The eternal Claudio Ranieri has turned Roma's expensive squad back into a team

Football moves at lightning speed.

What works one week no longer works the next. An edge is soon blunted. Trends seem as short as the TikTok videos explaining them. Positional play. Relationism. Buy into it. This is where the game is supposedly going. Stand still and you’ll be left behind. When clubs recruit coaches these days, the decision-makers want analysts to run through a deck explaining why the candidate’s ideas are fresh. They don’t want yesterday’s man. They tend to want a 30-something German or a Basque from an unpronounceable village with the letter X in its name.

Claudio Ranieri, on the other hand, turned 73 last autumn. When he left Cagliari last summer everyone assumed it was to retire, collect his pension and play with his grandkids. But football won’t leave Ranieri alone. “I had more offers in the last few months than when I won the league with Leicester,” he said. Ranieri turned all of those offers down. Except one.

In November, he boarded a plane to London — a regular flight with ordinary people like you and me — hailed a cab and told the driver to take him to Claridges where Roma’s owner Dan Friedkin was staying. Would he come out of retirement for a third spell with the club he supported as a boy, the Texan wished to know?

Vincenzo Montella, a member of Roma’s last title-winning side, was also in the frame for the job after resurrecting his career with the Turkish national team. But no one else would take it. It seemed like a hiding to nothing. Whoever accepted to become Roma’s fourth coach of 2024 would need guts, brains, and a big heart, all things Ranieri had held in his hands as a butcher’s boy growing up in the San Saba neighbour of the Italian capital.

At the time, Roma found themselves in 12th and in disarray. They were enduring their worst start since 1974. The fans, some of the most vociferous in the world, were in open rebellion. They intimidated CEO Lina Souloukou into resigning and harassed captain Lorenzo Pellegrini and the other senior players Bryan Cristante and Gianluca Mancini. It was the lowest ebb of the Friedkins’ ownership.

Three years of underperformance in the league had been covered up by Jose Mourinho’s charisma and controversies, the conquest of a first trophy in 14 years and back-to-back European finals in UEFA’s second and third tier competitions.

The financial losses caused by repeated failures to qualify for the Champions League and investing €115m net in Mourinho’s first summer mattered little to fans as long as big names like Paulo Dybala and Romelu Lukaku kept arriving and the Friedkins showed respect to the club’s history and tradition. Firing Mourinho’s successor, a club legend Daniele De Rossi, four games into the new season, a few months into a new three-year contract and after spending another €100m ended that.

Ivan Juric, his replacement, was introduced in the stated belief his appointment fell in line with the owner’s ambitions to win trophies. The ashen Croat was sacked within six weeks, having decried “a shit situation.” What must he think of Southampton?

Anyway, Ranieri wasn’t afraid to jump in. Five years ago, he answered the Lupi’s call in another hour of need. Roma, a Champions League semi-finalist in 2018, were sixth at the time and risked missing out on the competition for the first time in six seasons when he stepped into the breach. Monchi, in his brief spell as sporting director, had left the club in a mess, however, it really is saying something that Roma were in a better state then than they were in November. The context, however, was eerily similar; a palpable antipathy towards the owners manifesting itself in scathing banners inside the Olimpico and outside Trigoria where Roma train.

Ranieri himself had criticised the running of the club in an interview with RAI Radio Anch’io lo Sport. The structure(less) appearance of Roma struck him as “cold” in “spirit” and “characterless.” He “did not understand” De Rossi’s dismissal. What gave him pause before judging the Friedkins was the amount of money they have put in. Close to a billion. He remembered a time in his childhood when Roma fans went around the Curva Sud holding a whip-a-round to help out a hard-up club. Roma have certainly been more rosso than giallorosso under the Friedkins — in the red. But they’re not short of cash as their recent acquisition of Everton shows.

So Ranieri put his scruples over De Rossi to one side and heard them out. In addition to a caretaker role, Ranieri was offered the chance to move upstairs and become an executive at the end of the season. Craftily, though, he still left the fans’ with the impression that this wasn’t about power and he would do the job for nothing.

Football, as a game, should have long passed Ranieri by. His opponent on Sunday night, Lazio coach, Marco Baroni played under him at Napoli… in 1991. So long ago that goalkeepers could still pick up back passes.

But, as in a Roman trattoria, the old recipes like amatriciana, carbonara and gricia still work. For all the Michelin stars given out for molecular gastronomy, and plates served with micro-herbs tweezered onto them, a classic will always be a classic.

Keep things simple. That’s what Ranieri has done. He’s played to the gallery by not ruling out a return to the club for Francesco Totti in some capacity. He’s played his best players. Mats Hummels, Leandro Paredes and Paulo Dybala are all World Cup winners. Juric inexplicably overlooked the first two. Dybala, meanwhile, was asked to chase after defenders rather than make them chase after him.

Ranieri rectified that and doesn’t seem to care that as long as Dybala keeps playing, his contract will be automatically renewed with a salary escalator; something De Rossi and Juric always had in the backs of their minds. Ranieri also took the under fire players Pellegrini, Nicola Zalewski and Bryan Cristante out of the firing line. He defended Pellegrini, a Roman like him, in the press and left him out of the starting XI so neither him, nor the team had to play under a cacophony of whistles every time he touched the ball.

On Sunday, though, Ranieri rather unexpectedly brought him back for the biggest game of the year. Pellegrini apparently had a “mad desire” to play and it showed. The skipper scored the opener, curling in a shot from the edge of the box after a breathtaking transition. It evoked memories of another derby from 14 years ago. Ranieri was in charge then too when Roma came back to win a derby in 2010 after he boldly took off his figli di Roma — or sons of Rome — Francesco Totti and De Rossi at half-time. The Pellegrini decision was a new twist in man-management from Ranieri, a skill far more vital than whatever tactics reel is trending on social media.

Roma soon found a second, transitioning cutely again, this time from a goal-kick with Alexis Saelemaekers pouncing on his own rebound to clinch victory. The Belgian’s return from injury has been another reason for Roma’s upturn in form.

Dybala — who is “worth the ticket price alone” in Ranieri’s opinion — was once again involved in both goals and spent the rest of his time on the pitch drawing bookings from Lazio players. Ranieri has even got him vibing off the stiff Artem Dovbyk who acted as a backboard in the build-up to Pellegrini and Saelemaeker’s strikes.

The Ukrainian, who has scored only once in the league since Ranieri took over, remains a work in progress. The fact he’s 28 in June and cost €30.5m, almost as much as Lazio’s entire summer transfer window, has raised questions about Roma’s sporting director Florent Ghisolfi. His other big signings such as Matias Soule (€25.6m) and Enzo Le Fee (€23m) have made little to no impact unless you count the news Le Fee was attracting interest from Championship outfit Sunderland in the hours before Sunday’s game. Saud Abdulhamid, a Saudi full-back signed from the Saudi Pro League, plays like a Saudi full-back signed from the Saudi Pro League. He’s raw and has become a cult figure for the wrong reasons.

Beating Lazio will help Roma forget, for a night at least, that they are still 10th and 12 points off their rivals who occupy the last Champions League spot. Forgiving that is harder and a banner in the Sud before kick-off offered a reminder to that effect. “Noi simboli e colori di questa citta’. Voi feccia della societa,” it read. “We’re the symbols and colours of this city. You the dregs of a club.” Only Ranieri is unimpeachable. A fifth win in seven in all competitions is giving him confidence the worst is over. “Now we are a team,” he told DAZN. “Everyone knows what to do.” And Roma do, undeniably, look a more credible proposition in what remains an incredible league position for a team with this wage bill and this smattering of talent.

Ranieri has been given an input into who Roma hire as coach next season. The question sporting director Florent Ghisolfi keeps getting asked is: What if he picks himself? What if the Friedkins let their emotions get the better of them as they appeared to do when making De Rossi’s interim appointment permanent? Let’s leave that for another day. But as each one passes and football moves on, do rest assured that as the game changes, or at least appears to change, Ranieri will continue to make it look exactly the same.

His relatively ancient set of skills in managing a football team are as eternal as Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

(Header photo: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images)