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Roberto Mancini is no longer the coach of the Saudi Arabia national football team: the Saudi Federation announced this in a note, speaking of a joint agreement which provides for “the end of the contractual relationship”. Mancini left the post after just over a year and at a time when he was not having particularly positive results: in the last four matches of the qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup, Saudi Arabia won only once and is now third in the standings on equal points with Australia and Bahrain in group C.
There had been a lot of talk in Italy about Mancini’s choice to go and coach Saudi Arabia: his resignation, on 13 August 2023, was rather unexpected and had come less than a year before the start of the European Championships, with two matches to to play the following September and a few days after his appointment as manager of the Under 21 and Under 20 national teams. In the days following his resignation, many rumors had circulated about the possibility that Mancini had done so to accept a much more profitable position in Saudi Arabia, with a salary of tens of millions of euros a year: in that period, in fact, some football teams from Saudi Arabia, a country with a very modest footballing tradition, had convinced many important players and coaches to move from Europe by offering them many money.
Mancini, however, had attributed his resignation essentially to a bad relationship with Gabriele Gravina, the president of the Italian football federation, the FIGC, and to the fact that Gravina had decided to appoint a new staff, sending away a group of historical collaborators to whom Mancini did not he wanted to give up.
At the end of August, however, he confirmed that he would indeed go to coach Saudi Arabia.
Before this latest assignment, Mancini had been coach of the Italian national team from May 2018 to August 2023. In 2021 he won the European Championships, but the following year he failed to obtain qualification for the 2022 World Cup.
Mancini was one of the best-known Italian football players of the 1990s, especially with Sampdoria and Lazio, with whom he won the Scudetto in 1991 and 2000 respectively. As a coach he won three Scudetti (all with Inter), four Italian Cups, the English Premier League with Manchester City and a Turkish Cup with Galatasaray.
