EURO 2024 is about to begin and apart from the players, coaches will play a big role too. A total of 154 have led national teams in the 16 European Championships held so far, and this list will now be expanded by 17 more names. At the upcoming European Championship, there will be as many as eight foreign coaches—a new record The previous maximum was four, achieved on three occasions: in 2008, 2016, and 2021. This time, Italy alone will provide five coaches!🚨💥🇮🇹 HISTORIC.. There are (5) coaches from Italy in #euro2024!🇮🇹👑 The largest number of coaches from one country in one tournament in the entire history of the Euro Championship! pic.twitter.com/1H9tJ2pQx9— Olt Sports (@oltsport_) June 13, 2024 In a season where the two main UEFA club competitions were won by coaches from Italy, the continent’s premier national team competition will also be numerically dominated by coaches from a league historically known for its tactical innovations and specialties. Along with Luciano Spalletti, who will defend Mancini’s title from three years ago with the Azzurri, Francesco Calzona will lead Slovakia, Vincenzo Montella will coach Turkey, Domenico Tedesco will guide Belgium, and Marco Rossi will manage Hungary. So far, only once has a single country provided more than two coaches in one tournament—Netherlands with three in 2008: Marco Van Basten, Guus Hiddink, and Leo Beenhakker. The first foreign coach at the European Championships was the German Sepp Piontek in 1984, who led Denmark. Since then, only in EURO 1992 did none of the participating teams have a foreign coach at the helm.Crazy EURO 2024 stats: Grandad Pepe, Lamine the Kid, youngster Julian and omnipresent CityIn addition to the aforementioned Italians, Georgia will have a foreign coach in Germany (Frenchman Willy Sagnol), Austria (German Ralf Rangnick), Portugal (Spaniard Roberto Martinez), and Albania (Brazilian Silvinho). Interestingly, Silvinho is not the first Brazilian to participate in the European Championship as a coach; Luiz Felipe Scolari led Portugal in 2004 and 2008. Silvinho and Scolari are also the only non-Europeans to coach at the European Championship. Five coaches have led two different national teams at European Championships: Dick Advocaat, Guus Hiddink, Fernando Santos, Giovanni Trapattoni, and Lars Lagerbäck. Roberto Martinez will join that list at the EURO but with one key difference: he will be the only one where neither of the two national teams is his homeland (Belgium and Portugal). Besides Martinez, this will also be the second consecutive European Championship for Gareth Southgate, Kasper Hjulmand, Zlatko Dalić, Marco Rossi, and Steve Clarke as coaches, while for Didier Deschamps, it will be the third in a row. The Germans have nothing to hide; players’ salaries are out in the openThe French coach will chase several historical achievements in Germany. First, he will attempt to become only the third coach, after Helmut Schön and Vicente del Bosque, to win both the World Cup and the European Championship as a coach. If he succeeds, he will become the only person in football history to win both tournaments as a player and a coach. He was a world champion with France in 1998 and European champion two years later. He led France to the world title in 2018 and will have a good chance to achieve this as a coach for the third time. Only Berti Vogts has won the European Championship as both a player (1972) and a coach (1996). Ronald Koeman, a winner of EURO 1988, will also have the opportunity to join Deschamps in this exclusive club. Deschamps and Southgate—both losing finalists in the last two European Championships as hosts—have already experienced being participants in the tournament both as players and coaches. Now, Murat Yakin, Vincenzo Montella, Willy Sagnol, and Dragan Stojković, will join them.##NAJAVA_MECA_8154653##Considering only tournaments played in a group stage format with at least eight teams in the finals, none of the winning coaches were younger than 50, which is not a good omen for Germany and Belgium, who are among the top contenders, especially for the host nation. In fact, on Friday night, in the premiere against Scotland, Nagelsmann, at 36 years and 327 days, will become the youngest coach ever to lead a match at the EURO, breaking the record set by Srečko Katanec in the memorable Yugoslavia-Slovenia 3:3 match. The oldest coach at the EURO will be Ralf Rangnick, who, if Austria progresses past the group stage, will celebrate his 66th birthday in his homeland during the round of 16. Luis Aragonés led Spain to the title at the age of nearly seventy.
