Ranieri’s Appointment Will Appease Roma Fans – But Where Is the Project? | OneFootball

So, it will be Claudio Ranieri again. The Tinkerman will be the new Roma manager at least until the end of this season, when he will reportedly take an executive role at the club. Ranieri will be the third manager to hold the reins of the Giallorossi this campaign, after the perplexing axing of Daniele De Rossi and Ivan Juric’s short, disastrous interlude.

He inherits a club in pieces, sitting 12th in the Serie A table and coming from four losses out of the last five league games.

The 73-year-old surely wasn’t the number one choice for the Friedkin Group – Roma’s U.S. management. They came to him after some difficulties to reach an agreement with the Turkish Football Association blocked a potential deal with Vincenzo Montella.

The Friedkins thus decided to resort to a cult figure in Rome, a choice that not a single Giallorossi fan would dare to contest. Claudio Ranieri was born and raised in the Eternal City and has been a Roma fan for a lifetime.

He has already coached Roma twice. He was in charge during the 2009/10 campaign, when he ended second only to José Mourinho’s Inter. Then, he was called at Roma’s deathbed in 2019 when Eusebio Di Francesco’s tenure had reached its end and wrapped the season with a commendable sixth place.

Roma love their children and putting one of them in charge is a safe shortcut to appease the Giallorossi’s restless fan base. The Friedkins seem to have figured that part out as they did exactly the same back in January, when they handed the Roma job to De Rossi to help the supporters recover from the shock of Mourinho’s abrupt sacking (only to reserve for him the same treatment a few months later…)

But that will only work in the short term. Ranieri cannot and is not meant to be a solution for the future. To hand the reins to him means that the Friedkins are blatantly recognizing already in November that this season has gone wrong, and the only goal can be to save what can be saved.

Said differently, there is no real project in sight for Roma. Their fans should resign themselves to endure yet another one of those transition seasons that they have grown accustomed to over the past few years.

As for Sir Claudio, he showed once again to be a true gentleman by accepting to put himself in a situation where he has more to lose than to win. If he does better than Juric (and, honestly, it would be hard to do worse…), he has just saved the day one more time. Nothing new for him and, after all, the Giallorossi supporters already love him.

But, if by any chance he manages to do worse, he risks spoiling, albeit minimally, his relationship with the fans and ending on a low note a career whose final accomplishment could very well have been avoiding relegation in Cagliari only a few months ago.