National Team Head Coach Roberto Mancini was the BFC Academy Webinar’s first guest, in a series of online video conferences organised by Bologna for the academy’s young players with big names from the world of sport and entertainment, the show airing on  Bologna’s YouTube channel. There were plenty of questions from the young players for the Coach in the 45-minute chat, with CEO Claudio Fenucci running the discussion. “For me Bologna is Bologna, it’s something special,” were Mancini’s first words, having started his career as a footballer in the youth teams in 1977 before moving up to Serie A in 1981, aged just 17. Speaking about the National Team, the Coach expressed his hopes of resuming activities in September: “We’ve organised a few chats to say hi to the guys and keep in touch with them. We haven’t seen each other since November and we’re hoping to restart activities in September. The scheduling will be an issue.”

But the focus of the meeting was on the young players themselves, Mancini emphasised the following: “In my coaching team, there are people monitoring the Primavera league, and if there are good players, I’m ready to call them up. Age doesn’t matter to me: what counts is technique and character. That way of thinking is the result me making my debut for Bologna when I was sixteen and a half, thanks to the fact that I met people who put their faith in me, so I’m always ready to do the same. You have to give good young players a chance, allow them to play and allow them to make mistakes too.”

On the topic of young players, the conversation touched on Zaniolo, who came straight to the National Team from the Primavera: “I saw him play at the finals of the Under-19 Euros, where he was underage, and I decided to call him up. I also watched Tonali, Scamacca and Kean in that team. That’s why I’d advise you guys to be committed and train hard: if you have technical qualities and character then I’m ready to call you up, even if you haven’t made your first team debut yet.”

He proceeded with the following: “I hope I’m not wrong here, but I think that I’m a coach that has given younger players chances in all of my club experiences. Between Inter, Fiorentina, Lazio, Manchester City, Galatasaray and Zenit. When I see a player who’s ready for the first team I’ll bring them in, and if they have quality then they’ll play too, I don’t think about the possibility that that they might lose me a game. When Burgnich gave me my debut at 16 and a half, there were four or five other attackers who were much better and more experienced than me, I don’t know why he did it, but he gave me a chance; I came off the bench for the first two or three games, I was excited and I didn’t manage to play as I wanted. Then I scored in the fourth game; that goal gave me an enormous boost and I then played almost every game.” Mancini also spoke about women’s football: “You need a lot of passion in football and you girls have it in abundance. I also watch the players in the Women’s National Team, their passion is just crazy and that makes them always keep on improving. I hope that they can go even further because women’s league has improved so much compared to when it started, the, as has the Women’s National Team.”

Train hard and live like an athlete: this was the Coach’s advice. He continued by saying: “Technique and character are important and they’re the first things that I look at, but they’re not everything. I lost a couple of years after my debut by thinking they were everything. I had quality, God had given that to me, but it took me a while to understand things, then I improved so much through hard work. If I hadn’t have done that, I would have been gone, just like Macina. He was born in the same year as me and was my teammate in the youth teams at Bologna: he was the best in the world at Under-15, he could have been Messi, I’ve never seen anyone with his sort of talent. But he didn’t like training and he just lost it at some point. That’s why I say to people: train hard, live like an athlete, listen to your body and take care of yourself. If you have talent, those are the rules you need to follow to get to the top.”