How Italiano stopped Fiorentina’s suffering and brought joyous disbelief

F iorentina’s players have been waiting two months for their manager to buy them dinner. Vincenzo Italiano promised to take them out as a thank you for their win away at Inter at the start of April. He had never before tasted victory at San Siro in his 30 combined years playing and coaching in Italy.

The only problem was finding a free evening. Four days later, Fiorentina faced Cremonese in the first leg of their Coppa Italia semi-final. The following week, they were off on a Europa Conference League trip to Poznan. Sandwiched between was another Serie A game. If you will insist on going to the final of every cup you enter, you won’t get a lot of breaks.

“I don’t want to hear anyone say that I’m not a man of my word, or that I’m a tight-ass,” a laughing Italiano said on Thursday. “There simply has not been a free night. I promised this to the lads, and I repeated it a few days ago; the boss needs to pay his debt.”

Even the timing of this conversation told a story. Italiano was speaking at the media day for Fiorentina’s Conference League final against West Ham but sometimes found himself discussing his team’s Serie A season-ender against Sassuolo the following day. As he reminded his audience, the Hammers were off at a training camp in the Algarve.

Wednesday’s final will be the 60th game of Fiorentina’s season – a club record, and three more than their opponents have played. The exhaustion is real but so is a sense of joyous disbelief. Before Italiano’s appointment in the summer of 2021, the Viola had spent a grim season battling relegation.

As he recalls it, all anyone at the club wanted was “to stop suffering, to stop being anonymous, to be respected and to have an identity”. He delivered immediately, helping