Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2023

/90 9TH ASPIRE ACADEMY GLOBAL SUMMIT You and FrancescoTotti, the king of Rome, were the last great number 10s of our tradition after the age of the two Robertos: Baggio and Mancini. Why dowe have nomore great number 10s? Do you think that in the in the younger Italian teams physicality is more important than technique? For sure it has happened during the past years. I saw it when I was playing, when young guys came from the youth, we were looking for strong or fast guys. When I was a kid, I was born in November, so I was playing with my teammates, some were born the first day of January. In my first year in Padova, when I was 13 years old, it wasn’t a great year. If the people of Padova didn’t have that passion, saying “let’s wait one more year,” I could have come back to San Vendemiano and my history would have been different. I believe that everybody has a different story. I played and I won here in this stadium, the Champions League, with two guys, one of them joined Serie A at 27 years old, Angelo Di Livio and the second one the best player of the game, Moreno Torricelli. They played until they were 23 years old in the fifth division. So talent, where is the talent? Talent is everywhere and sometimes you just need to see with different eyes, just to wait a few more months, few more years and try to be more personalized with the players as much as you can. Because everybody needs different things. We heard the coaches saying that nobody is the same. I need to be different, to different personalities, to different backgrounds. Of course, imagine what happen with the kids: they’re still learning. Back to your question: the most important thing is what happened between 12-13 and 18-20, even 25 years old. Every time is a moment to learn understand something more about your players. For me, talent is very important and without that, probably Argentina wouldn’t have won the World Cup. With the ‘Number 10’, with De Maria, with the goalkeeper, with different kinds of talents, they showed something that catches our attention, making something unbelievable. With the talent of the team, believing in the ‘Number 10’ and playing in the old way: we run for him, he can rest, he can do whatever he wants and we’re going to die for him. So, it is a talent also to put together all these personalities and say: “We’re going to go in that way and we believe in that way.” Sometimes you win, sometimes not, but talent is even running talent and having someone running a lot is a talent. Everybody has a different talent, but we need to be a little bit more focused on creativity, something that is inventing things or seeing things that didn’t work and now suddenly works. One example, who become an amazing player, was in Real Madrid, Vinicius Jr. Up until two years ago, people were saying: “What is this guy doing? All the time he does the wrong thing.” But they saw talent and then he found Ancelotti, who understood what was going on, trying to teach him and Vinicius put a lot of effort into learning. Then he became a player who can kill every game and one of the best that we will have in the next 10 years. So, timing, passion, talent, vision, creativity, finding solutions are things that are very important, in every level.