The last time of Ranieri, the man of providence

And now? Under what umbrella will the Roma fans take shelter? Who will protect their true dreams – to quote maestro Venditti – from everyday life? There are no more patron saints. Finished (unless you want to dare the undareable, that is, dial Francesco Totti's number). José Mourinho, Daniele De Rossi, Claudio Ranieri: different stories, profiles, styles, even very different. But a common denominator: professors of Romanism. The first – distant in geographical origins, close in elective affinities – quickly became one out of opportunism. Brilliant was he who, at the moment of his painful farewell, said with lucidity: “José did not coach Roma, but the Romanists”. The other two – one with the impetuous energy of the waves when they swallow the beach (and in fact the establishments of his Ostia have all shrunk); the other with the disenchanted look and the quiet strength of someone who grew up on quinto quarto and Testaccio anecdotes (actually born and raised in nearby San Saba) –, I am by birth and profession of faith. Made, shown, practiced. For years, decades, decades. Here and elsewhere. As players (more Daniele than Claudio) and coaches (more Claudio than Daniele). Gone and returned. Incapable of saying no. Why? Very simple. “If Roma calls, I have to say yes,” Ranieri said a few months ago , when the Friedkins called him up to help lift a team that seemed to have definitively gone to the mat, knocked out by the deadly blows of the Souloukou-Juric duo, the friendly fire that would have accompanied the Magica to Serie B, for sure, had it not been for the intervention of the man of providence, which is a much nobler epithet than the fixer , a qualification with which our man has been contracted several times, especially in the final part of his very long career as a coach – thirty-four years have passed since his debut in Serie A, can you imagine?

And speaking of nicknames (a Roman specialty), those that have accompanied him, in some cases labeled him, around here, have never done him any particular justice: from the “pecione principe” when he was kicking his first kicks at the oratory, to the “fettina” with which we cruelly reminded him of his family origins (an even more ruthless alternative, “macellaretto”), up to the terrible “sor Claudio” of these last few months, a sort of baronet 'de noantri. But nicknames usually work, and in Ranieri's case they tell of a trajectory - of a man, a footballer and a coach - inspired by the (very successful) attempt to emancipate himself from his working-class origins (after all, he has lived for years in an elegant apartment on Viale Bruno Buozzi, in the very bourgeois Parioli), without ever abandoning his values ​​- first and foremost honesty and respect - which have guided him, wherever he was - in the provinces or in a metropolis - and whatever the objective - promotion, safety, European placement, championship - of the team entrusted to him, often with the pressing need to fix it, precisely.

This time around – he fell for it three times, 2009 with Sensi, 2019 with Pallotta and 2024 with the Friedkins, always for love – it seemed too arduous an undertaking even for his skills as a quality craftsman. It was a ramshackle team, Roma. It ended in one of those cursed seasons in which it quickly gives in to self-harm , giving credence to the definition chosen for it by Paolo Conti, goalkeeper in the second half of the Seventies, years of passions and frustrations: “Phenomenon of spontaneous combustion”. Even his fans, who with Mou had remembered that other unmissable maxim of captain Di Bartolomei – “There are football fans, then there are the Roma fans” – had shown worrying signs of disaffection, brought to exhaustion in the space of a few months by the sackings, first of Mourinho then of De Rossi, and then by the mortifying experience with Juric , which no Roma fan deserved to live through.

With his heart broken, the Roma player has once again entrusted himself to Claudio Ranieri, who is also capable of fixing his feelings. “One of us,” they shouted at him the other night as he was doing a lap of the pitch, with his nephews as squires and a scarf around his neck that read the slogan that every fan would like to be, again, a programmatic commitment: “Until death.” No, not this time. A fourth, no. Enough. Even if the role of senior advisor generates, at the moment, more doubts than certainties, there is no question of continuing. “One more, the last one,” Ryan Friedkin supposedly assured him the other day, in a last-ditch attempt to keep him chained to the bench. But at almost 74, he will turn 74 on October 20 – like Rimbaud, Borzov, but also Kamala Harris and Mara Venier –, he has decided to move on to a role that is, we don’t know if better, but certainly more serene. From September, probably, in the middle of the afternoon we will see him again from time to time in Vicolo della Palombella, a stone's throw from the Pantheon, in front of the door of Gianturco, the Primary School attended by little Dorotea, the granddaughter who on Sunday evening managed to melt the emotion of grandfather Claudio in front of the Capitoline she-wolf that he had received as a gift from the team, with a brilliant and hilarious "we have another pet now".

“From Testaccio to Rome, I made my childhood dream come true”, the synthesis of a life. Inside, there have been many things. Beautiful, unforgettable, but also tiring. There was a before and after Leicester, one of the greatest feats in the history of football (world cup, not just English). He has taken more satisfaction abroad. In Italy, he deserved to lift an important trophy, more than the Coppa Italia and the Supercoppa won with Fiorentina thirty years ago. But probably, the two experiences in Cagliari, at the beginning and end of his career (from C to A from 1988 to 1990; promotion from B and salvation from 2022 to 2024), have given him much more than a title. Tomorrow he will sit on the bench for the last time, the 501st in Serie A, almost thirty-five years after the first. It was September 9, 1990, Inter strolled in Cagliari with a hat-trick by Klinsmann, scored in 17 minutes. It seemed like a season marked, and instead in the end that team was saved. They called it the Cagliari of the indomitable. For everyone, not for him, more father than tamer. As a Roma fan said, "thank you because like a father to his children, you didn't ask us to be perfect". You were great, Claudio.

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