To nobody’s surprise, Fiorentina announced a few hours ago that the club has parted ways with Paolo Vanoli and his coaching staff, declining to pick up its option to keep him around for another year. The mister doesn’t have another job lined up as far as I know so he’ll have to sit and wait for an offer even after he performed a miracle in Florence after Stefano Pioli pulled the controls down and parachuted out before the part where there’s a wreckage in a smoking crater.
I’ve written about this more than once but I’ll restate the obvious: it’s a tremendous injustice that Vanoli won’t get a real chance to lead this team. Fiorentina was sinking to the ocean floor, tied to barrels of toxic waste, and he came in and cut the ropes so that the club could eventually bob back to the surface. It’s easy to forget in the post-season numbness but relegation wasn’t just a possibility when he arrived. It was a matter of historical fact.
Vanoli didn’t offer a well-constructed narrative about turning things around. He didn’t pander to journalists or fans. He treated his media sessions as an irritating distraction from the mission he’d signed up for. He spent most of the season screaming at everyone on the pitch (3 yellow cards, 2 red cards) and demanding that his guys play like what they were: a bad team that needed to buckle down and grind out results.
That’s what I’ll remember about his tenure. He didn’t want his team doing any of the stuff that good teams do. Romantic attacking. Tactical innovation. Even Diego Simeone-style grit. No, Vanoli offered hard work and suffering and not much else. After scrapping the 3-man defense, he didn’t do all that much besides stubbornly demand more work and more suffering. He demanded penitence for sins past. The reward? More penitence.
And it worked. It was as fun as watching oxen haul a plow across a desert but it worked. There wasn’t an esprit de corps like there was under Vincenzo Italiano, a sense that the whole roster was united and pulling in the same direction. The sullenness and petulance were still visible. The difference was that chins didn’t collapse onto chests at every little mistake. Instead, the squad played with a doggedness based not on self-belief but on the understanding that doggedness has a meaning unto itself.
It wasn’t enough for Fabio Paratici. We knew it wouldn’t be. He was hired to tear down the smouldering remnants left behind the breakup of the Commisso-Barone-Pradè brain trust. Even though Vanoli lurched up out of the coals and smothered them, he’s still a result of the wreckage that predates Paratici and thus must be shuffled on. It makes perfect sense despite the deep injustice of it all. After all, sports are supposed to be the ultimate meritocracy: succeed and rise, fail and descend.
Vanoli succeeded and now descends, which is in keeping with his alogical tenure. He turned Fiorentina into an industrious but hideous creature that eventually clawed its way out of myriad dangers and blindly lurched to safety. Posterity will ignore these 210 days as a Lynchian interlude, an interstition between the tail end of the Italiano years (ably extended for an extra season by Raffaele Palladino) and whatever Paratici’s cooking up. This is a footnote that nobody reads. An explanation in a foreign language. A warning unheeded.
I’m not optimistic about Fiorentina over the next couple years. The organizational chaos doesn’t look like resolving itself into the order necessary for running a club. Vanoli’s stint in charge probably didn’t change much in that regard. He reminds me of nothing so much as that Douglas Adams line: he taught the Viola how to throw themselves at the ground and miss.
So long, Mister Vanoli, and thanks for everything. We’re only here because you made it happen, even if none of us liked it. Best of luck wherever you wind up next.
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