Turin, Oct. 9 (LaPresse) – “Milan’s youth sector was a school. Maldini, Baresi, Tassotti, and all those great players taught me the ethics of football, the value of training, the idea of training harder after a win, and respect within a group, starting with schedules. I feel like a son of Milanello, of Milan, the real one.” This is what Roberto De Zerbi said in a long interview with Corriere della Sera.
The Marseille coach then spoke about the importance of taking players on retreat to work on their “fear” of the Velodrome and making them go “running at 5 a.m., risking encounters with wild boars,” to get them out of their bubble: “Probably it was the most beautiful thing I have done, the one closest to me as a person: I listened to and understood the players’ discomfort, which prevented them from performing at home. I did something strong to make them get to know each other.”
“I held three meetings,” he continued, “in one we brought out the negative feelings we had at the Velodrome; the next day each player talked about the values they identify with, we wrote them down and hung them up; then we showed a video about the fans at the Velodrome to make them understand who they were facing.”
“I’m not a moral teacher,” De Zerbi explains further, “but I want to convey who I am: as a man, before being a coach. If you see each other every day, you can’t talk only about 4-4-2.”