Johnny Phillips: That’s amore! The Italian game is on the rise again

The top of Serie A appears wrapped up with Luciano Spalletti set to deliver a first scudetto to Napoli since the Diego Maradona era, more than 30 years ago.

Behind top spot a fascinating race for Champions League football is developing with five clubs battling it out for three places. The two Milan clubs won their Champions League Round of 16 first leg ties against Spurs and Porto, and on Thursday night the two Rome clubs progressed to the next round of the Europa League and Europa Conference.

Atalanta are not in European competition this season, enabling them to challenge in Serie A and they currently sit sixth. Were it not for a 15-point deduction, Juventus would be third in the table in among the European challengers too.

That penalty was imposed by the Italian Football Federation following a probe into the Turin club’s transfer dealings, and spending is a topic that still dominates conversation. Earlier this season Juventus, Milan, Inter and Roma were all sanctioned by Uefa for Financial Fair Play breaches.

Lazio are conspicuous by their absence from that list. For the last three seasons they have finished above arch-rivals Roma, something which has irked current Roma head coach Jose Mourinho. When this season began Mourinho made disparaging remarks about Lazio’s summer spending to unsettle Maurizio Sarri’s side, but I Biancocelesti – The White and Sky Blues – have quietly gone about their business and lie just two points behind their city rivals.

Lazio’s story is one of responsible growth and accountability. It has been a long journey. Lazio in the 1990s was a team of world class players and unrestrained ambition. After Paul Gascoigne made his high profile move to the club from Spurs, it was purchased by Sergio Cragnotti and the decade ended with the famous 1999/2000 title win under Sven Goran Eriksson. The Swede had the best squad in the club’s history to work with: Marcelo Salas, Sinisa Mihajlovic, Alessandro Nesta, Roberto Mancini, Pavel Nedved, Attilio Lombardo, Juan Sebastian Veron, Diego Simeone, Fabrizio Ravanelli and many more.

But the spending caught up with Cragnotti. In 2002, his food company, Cirio, went bankrupt and two years later the club was sold to Claudio Lotito who inherited debts calculated as high as £500million in some quarters.

A year on from Lotito’s arrival the club signed Albanian forward Igli Tare from Bologna. In 2008, as he was approaching his 35th birthday, Tare went to see Lotito to negotiate a one-year contract extension. Instead, the owner asked him how he thought the team should be approaching the forthcoming 2008/09 season and offered him the job of sporting director. Tare had impressed Lotito with his professional work ethic and was clearly a student of the game, having spent his career playing under top coaches in Italy and Germany. Fifteen years on from the shock appointment the two men are still working together. At the end of 2017 a remarkable financial turnaround was complete when the club posted £42m half-year profits.

It has not been an easy journey, particularly given the unchecked spending elsewhere in Serie A, but Tare has helped foster a family atmosphere within the club’s Formello training base, 20 miles north of Rome. It is one of the reasons they have been able to hold on to Italy’s European Championship winning striker and four-time Capocannonierie, Ciro Immobile, for the last seven years.

One of Tare’s earliest successes was persuading his former Kaiserslautern team-mate Miroslav Klose, Germany’s all-time leading scorer, to sign for Lazio in 2011 and remain for five seasons.

Lucas Leiva was shrewdly picked up from Liverpool after 10 years at Anfield, making his debut in the 2017 Italian Super Cup win over Juventus and going on to help Lazio win the Coppa Italia the following season. He won Player of the Year in three of his five seasons with Lazio.

Tare was recently linked with the sporting director’s role at Tottenham Hotspur and he has built contacts over many years at some of England and Germany’s biggest clubs as he looks to maintain an edge in recruitment.

In the 2019/20 season it appeared all Lotita and Tare’s work was coming off, under the brilliant management of Simone Inzaghi. A 21-match unbeaten run saw Lazio surge to the top of Serie A, with gates rising upwards of 60,000 and the ultras of the Curva Nord in the Olympic Stadium proudly producing their impressive Tifo displays.

And then Covid-19 hit, with the northern province of Bergamo making global headlines as the pandemic spread. When football returned the impetus of the title charge had gone and Lazio won only five of their remaining 12 matches, finishing fourth in Serie A.

Now, under Sarri, Lazio are in contention for a Champions League place and the Derby della Capitale is on the horizon next month. Supporters often demand the club spends more money but it is a source of pride on the Curva Nord that, despite the vastly superior budget Mourinho is operating with at Roma, it is Lazio who have been the city’s number one club in recent seasons.

The returning winger Felipe Anderson, who left for £36m to West Ham in 2018 and was tempted back in a cut-price deal, has been starring for the side again, providing the ammunition for Immobile.

With just six games remaining in Serie A there will be more twists and turns to come but the work of Lotito and Tare in stabilising a once bankrupt club is admirable, whatever the outcome at the end of the season.