Claudio Ranieri’s Third Roma Debut Will Be a Trip Down Memory Lane

Claudio Ranieri is set for a nostalgia overload on Sunday evening.

Ranieri has returned to the Roma bench for the third time in his storied career, coming to the rescue of the team he loves most in their time of need.

Roma’s season has gone from bad to worse since sacking Daniele De Rossi in mid-September. His replacement, Ivan Juric, lasted all of two months before being handed his own marching orders amid three wins from 12.

Ranieri answered the call to ostensibly come out of retirement and steer the Roman’s rocking ship as the sharks gather.

Much had been expected of Roma pre-season, but the club has since been engulfed in turmoil courtesy of the political mayhem which ensued behind the scenes. That all bled onto the pitch.

After several coaches either rejected the job or showed little interest, Roma called Sir Claudio, as he’s now known after his Premier League title win with Leicester City, to restore order.

“There were only two circumstances in which I might coach again: either at Roma or at Cagliari,” Ranieri professed in his unveiling last week. “But I fully believed that I’d be watching football from the other side.”

Less than six months after leaving Cagliari, when he guided the Sardinian side to Serie A safety, Ranieri is back on the side he knows best: coaching.

Ranieri doesn’t have a cushioned landing, with his first game in Roma colours for nearly six years against Antonio Conte’s league leaders Napoli.

“I am pleased to see Claudio. I have great esteem for him, and there is also friendship,” Conte told reporters this week.

That friendship blossomed when Conte arrived in London to take the Chelsea job in the summer of 2016 and called Ranieri for advice, with the latter of course in charge at Stamford Bridge for four years. Despite the 18-year age gap, the pair even celebrated a Valentine’s Day together with their respective wives in 2022. 

Yet friendship will be put aside for 90 minutes in the first Derby del Sole of the season. Moreover, Ranieri will be standing in familiar terrain on Sunday evening, having been manager of Napoli in the early 1990s.

Ranieri’s work with Cagliari in the late 1980s, where he guided the Rossoblu from Serie C to Serie A in three consecutive seasons, was enough to hand him the reigns to the Napoli job amid the ruins of the Diego Maradona era. 

Maradona was banished from Naples — and the game — after failing a drugs test in March 1991. Napoli’s Scudetto defence had collapsed long before his punishment for cocaine usage, but the final months of the season without the world’s greatest player actually gave the Partenopei some hope for the following season.

Napoli didn’t lose any of their remaining league games without Maradona, winning four of the final eight. Alberto Bigon, the coach behind Napoli’s second Scudetto, was let go at the end of the campaign. Then-club president Corrado Ferlaino decided Ranieri was ready to steer Napoli in the post-Maradona era.

With the club stripped of Maradona’s majesty, Ranieri entrusted the No10 shirt to a young Gianfranco Zola, who formed a brilliant understanding with the vastly underrated Brazilian striker Careca.

Zola had been taken under Maradona’s learning tree the season prior but now was given the chance to play week in and week out in Naples. “The player that I am was due to him [Maradona],” Zola told the BBC in 2020.

Yet replacing the world’s greatest ever player didn’t phase the man from a small Sardinian comune.

“I wasn’t worried [about replacing Maradona], he told Simon Jordan earlier this year. “I always thought about being better and not about the pressure.” Zola, anointed by Maradona himself as his successor, responded to the challenge.

He scored 12 goals in Serie A, just behind Careca’s 15 in what was the Brazilian’s final great season in Europe.

Surprisingly for a Ranieri side, Napoli’s issues weren’t in attack but at the other end. They had the third-best attack in the league but only the eighth-best defensively. Ranieri’s old side, Cagliari, conceded less despite finishing 13th in an 18-team Serie A.

Yet Ranieri’s first season in Naples was a roaring success. Against all odds, he managed to make Napoli a better side than the season before and pulled the club out of the Maradona-shaped abyss. A fourth-placed finish ensured another foray into Europe and the Uefa Cup, the competition they’d won three years previously.

As was common in his career, the second season didn’t go as planned. Like what would happen at Juventus, Roma (first stint) and Leicester further down the road, Ranieri was sacked. At Napoli, he lasted merely two months into the 1992-93 season before the axe fell.

This was despite the splendid 6-1 aggregate victory over Valencia in the Uefa Cup, with a young Daniel Fonseca scoring all six. 

Maradona was contracted to Napoli for another season, and with his ban complete, there was hope the former golden boy would return. FIFA had to intervene in negotiations between Napoli and Sevilla to break the stalemate and allow Maradona to play club football again. 

Despite having Zola, Careca and Fonseca in attack, the defensive issues of the previous season worsened in the next. A 5-1 demolition at home by Milan, in which Marco Van Basten scored a poker in one of his final great games as a player, was followed by a 3-1 away defeat to reigning champions Sampdoria, and Ranieri’s time in Naples was over.

Since then, Ranieri’s record against Napoli has been more defeat than success. He hasn’t registered a win over his old side for 15 years when, coincidentally, his Roma side won 2-1 thanks to a brace from Francesco Totti in October 2009.

The proceeding years have seen no wins from 12, and Ranieri won’t just be hoping he can get one over on his friend Conte but also turn the tide on his own history and secure three much-needed points for the Giallorossi.