There’s a swallow in Coverciano, Giovanni Costantino

The hot summer wind, as Alice sang (with lyrics co-written by Franco Battiato, who also composed the music), has brought not only soaring temperatures but also something new to Club Italia this season. In the usually stagnant and ‘Gattopardo’-esque world of Italian football, where everything changes so that nothing changes (as per the quip from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel), a variation on this theme has in fact been offered by the list of coaches appointed to lead the Italian youth national teams. With the promotion of the former Under-19 coach, Alberto Bollini, to Mancini’s assistant, there has in fact been a reshuffle of the coaching staff that has left the Under-16 bench vacant. Rather than entrusting these lads to someone from within the organisation – perhaps a former player – the technical committee has appointed Giovanni Costantino.

As mentioned, this is an unusual choice that goes against the grain, given that Costantino has international experience as a first-team manager and can also boast an unusual (by the standards of our managers) command of languages. Born in Messina, aged 41, Giovanni Costantino has had to face the difficulties that all those young people who want to become top-level coaches have always encountered, without having played in the Serie A, B or C leagues. The new national team coach had to work his way up from the bottom abroad, a journey that took him as far as Finland before he went on to become an assistant coach at Honvéd in Budapest, at Dunajská Streda in Slovakia and with the Hungarian national team, where he worked with players such as Dominik Szoboszlai, the Liverpool midfielder.

That’s where his adventure as a head coach began, with spells at MTK Budapest, Casarano in Serie D, FCU Craiova and even in Kyrgyzstan, before this return to Italy. It’s hard to say whether Costantino’s arrival will mark the start of a real change at Coverciano (and here we return to "The Leopard"). On the other hand, as Aristotle said, one swallow does not make a spring. The hope, however, is that the 41-year-old Sicilian’s good work might open the doors to top-flight football for other young coaches who do not come from the usual professional pathways.