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Francesco Guidolin, Swansea City’s self-described “niche” coach

By on January 18, 2016

If Francesco Guidolin could manage any club in Germany, he wouldn’t head straight for the top job at Bayern Munich, or even Borussia Dortmund.  The promise of VfL Wolfsburg, Schalke 04, Bayer Leverkusen, nor Werder Bremen, whom he had once supported as the manager of Palermo, capture the Italian’s fancy.  Instead, Guidolin would take the reigns at Hertha Berlin, a club that were relegated from the Bundesliga at the time Football Italia picked up a money quote from the then-Parma manager.  “At heart, I am a niche coach,” he said in 2011.  “I love Berlin and I’d love to take charge of Hertha Berlin.”

“If Hertha don’t want me then I’ll wait for a call from Nottingham Forest, another niche club.”

Instead, the sixty-year-old manager has taken over the top job at Swansea City over the weekend, his first post outside of Italy since 2006.  Even in the commercialized machine that is the Premier League, Guidolin has stayed true to his niche heart with the Swans. A perfect match for a “project” in which has always been looking to invest his time.

Twenty years ago, perhaps, Guidolin says he aspired to join a big club. As a young manager, directly on the back of a steady playing career, primarily for Verona, he impressed at Ravenna in Serie B and then Atalanta in Italy’s top division. In 1994, still an unknown name outside of Italy, Guidolin stepped back down to Serie B to take over at Vicenza.

However, he quickly led Vicenza up into the top division and after a ninth-place finish in his second season in charge, they flirted with the title race the following year and led the back on occasion. They won the Coppa Italia title in 1997 and lost to Chelsea in the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup semi-finals the following season. Via James Richardson’s famous Football Italia television show, their successes were broadcast to a wider, international audience.

It was during these days of his managerial fame that Guidolin dreamed of joining a big side. He had led a team from the second division to the top of Italian football during the league’s heydays in the nineties and his stock was soaring. In 1998, he accepted an offer at Udinese, where he spent a season, before moving on to Bologna. He helped the Rossoblu reach European football, but faced the sack in 2003 after a twelfth-placed finish.

His stock had plateaued and before signing on at Palermo, he took a six month sabbatical. He led them to promotion in the 2004-2005 season, but then left for Genoa the following summer. Yet things didn’t exactly go as planned and before he took charge of a single game, Genoa were relegated to the third division for allegations of match fixing.

Guidolin quickly got out of his contract and headed East to manage Monaco. Although he only lasted a season, the experience helped Guidolin develop the versatility at the root of his tactical acumen.

But the wear and tear of so many moves began to erode his hopes of managing any of Europe’s big-money clubs, and he returned to Italy to manage Palermo again. Although he was linked with the vacancy at the helm of Queens Park Rangers in 2007, he stayed at Palermo for another year. In 2008, he moved to Parma and then Udinese in 2010 to follow a desire to settle down at a single club after a nomadic career at fifteen different clubs in twenty years. He was no longer bothered by the glitz and glamor of Europe’s finest.

He built one of Italy’s most exciting attacking teams, utilizing his passion for the youth game by nurturing young stars such as Medhi Benatia, now at Bayern Munich, and Alexis Sanchez, who established a formidable partnership with Antonio Di Natale up front. Their counter-attacks were deadly and quick build-ups mesmerizing.

“I remember when Brendan Rodgers was Swansea’s manager, and Swansea played very, very well,” he told Swansea’s official website.

“When I was at Udinese I showed the players a video of the styles of Swansea.”
They were known as the “Little Barcelona,” and Guidolin looked up to Barca’s “complete program.” He admired “their appearance in possession and without their dominant play, and the ease with which they create chances and capture the imagination.”

“They just bring everything,” he said in 2011. “We are just Udinese.  Barcelona is perfection.”

Guidolin has had limited exposure to English football throughout his long career, but has always been enticed by atmosphere around football in the home nations. “If you go to a new, inviting and full stadium and then see the same game in a half-empty, dilapidated stadium, where the spectators far sit away from the pitch and the players might even play on a poor field, the whole thing is a completely different picture,” he said in an interview with German magazine Spox. He joked that it made up for the long-ball football.

“The best directors don’t always end up in Hollywood,” he said back in that 2011 interview.  With Swansea, though, perhaps he’s gone a step further up the ladder than he ever bargained for.

Homepage photo credit: By Christopher Elkins from Bristol, United Kingdom (IMAGE_154) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.