AS Roma manager Daniele De Rossi, Brighton boss Roberto De Zerbi face off as anything but foes

AS Roma will host Brighton on Thursday for the first leg of Europa League’s round of 16 (12:45 p.m. ET on Paramount+) and at the same time two Italian managers will meet for the first time on the bench. The new Giallorossi coach Daniele De Rossi, who replaced Jose Mourinho last January, will face Roberto De Zerbi, one of the most talented managers in European soccer. The two have a lot in common on the field but are also linked by a special relationship off of it. 

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De Rossi just started his coaching career after replacing the Special One on the Roma bench, the club where he became a legend as a player. After becoming an assistant coach for the Italian national team alongside Roberto Mancini during Euro 2020, which Italy won, De Rossi had his first coaching spell at SPAL in the Italian Serie B, where he only won three games before being sacked after 17 games in charge. At the end of the 2022-23 season, the Italian team was relegated to the third division despite the sacking of De Rossi. 

The Roma legend waited for another chance which only arrived in January when Roma decided to sack Mourinho and appoint the former captain as manager until the end of the current season. Despite the little experience, his impact has been phenomenal up to now, and there are increasing possibilities to see him stay long term. Under De Rossi, Roma won six out of seven Serie A games, only losing to leaders Inter, where the Giallorossi showed they can compete with the best teams. Roma also knocked out Feyenoord in the Europa League playoff round and demonstrated to be one of the candidates to win it all as the side aims to bounce back from the final defeat to Sevilla in 2022-23.

De Zerbi, on the other hand, is one of the most talented coaches around Europe and he’s impressing once again this season, despite the multiple injuries that affected his roster. The Italian coach after managing Foggia, Benevento, Sassuolo and Shakhtar decided to join Brighton in 2022, as Chelsea appointed Graham Potter after six matchdays of the 2022-23 season. De Zerbi quickly installed his ideas of football in the team, which became one of the most exciting to watch and also qualified for Europa League for the first time after finishing sixth in the Premier League.

De Zerbi’s path is more advanced compared to the one of De Rossi, who just started his coaching career, but we can see some things in common in their ideas of football. De Rossi and De Zerbi both like to keep the control of the ball and rely on ball possession as one of the main principles of their tactical ideas. De Rossi said himself that he studied and wanted to take De Zerbi as a reference for his ideas of the game. The current Brighton coach gave a lecture at the coaching class where De Rossi studied before signing for AS Roma on how to build action from the goalkeeper with all the players involved in the game, starting from the defenders. On top of that, as the Roma coach revealed after the draw, their two daughters watch the Roma games together in London. 

“I respect De Zerbi, for me he was like an open book. He helped me, made his books and his data available to me and advised me. Our daughters are friends. They meet at the Roma clubs in London to watch the matches,” De Rossi said recently. 

“I imagine that his daughter won’t have the Roma scarf when we meet. This thing brought us together even more. I think he is a genius. Like it or not, he brought something new. You can’t copy a genius, but I think he changed something, many want to imitate him.”

For sure, De Zerbi has attracted the interest of many European clubs for the future, and rumors suggest that he’s on the lists of clubs like Liverpool, FC Barcelona and Bayern Munich among others. De Rossi is definitely looking at him as a role model, but his dream is to stay at Roma as long as possible. If he continues in this way, there are big chances that his dream can at least live for another season as these two continue to deliver results.