For the most nostalgic Italian fans, remembering the so-called “coach-eating presidents” is a way of celebrating a football era in which they/we had the richest and most competitive league in the world. In the provinces, more than at the big clubs, those who ran Serie A clubs — but also Serie B clubs — tended to give little time and therefore little trust to whoever sat on the bench. Dismissal was a tool used frequently, often excessively. Well, the scenario has changed but the trend has remained the same: our country is one of those in which coaches are changed at a fast, very fast, truly too too fast pace. This is explained by the latest report by the CIES Football Observatory, which compared all the most important leagues in the world — first and second divisions — and found that Serie A and Serie B clubs guarantee very little room for work to their own coaches. Especially when compared with the other major European leagues.
Let us start with the numbers: if we look at Serie A, as many as 75% of the coaches currently in charge were appointed less than a year ago; in the Premier League and La Liga this same share falls to 40%, in Ligue 1 to 50%, in the Bundesliga to 55.6%. In Serie B, however, it rises to 90%. And again: Serie A is the only one of the five top leagues to have ZERO coaches who have been in charge for more than two years, exactly like the Peruvian Liga 1, Costa Rica’s LIGA FPD, the Cypriot 1. Division and the UAE Premier League of the United Arab Emirates. Finally, but not in order of importance: the average length of a spell in Serie A, for a coach, is 10.9 months: it is the lowest of all in the five top leagues, which stand at completely different values (29.1 months in La Liga, 27.8 in the Premier League, 23.3 in the Bundesliga and 17.1 in Ligue 1).
In short, it can be said: these are clear, eloquent, entirely incontrovertible statistics. The data, in brief, show that in Serie A it is extremely difficult to think of a truly long-term project, and it does not matter whether we are talking about small, medium-sized or big clubs: coach turnover practically never stops, involves every team and shows how much hard, pure results, for Italian directors, matter far more than working with a view beyond the present.
Of course, this analysis was also carried out at a particular moment, namely at the end of a long and glittering adventure such as Gasperini’s at Atalanta (which lasted nine years). But the case of Atalanta and the Piedmontese coach must, in fact, be considered an isolated one: before him, the last to last more than eight seasons had been Ancelotti at Milan (2001 –> 2009). In the last 15 years, moreover, only Allegri at Juve (the first cycle, the one that lasted from 2014 to 2019) and Pioli at Milan (2020 –> 2025) managed to coach the same club for five seasons. It is a serious problem, because coaches — and they themselves say it, openly confess it — need time, sometimes even an entire season of “settling in”, in order to have a real impact on their teams. On their players. And instead directors and clubs and fans are in a hurry, they want results and they want them quickly, practically immediately, otherwise the dismissal is triggered and a new owner of the bench arrives. Not exactly the best possible condition/culture for anyone who would like to build something that goes beyond the short term.