For Claudio Ranieri, the connection was there from the beginning, ever since he kicked a ball around the oratorio of the Basilica of San Saba in the centre of Rome, where he went to church every Sunday and first began to love the game of his life. Even then, the order of things was important. “First, we go to mass,” he says. “After, we play. Play before mass?” He wags his finger, as if imitating a disappointed parent. “No, you cannot.”
Almost 70 years later, faith and football still intertwine for Ranieri, even as his Roma side face Inter Milan at the San Siro on Sunday in a match that could tug the title away from Inter and turbo-charge Roma’s unexpected push for the Champions League. Ranieri came out of retirement for his boyhood club in November, taking one last job with the team he still calls his own. Under him, Roma have not lost in Serie A since December. On points taken since then, Roma sit top of the table.
Yet Ranieri’s focus has also been elsewhere, as he joined the tens of thousands filing into St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican on Thursday to pay his respects to the late Pope Francis, along with a handful of Roma’s Italian and Argentinian players. Fixtures have been moved and media commitments cancelled.
“It was an emotional time,” Ranieri says. “He was a fantastic man. I met him twice before and every time . . . very emotional for me. The Pope is the Pope. It’s [religion] inside me, I try to live with this point of view. I pray, sometimes before sleeping, but it’s not ‘boom-boom’, like a routine. I think it’s important to feel it, that connection with somebody above you.”
It is a connection Ranieri shares with his city too, built on more than just three spells as coach at Roma, the club where he also started out as a player in 1973. “The connection is total,” Ranieri says. “Roman people, we love. Every person loves their city but here we really love. The fans are very anxious, very happy, very scaramantico — superstitious — it is something intense for us.”
Ranieri’s father was a butcher in Rome and used to let his son ride his motorino (moped) around the city, delivering meat to customers. “I knew all the roads then,” Ranieri says. “Now I forget them, maybe it’s my age.”
He is 73 now, sitting inside Roma’s training ground in Trigoria, still with those spectacles and that mischievous sense of humour which made Ranieri, at Chelsea and then Leicester City, one of the most-loved managers in the Premier League. He retired at the end of last season after keeping Cagliari in Serie A, a fairytale in itself given Ranieri also led them from Italy’s third tier to first, 34 years previously.
“It was the perfect ending,” Ranieri says. “I was finished but so many teams ask me last summer, ‘come back, come back’ and slowly, slowly I said, ‘OK only if Cagliari or Roma call me’. I hoped it would be impossible and Cagliari and Roma would go well and they don’t need my service. But in the end, Roma asked me and I can’t say no.”
Ranieri was summoned to London, where he still owns a house in Parsons Green, and met Roma’s American chairman Dan Friedkin, agreeing to take charge until the end of the season. In theory, he will then take up an advisory role, which includes helping to find his successor, although many Roma fans would like Ranieri to postpone retirement again. “No, no, no,” Ranieri says. “I am giving my coaching card back. This time, I say stop.”
Ranieri’s appointment was certainly aimed at appeasing the fans, after Roma sacked two coaches in three months and sat four points above the relegation zone after 12 games played. Yet the biggest lift has been the results since Ranieri’s return, with the team winning eight of their past ten in the league and unbeaten since December 15.
Roma believe they can qualify for the Champions League. “There was a big reaction from the players,” Ranieri says. “I am a very lucky man because I link very well with the players. They understood the bad situation and they react. Europa League, Champions League, we are very close, but there are so many teams in contention. We will try. We fight to the end.”
This has always been Ranieri’s skill, the blending of tactical organisation with a personal touch, which allows his players to breathe. “If I have to be strong I am strong. If I have to laugh, I laugh. Have I changed? Yes, because society has changed,” he says. “I joke with the players that I am always watching them on TikTok and Instagram but I don’t have nothing eh? They arrive and ‘boom-boom-boom’ they are looking at all this but I have never tried it. I don’t care. I want to be free.
“But I leave the players alone. For me it is important that when we have lunch together or we are on the pitch, we are strong. When we go outside, it is your life. The important thing is you play well, you train well. But I am not oppressive. There are some rules, of course. I always say I am a democratic man, until they don’t do what I want.”
Ranieri has that ruthless side to him too, despite his chirpy demeanour in the media. In Rome, they remember how he substituted Francesco Totti and Daniele De Rossi — two club legends — at half-time of a Roma-Lazio derby in 2010. “That is what I felt eh? If I feel something I do it. Do I worry about people? No, no, no. I decide. I know football,” he says. “Everybody knows Claudio when he comes in for press conferences, blah blah, but not in the dressing-room. One thing is Claudio in the dressing-room. Another thing is Claudio in the media.”
It will be ten years this summer since Ranieri’s arrival at Leicester, when he replaced Nigel Pearson after the team had just finished 14th in the Premier League. That they won the title a year later seems even more astonishing now, given Manchester City and Liverpool have dominated the league since.
“I had very good players in exactly the right moment,” Ranieri says. “It was a great story, amazing, and it could happen again, but maybe once in 40, 50 years. I remember the chairman told me, ‘40 points Claudio, please, 40 points’ and I was telling the players ‘40 points, 40 points’. When we achieved 40 points, it was ‘OK try Europe now, Europe,’ and then after Europe, ‘OK, go Champions League! Champions League!’ and when we had Champions League I said, ‘OK, it’s this year or never more. Come on now. Come on. We can do it.’ ”
The difficulty, he says, was keeping the players grounded: “It was a nightmare. I remember in December, [Riyad] Mahrez asked me, ‘Coach what can we do this season?’ and we were laughing about it and I said, ‘I don’t know!’ Mahrez looked straight at me and he said, ‘No, you know. I know you know.’ ”
Ranieri can still see the piles of good luck presents and cartolinas — postcards — sent to his door, “From Brazil, America, Canada, Japan, China, everywhere” and he still holds dear an exchange he had with a group of Indian supporters, who said Leicester’s success had helped them feel part of the community.
“They said, ‘Thank you Claudio because you have linked our community with the English community’. They said, ‘Now we go to the stadium all together’ and that I think was the best gift I received in football,” Ranieri says. “All the presents are not important. It is the words.”
Jamie Vardy was instrumental too, the 38-year-old striker, who scored 24 goals that season and announced on this week he will leave Leicester in the summer. “Vardy was un’icona, an icon of Leicester,” Ranieri says. “He started from a very small team and he played for England. Vardy, [N’Golo] Kanté, Mahrez . . . unbelievable players. People say it was a problem, the Red Bulls [the energy drink Vardy enjoys] — which problem? When he wants one Red Bull, why I have to say to him, ‘Pwahh! Stop!’ No. Every player has his personality. I wasn’t a manager who says, ‘Eh, this is the way’. You have to understand the personalities.
“I remember one match it was my birthday and the chairman came into the dressing-room half an hour before the game with a big cake singing [Ranieri sings] ‘Happy birthday to you . . .’ I said, ‘My god, if in Italy you do something like this, they could never understand!’ But I say thank you, the players sing happy birthday and OK, now we play.”
Ranieri admits to feeling a tinge of “sadness” still about the way it ended at Leicester, after the club sacked him the following season, nine months after they were crowned champions. Ranieri has been back only twice in a personal capacity, around the death of Leicester chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha in 2018, but “otherwise never more”. Has he perhaps spoken to Vardy since his announcement? “No, no, nobody,” Ranieri says. “I don’t like to break the balls of my players.”
Even dilly-ding, dilly-dong, the slogan of that remarkable season, was left at Leicester. “Dilly-ding dilly-dong, you know I first said it with my daughter — ‘come on, dilly-ding dilly-dong, wake up!’ And then I used it on my Cagliari players in 1988, to wake them up in training,” Ranieri says. “One year, I even bought all the players bells for Christmas. But after Leicester, it never again come in my mind.”
Yet the Tinkerman nickname from his time at Chelsea has always stuck with Ranieri, who is still one of the game’s great pragmatists at a time when purists, dedicated to one system and one idea, have been very much in vogue.
“I look at everything, all the statistics, blah blah blah, but after there is the human side. Players are humans, not robots,” he says. “Inside one match, there are so many matches, you have to be able to change. If you are scientific and something goes wrong, [clicks his teeth], you cannot adapt.
“Look, in my first month of [Roman] Abramovich at Chelsea, he told me, ‘What do you want? I can buy it’. I told him it’s not possible, the Premier League had already started. Abramovich wanted Totti but I told him, ‘Roma doesn’t sell Totti in two days’. I said, ‘Totti, no chance’. But can you imagine? During those years we changed everything. There was a reason I was The Tinkerman. I changed because new players arrived and I had to use [them].
“I played with all the systems, 4-4-2, 3-5-2, 4-3-3. The winner is not the system or the coach, the winners are the players. There are coaches who have their system but I am not this kind of coach.
“I changed the system at Leicester. They played 3-5-2 and I played 4-4-1-1 with [Shinji] Okazaki behind and Mahrez on the right. [Marc] Albrighton was used to playing right wing and I put him on the left. It was good. The Tinkerman is good.”
The game will certainly miss Ranieri if he is to end in Rome where he began, after a career spanning six decades and more than 1,500 matches, in which he has coached 18 different clubs, in five different countries.
“I am a man of football,” he says. “There are some managers that when they coach the big teams, they don’t want to go to a normal team again. They wait, wait, wait. I don’t wait. I love my job. I have been in Serie B, in France with Monaco, in Greece, with Watford, Leicester. It’s not important for me.
“I understand maybe these managers have this pedigree and maybe they have good agents but I have only friends. In my career, only friends. So with the big clubs, I never had this chance, but it’s not important for me. I won the best title in the world. The best title ever.”
Inter Milan v Roma
Serie A, San Siro
Sunday, 2pm
TV Discovery+/TNT Sports 8
