Interview
Fabio Cannavaro

Making history and leaving a lasting legacy are objectives every footballer wants to achieve. As a player, Fabio Cannavaro did exactly that, and now, as a coach, he is on his way to doing it again.

While the image of captain Cannavaro lifting the FIFA World Cup in 2006 is etched in the memory of every Italian football fan, he is also held in high esteem in the rest of the world following a remarkable career as a commanding central defender; indeed, the first – and so far only – defender to be named FIFA World Player of the Year (also in 2006).

Taking up coaching after his playing career, Cannavaro has been active on the sidelines in Asia for the last seven years. He is currently head coach of Chinese Super League side Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao FC, whom he guided to the 2018/2019 league title, adding to the Chinese Super Cup trophy his team won a year earlier.

We spoke to the charismatic FIFA Legend to learn about the challenges of being a coach in a foreign country and what inspired him to earn his coaching badges in the first place.

Having so far spent your coaching career in Asia, has it been difficult to coach in countries and cultures so different from your own, and so different from each other?

I was lucky to finish my career in an Arab country. When I announced I was leaving Juventus, the first team to call me was in Dubai and I didn’t think twice because I saw it as an opportunity to play and be able to learn English. After a year, when I was getting too many aches and pains, I decided to stop and the club chairman told me the position of sporting director was open. In my three years in that role, I was able to get all the coaching licences, and that’s how I made the switch from player to assistant.

For me, it was essential to try and understand the dynamics that seemed strange to me because I was so used to European football. Starting with food, the approach to competition, the pre-season training camp. Everything was totally different. Playing in front of a thousand people, coaching at ten o’clock at night... it was a good experience and enriched me personally.

Marcello Lippi decided to give me this opportunity to be the first-team coach for Guangzhou, one of the top clubs in Asia. Initially, it was different because I had switched from Arab culture to Chinese culture.

After a brief stint in Saudi Arabia, I decided to go back to China, to the second division. I was already familiar with Chinese habits, with the dynamics, with the way I had to deal with the players. I’ve now been in China for five years.

The most difficult thing at the beginning was trying to teach certain players how to be 360° professionals. Mister Lippi had won so much here, but I had a major challenge, because this was a club that didn’t have the right structure to match its stature.

I had seen with Tianjin that it was essential to have a sports centre, so I convinced my boss in Guangzhou to build the new sports centre. Thanks to my experience in China, it enabled me to help this club to grow.

When it comes to mapping out plans for an entire season, including preseason, transfers and training, what level of detail you go into in your duties as a coach and what do you delegate to your technical staff and sporting director?

As a coach, I like to do everything myself. I select the pre-season camp. I choose the hotels. I decide everything that concerns my team. I don’t think of myself as just a coach but, through my experience here in China, as something more. In England, they call it a “manager”. Obviously I have to report to a sports director, but I’m the one who makes the decisions. In the end, if things go badly, I’m the one who takes responsibility.

It’s a personality thing: I don’t mind admitting that I go onto the pitch and tell the groundsmen how to cut the grass. When we built the sports centre, I took care of every little detail, as if it were my own home. I tell the staff how to wash the equipment, how to arrange certain things, how to travel. For me, it’s essential that the team travels in the same uniform. It doesn’t bother me if I have to spend a bit of time organising the gym, or understanding how the dining room will be arranged, how to lay out the tables. I check everything [laughs]. It’s my job and I do it with so much passion.

And I don’t just like to coach the team. I also work a lot with the staff. It’s not that I work on my own: I try and involve the whole team. Because for me there’s the team that goes onto the pitch and there’s the “invisible” team off the pitch that does everything for the players. So, I’m a coach who tries to manage both teams.

I did it as a captain, and I’m doing it as a coach. Because I think when a coach leaves a job, he has to leave something behind, not just at a technical level but at an organisational level as well. So, let’s just say that I like to manage everything [laughs].

What’s your approach to establishing a group with a winning mentality?

There’s no special trick to it, but you have to build a group of people who are willing to make sacrifices. In sport, in football, in everyday life, you have to make sacrifices. And you need to understand how much you’re willing to sacrifice to achieve your goal. So, for me, it’s essential to have a team of players who want to make sacrifices. I can take the best players in the world but if they don’t want to make the sacrifices, it’s going to be really difficult. You don’t need a team of champions to win. Everyone has to be prepared to give that little extra for each other, go the extra mile to achieve their goal. That’s sacrifice.

You’ve coached high-profile clubs in Asia, as well as the Chinese national team. How does coaching a club compare to coaching a national team?

Coaching the Chinese national team was different, but very interesting. The fact that you’re representing a country, the fact that you can choose the players from a whole nation, it’s cool. But you need a degree of luck to be able to maintain relations with your players and create a team. I was just there for a short time because I found I needed to work with players on an everyday basis so I could grow as a coach. I had to develop my own system of coaching. For that reason, I chose to stick with my club. I had started a five-year project, and I was rewarded because last year we finally won the Chinese Super League championship together.

We’ve rejuvenated the team, which in the last ten years had won two AFC Champions Leagues and seven championships. We’ve brought the average age of the team down from 33 to 24-25 years. I’m very happy with the work I’m doing here and how it’s helping me to grow a lot because my dream is one day to go back to Europe and I want to be ready. While I’ve always coached in Asia, I have my own system of coaching.

While I love Chinese cuisine, in my staff I have brought in a doctor, a physiotherapist, my brother as assistant, a goalkeeping coach, fitness coaches and an Italian chef. At first, it was seen as a bit strange to bring in my own chef, but it has been a huge asset in this pandemic situation. And it is part of having knowledge about different cultures to help a team improve and, now, we travel like a European team, with two chefs, our own food, our own things.

Today, at an organisational level, I think Guangzhou Evergrande is easily comparable to a European club. In that sense, there’s nothing lacking, and I’m very happy about that.

I think the next step for Chinese football is to develop the brands. Because while it’s true that Guangzhou Evergrande is already something of a name in Asian football, the name is also recognised because of the Evergrande [real estate] group. In future, in the same way that brand-building was fundamental for clubs in Italy, it will be fundamental here too.

You are well placed to provide an analysis of the state of Asian and, in particular, Chinese club football. What are the key strengths and areas of improvement you can identify by drawing on your many years of experience at the global elite?

With regard to Asian football, it’s growing: you only need to look at national teams such as Korea Republic. You have Korean players like Son Heung-min who is now in the Premier League and scoring four goals in a game. There are certainly the academies that started first, Korean and Japanese, having held the World Cup in 2002, while nations like China are coming through.

There’s also IR Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar who will host the FIFA World Cup in 2022. So it’s growing. Of course, you can’t compare them to Europe or South America for footballing tradition, but they have one advantage, which is the sheer potential number of players they can invest in. And then they have the financial aspect, which makes a difference in football. In recent years, Asian clubs have already grown so much.

With regard to China, that is a different situation. Because I came here in 2015. In 2017-2018 football was really growing so much. Then the Chinese FA decided to put limits on the spending of some of the Chinese clubs, with the aim of developing young talent. It’s the right thing to do, because, if you want a movement to grow, you have to invest in young players. But then you also need to be careful, because a young player might only be playing thanks to the “under-23” rule, which is not the same as a young player making the first team on merit. They’ve since scrapped that rule, but there are other limits on bringing in foreign players.

In my opinion, Chinese football is currently in a bit of a dip. But two teams stand out: Guangzhou Evergrande and Shanghai SIPG. They are the two teams that are always striving to be at the top level and offer something more than the other Chinese clubs. They are investing more in youth. They are sending a lot of players to Europe to help them grow. Certainly, it takes time and sometimes it can be difficult because people want to see results fast.

How has Guangzhou Evergrande dealt with the uncertainties and pressures of COVID-19 and what has changed in your day-to-day operations?

We were very fortunate to have inaugurated a new sports centre this year, meaning we could train in our own private facility. We were also very lucky in getting back from Dubai just in time before the country went into lockdown.

My club was very conscientious during the pandemic, knowing the importance of not spreading the virus. This made the players and the employees very aware, and our sports centre was sanitised every day. Masks were compulsory for everyone, swabs were taken every week: thanks to exemplary management, they virtually had us cocooned in a world where it was difficult to catch the virus.

Even now, the management continues to be highly attentive. We take swabs every week, they check our temperature every day, we have to wear masks when we go out. We’re now no longer staying at our sports centre in Guangzhou but we still haven’t had a single case.

If you could change one thing about the game’s current state, what would it be and why?

In recent years, football has changed so much. When you watch a match from ten years ago, things have changed a lot. And something that’s being lost, in my opinion, is the aspect of physical competitiveness. Not clashes, exactly, because you don’t have to hurt your opponent. But I think physical contact made football more entertaining. Nowadays, this is being penalised. On the other hand, the less physical, more technical players are able to play more freely, and rightly so because football is a technical game.

More recently, during the intensive schedules caused by the pandemic, FIFA introduced five substitutions, and I really hope we won’t go back to just three. And there are other aspects of the game that FIFA is rightly trying to improve such as the offside rule, the international match calendar, and the relationship between the referees and VAR.

But the one thing that I would like to see across sport is the elimination of racism. All forms of racism. Because, for me, racism is not just about a player with a different colour skin. For me, racism is 360°.

Over the years, I experienced certain situations myself around Italy, simply because I was Neapolitan. That’s a clear form of discrimination. And, of course, we need to make a distinction between rivalry and discrimination. But when you lose the respect and go on to racism, that needs to be eliminated from sport. It has no place in sport, just as it has no place in everyday life.