest positions—look at the FIGC election, pitting 67-year-old lifetime sporting insider Giovanni Malagò against 67-year-old former president Giancarlo Abete—has left the nation miles behind its competitors.
That spills over to coaching, too. Of that 2006 team, 7 players have coached in Serie A: Grosso, Andrea Pirlo, Gennaro Gattuso, Daniele de Rossi, Fabio Cannavaro, Pippo Inzaghi, and Alberto Gilardino. None of them have succeeded. They’re relatively young as managers but de Rossi’s the only one who might become more than a journeyman. Roberto de Zerbi, Vincenzo Italiano, Francesco Farioli, and Raffaele Palladino are probably the brightest young Italian coaches; Palladino was a fairly average top flight player but de Zerbi and Italiano mostly played in the lower leagues, while Farioli never played professionally at all. The best innovators aren’t coming from within the established system.
Fiorentina’s spent too long on the treadmill of mediocrity to fall into this trap. Grosso’s only 48 and could well improve as a coach but I’m not convinced that he’s the guy to lead this team out of its self-imposed misery. If Paratici is going to restart this project in the summer and bring in a new manager, I’d rather he avoided the echoes of glories from decades past. That’s the thing about echoes, after all. At every turn, they fade. And the Viola have spent all year fading.
