Not even Andrea Pirlo listens to Andrea Pirlo.
“I wouldn’t bet a single cent on me becoming a manager,” the Italian wrote in his 2013 autobiography, Penso Quindi Gioco (‘I Think Therefore I Play’). “It is not a job I’m attracted to. There are too many worries and the lifestyle is far too close to that of a player. I’ve done my bit and, in the future, I would like to get back even a semblance of a private life.”
Pirlo was his generation’s coolest operator, an effortless midfielder of such insouciant grace for Milan, Juventus and Italy, among others, that you almost felt as if football was a means to an end to fund his true passion: the winery he opened in 2007. Yet, seven years after making his prediction, the man nicknamed l’Architetto (‘the Architect’) by his 2006 World Cup-winning peers found himself back at Juve as the manager he’d promised himself he would never become. What gives?
Two years after his book was released, Pirlo joined New York City FC in July 2015. In his first full MLS campaign, his stance softened. Patrick Vieira – another midfield maestro, albeit preferring the scythe to Pirlo’s sickle – became NYCFC’s manager and told the soon-to-be-retired pair of Frank Lampard and Pirlo, respectively two and three years his junior, that their dugout aversion might change.
“Patrick told Frank and I, ‘You’ll see’,” Pirlo recalls now, with a smile. “He said, ‘In a few years’ time, both of you are going to become managers, because this is what happens eventually. To begin with, you don’t want to do it, but then your mind and your desire will lead you to become a coach’. That’s exactly what happened. I wasn’t thinking about it at all, but then I attended courses to get the coaching licence, just in case. Gradually, that desire started to grow, and here I am.”
Unlike Vieira, or Lampard starting at Derby, Pirlo’s first coaching job was with one of the world’s biggest clubs. He had been slated for a season in charge of Juve’s under-23s, but instead there would be no gradual path – just straight into the Turin furnace, nine days after Maurizio Sarri left in July 2020. As football somehow persisted mid-pandemic, Pirlo won the Coppa Italia, but a fourth-placed Serie A finish meant he was out after one season. It was a rude awakening to life as a manager and he needed a year to decompress.
In June 2022, he surprisingly went to Fatih Karagumruk in Turkey’s top tier. Istanbul isn’t just any city to Pirlo. Far away from his Italian comfort zone, it is also that he wants to make amends.
