Saudi Arabia job should finally give Roberto Mancini chance to play part at World Cup

Roberto Mancini had a faraway look in his eyes. It was creeping towards midnight on a humid evening in Sicily and, in the creaky old Stadio Renzo Barbera, he was confronting what he called the “unthinkable.”

Italy, his European champions, had just lost 1-0 to a last-minute, breakaway North Macedonia goal, a play-off shock that meant the Azzurri would not be going to the World Cup.

The “unthinkable”, Mancini, Italy’s manager on that night 17 months ago, added, “just happens sometimes in football”. Yet to happen twice in a row to the most decorated World Cup nation in Europe seemed to concentrate a heavy cargo of misfortune into a very short time.

“Good luck has turned to bad luck,” Mancini said of the steep ups and downs in his time in charge of his native national team. His Italy became European champions in June 2021; they were World Cup flops less than a year later. “The greatest disappointment of my career,” he called the ambush by North Macedonia.

The job Mancini is now ushered into, as manager of Saudi Arabia, comes with the realistic hope that, after his many varied experiences as a manager, he will finally be involved at a World Cup finals.

A major impact at the 2026 event in North and Central America is a clear target for the federation that has lured Mancini, who in his 36 caps for Italy as player never got closer to World Cup action than the substitutes’ bench and who, through 61 games as Italy manager until his resignation earlier this month, could not arrest a pattern of underachievement.

Since winning the tournament for the fourth time in 2006, the Azzurri have suffered two group-stage eliminations and two successive failures to qualify at all.

Saudi Arabia, home of the biggest-spending league in Asia, have