Vittorio Pozzo

Vittorio Pozzo was one of the all-time great football managers, and was unquestionably one of the most successful international coaches. Between 1912-48 he had three spells as manager of the Italian national team, covering a 20-year period, and in that time he led them to two FIFA World Cup and one Olympic triumph.

As a youngster, Pozzo studied in France, Switzerland and England (Manchester) in the early part of the 20th century and, as his love of football continued, he embarked on a playing career starting at Grasshopper Club of Zurich, before returning to Italy in 1906 and joining Torino. He became a player/coach at Torino in 1911, and when Italy entered a team for the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, Pozzo offered to coach the team. Despite losing their opening match to Finland, it heralded the arrival of Italy on the international football stage. After the Stockholm Games, Pozzo returned to Torino, where he stayed until 1922. At the same time that he coached Torino, he dovetailed his footballing duties with that as a manager with the Pirelli company. From Torino, Pozzo moved to AC Milan, and in 1924 briefly took charge of the national team for the Olympic Games that year. He was appointed coach to the national team for a third time in 1928, and was offered the job on a full-time basis the following year when he was given the free reign to run the team as he thought fit, and he set about building the first great Italian team. He was one of the architects of the Italian championship reform that led to the birth of Serie A, also in 1929.

Italy did not compete in the first World Cup in 1930, but Pozzo was developing formations and tactics all the time that would reap their rewards in years to come. His ideas were way ahead of their time, and they formed the basis of many systems that would be seen across the football spectrum for many years. Pozzo was able to put his new theory to the test on home soil at the 1934 World Cup. In the semi-final Italy overcame Hugo Meisl’s Austrian “wunderteam” to reach the final where they came from behind with two late goals to beat Czechoslovakia 2-1. With the likes of Giuseppe Meazza and Angelo Schiavio in their team, Italy went on to dominate world football throughout the 1930s. They won the Central European International Cup in 1930 and 1935 and then captured the Olympic title at Berlin in 1936, when they again beat the powerful Austrians. By the time the 1938 World Cup came around, Italy’s dominance was being challenged by Hungary, and the two countries met in the final, but it was Pozzo who led his team to a memorable 4-2 victory in Paris. This triumph, however, was to be the start of a decline in Italian international football.

Pozzo remained in charge until resigning following a 5-3 quarter-final defeat by Denmark at the 1948 Olympic Games in England. Following the Superga plane crash that wiped out the Torino team in 1949, Pozzo had the difficult task of identifying the bodies of those killed. This disaster contributed further towards Italy’s decline on the world football stage.

After ending his managerial career, Pozzo returned to his early career as a journalist when he joined La Stampa and Il Calcio Illustrato as a sports columnist. He wrote his memoirs in a book entitled Quarant’anni di calcio italiano, published on the eve of the Roma Olympics.

Pozzo died on Sunday 21 December 1968. Sadly he was not remembered with a minute’s silence at stadiums around the country the following Sunday, not even at the Municipal Stadium, Torino. In the 1970s, however, a sports centre in Milano-Niguarda, and the Boscoreale stadium near Napoli were both named in his honour, as was the Lamarmora-Pozzo stadium at Biella in 2008. On the 50th anniversary of his death in 2018, an Italian postage stamp was released in his honour.

During his time in charge of the national team, Pozzo enjoyed 65 wins and 17 draws in 97 matches in charge of the National A team, including 30 consecutive matches unbeaten between 1935-39, a record still standing at the end of 2019. Perhaps more remarkably, going into the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Pozzo remains the only man to lead a country to two World Cup successes.