Marcello Lippi

Marcello Romeo Lippi Commendatore OMRI (Italian pronunciation: [marˈtʃɛllo ˈlippi]; born 12 April 1948) is an Italian former professional football player and manager, who led the Italy national team to victory in the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

He was appointed as Italy head coach in the summer of 2004 and 2008, and he was succeeded by Cesare Prandelli after a disappointing performance in the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Throughout his career as a manager, he won one World Cup, one UEFA Champions League, five Serie A titles, three Chinese Super League titles, one Coppa Italia, one Chinese FA Cup, four Italian Supercups, one AFC Champions League, one UEFA Super Cup and one Intercontinental Cup. Lippi is the first and to date the only coach to win both the UEFA Champions League and the AFC Champions League. He is also the first coach to have won the most prestigious international competitions both for clubs in different continents, and for national teams (the UEFA Champions League and the Intercontinental Cup in 1996 with Juventus; the AFC Champions League in 2013 with Guangzhou Evergrande; and the FIFA World Cup in 2006 with Italy).

Lippi is regarded as one of the greatest and most successful managers in football history, and in 2007, The Times included him on its list of the top 50 managers of all time. He was named the world's best football manager by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS) both in 1996 and 1998 and the world's best National coach in 2006.

Born in Viareggio, in northern Tuscany, Lippi began his professional career as a defender in 1969, in the role of sweeper. He spent most of his playing years with Sampdoria, where he played consecutively from 1969 to 1978, except for a year on loan at Savona. In 1979, he joined Pistoiese, being part of the Arancioni's promotion to Serie A. He finished his playing career with Lucchese.

Lippi retired from active football in 1982, at the age of 34, to pursue a coaching career. Despite never having played for Italy at senior level, Lippi gained experience playing in his country's top flight as a central defender for Sampdoria. His rise to the top of the managerial tree also began at the Genoese club, where he started as a youth-team coach. After various stints in Italy's lower divisions, he became a head coach in Serie A in 1989 with Cesena. Lippi then moved on to Lucchese and Atalanta. The turning point for Lippi came in the 1993–94 season when he led Napoli to a place in the UEFA Cup.

With his success at Napoli, Lippi became a managerial target for the top Serie A clubs, with Juventus ultimately winning the race to secure his services. He won the Serie A title and the Coppa Italia in his first season at the club, also reaching the 1995 UEFA Cup final, with a team that included players who would play an important role in the club's future successes, including Gianluca Vialli, Fabrizio Ravanelli, Roberto Baggio, Alessandro Del Piero, Angelo Peruzzi, Angelo Di Livio, Moreno Torricelli, Didier Deschamps, Paulo Sousa, Antonio Conte, Alessio Tacchinardi and Giancarlo Marocchi, as well as Ciro Ferrara, a player Lippi had previously coached at Napoli and who later acted as his assistant with the Azzurri. He made the team less dependent on the individual plays of Baggio, and also helped Vialli and Ravanelli rediscover their goalscoring form, in addition to introducing a young Del Piero into the starting line-up in a 4–3–3 formation, following Baggio's injury. The following season, Lippi guided Juventus to 1995 Supercoppa Italiana and the 1995–96 UEFA Champions League titles. With the arrival of several new key players which included Zinedine Zidane, Edgar Davids, Filippo Inzaghi, Mark Iuliano, Paolo Montero and Igor Tudor, these victories were followed by consecutive league titles, the 1996 UEFA Super Cup, the 1996 Intercontinental Cup and the 1997 Supercoppa Italiana, as well as two more consecutive Champions League finals and another semi-final.

After five highly successful seasons at Juventus, Lippi moved to Inter Milan in 1999, leading the club to a fourth-place finish in the league and the 2000 Coppa Italia final, though he was sacked after suffering a disappointing defeat in the first match-day of the 2000–01 Serie A season; having previously also received significant criticism due to his poor results in his previous season with the Nerazzurri, and after Inter were eliminated from the 2000–01 UEFA Champions League in the third qualifying round by Swedish underdogs Helsingborg without managing to score a goal over the two legs.