Team Focus: Bologna Finding Form with a Settled Formation

When Giovanni Trapattoni was coach of Juventus from the mid `70s to the mid `80s, he'd often make the players with the poorest technique in his squad do training exercises with those who had the best.

Imagine then that you're not yet 20. You've just joined the champions of Italy and Cup Winners' Cup holders from Parma, a club that at the time had never been in Serie A and had only just won promotion to Serie B.

Trap calls you over and tells you that you're about to train one-on-one with Michel Platini, the Ballon d'Or winner that year and the year before too. How would you react? Your heartbeat would quicken. Your legs might suddenly get heavy. Your feet would probably turn to stone. That's what happened to Stefano Pioli.

After a couple of misplaced passes, Platini lost patience. "I can't work with this guy," he said. So Trap stepped in. "He took Platini's place," Pioli recalled, "and started to pass me the ball. At the time I was hurt, but I realised that he was doing me a favour."

Pioli was never really a regular at Juventus. Like Cesare Prandelli, he'd be called up to fill in for someone and do a job here or there.

For the most part, they were on the bench observing. They heard what Trap said, saw how he handled certain players, followed his reactions to certain situations and what changes he'd then make. They learned a lot. So is it any wonder then that Pioli and of course Prandelli would later go onto become better coaches than they were players, better than many of their more illustrious former teammates too?

Eight years Prandelli's junior, Pioli has done what in Italy they call la gavetta: he has worked his way up from the bottom. His appointment at Bologna in October 2011 meant he came full circle. His coaching career had started there 12 years earlier within the club's youth set-up. In the meantime, he'd worked up and down Italy from Verona, as Prandelli once had [though at Chievo not Hellas] to Palermo too.

Admittedly, Pioli's time at Palermo was brief. Three months to be exact, the duration of a pre-season. President Maurizio Zamparini sacked him before the 2011-12 campaign had even begun. Pioli would actually thank him for it. Why? Because had he been dismissed after the Serie A season had already started Lega Calcio rules would have forbidden him from taking another post in the division until the following campaign.

Pioli was therefore still available for hire. And when an offer to replace Pierpaolo Bisoli at Bologna arrived in October that year, he was able to take it and take it he did. At the time, they were bottom of the table. Bologna had mustered a single point from their opening five games and a relegation battle looked on the cards. Fans at the Renato dall'Ara weren't particularly hopeful.

Yet they needn't have worried. Bologna didn't just survive, Pioli led them to a ninth place finish as well, the club's highest for a decade. Had Antonio Conte not guided Juventus to the Scudetto and an unbeaten season, Pioli would perhaps have won the Panchina d'Oro, Italy's Coach of the Year award.

How remarkable that campaign really was becomes clearer when you consider the following: if it had started on the day of Pioli's appointment, Bologna would have concluded it in sixth place, a feat they last achieved in 1971.

While other teams had relaxed and taken their foot off the gas once their top-flight status was assured, Bologna pushed down harder. So strong were they in the second half of last season that their record over that time was the third best in Serie A.

"I used concepts like pride and dignity," Pioli told La Gazzetta dello Sport. "I explained that the great job that we were doing in training every day had to translate into results right until the final day. I said that we had to be remembered for never giving up. So we kept raising the bar: first survival, then 45 points, then 50, then the top half of the table."

You would have thought after the season they'd had that expectations were high ahead of new one. Instead La Gazzetta dello Sport predicted "a year of suffering." So what had happened over the summer to make the pink paper so pessimistic about their chances? Well, Pioli's team had been broken up.

Bologna's captain and symbol Marco Di Vaio, one of the most prolific goalscorers in Serie A history, had got to the age where it was time for one last challenge and one last pay-check. Off he went to Montreal Impact. Gaby Mundigayi, quite literally a pillar of Bologna's midfield over the last four years, went to Inter. Andrea Raggi, the team's centre-back followed the money to Monaco in Ligue 2, while goalkeeper Jean-François Gillet also left for Torino.

The spine was gone. So too was some of the sparkle. Bologna sold Gaston Ramirez to Southampton on transfer deadline day while another player of real promise, Ishak Belfodil, hailed rather prematurely as the next Karim Benzema because of his Algerian origins and his past at Lyon, was allowed to leave too. He moved an hour or so up the road to Parma where he has been one of the revelations of this season in Serie A.

Pioli had to pick up the pieces and start more or less from scratch. Bologna struggled as expected at the beginning of the season. Just how much though was still something of a surprise. Nine defeats from their opening 15 games was of great concern. Goal difference was all that separated them from bottom of the table Pescara in the last week of November.

If Bologna were to get out of trouble, according to Pioli, they had to "care obsessively about the details." The little things would be the difference between them and the other teams at the bottom.

Pioli likes stats. "They help me," he told Il Corriere dello Sport, "but you have to be careful with them. They're used to corroborate judgements made on the basis of sensations that my staff and I have had together. Stats help you form a better opinion.

"For example, at the end of one game I made a judgment on Saphir Taider [Bologna's holding midfielder]. In my own opinion and that of my staff, he'd lost the ball too much. He's a player who, because of his dynamism, can suffer a deficit in lucidity. The stats surprised us. Out of 75 balls he had lost only nine, stats indicative of a great performance in his position."

One of the balls Taider lost, however, was close to his own penalty area and, as such, it had weighed on Pioli's mind more than the others he'd recovered, clouding his judgment of the player's performance as whole. It does bring up an important point, though. Each ball lost has a value of its own. One can be more costly than another depending on where it takes place on the pitch and what it leads too. That's why stats should never be used in isolation but as part of a wider value judgment.

Other statistics interested Pioli. Bologna were having difficulty building their play. Holding onto the ball was a problem. Their possession stats have long been in the bottom half of the table. They've averaged 47.5% this season. More of an issue, however, was a lack of refinement in their passing. Only Genoa (58.3%) and Udinese (61.06%) have a worse completion rate in the final third than Bologna (61.09%). Even with a playmaker like Alessandro Diamanti still at the club, who is their assist leader with six this season, they have missed Ramirez's incisiveness from this perspective.  

Rather than play a short or a long passing game [Bologna rank 18th and 19th in Serie A respectively in these areas] they instead focus on getting crosses into the box, averaging 25 per game [the fifth most in Serie A], with most in open play coming from left-back Archimede Morleo (106). Why wouldn't you when you have one of the best headers of a ball in Italy, Alberto Gilardino as your striker?

After a long process of finding out what his best system is, one that has had Pioli experiment with six different formations so far this season, he has finally settled on 4-2-3-1, which allows him to play Panagiotis Kone, Diamanti, Manolo Gabbiadini and Gilardino all at the same time, a heady Molotov cocktail of a forward line. Since its adoption in mid-December, Bologna have really turn things around.

They beat Napoli 3-2 away from home and then dumped them out the Coppa Italia at San Paolo three days later. Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis was impressed. Aware that he might have to find a new coach this summer should Walter Mazzarri go through with his wish to take a sabbatical once his contract expires at the end of this season, Pioli figures high in his estimations. "He's a coach I like a lot," De Laurentiis said.

It seems he'll have to join a queue. Pioli has been spoken about as a possible replacement for Andrea Stramaccioni at Inter should he be so unfortunate as to lose his job. The 1-0 defeat they suffered to Bologna at San Siro on Sunday is what started the talk. Roma are also said to be considering him, as they also reportedly had done at the end of last season, to take over from interim boss Aurelio Andreazzoli in the summer.

Pioli's stock continues to rise, as do Bologna. Sunday's win was their third in a row. From second bottom, they are now 12th and appear likely to finish this season as strongly as they did the last. Considering the resources available to him, Pioli has done a remarkable job. The offer of a bigger one is surely only a matter of time.