Vincenzo Montella

Vincenzo Montella, born 18 June 1974 in Pomigliano d’Arco near Naples, was one of Italian football’s most clinical strikers of the late 1990s and early 2000s — “L’Aeroplanino” (the little plane), nicknamed for the celebration of arms outstretched after his many goals. He won the 2001 Serie A title with Roma alongside Francesco Totti, finished his playing career at Fulham and Sampdoria, and moved straight into coaching at Roma’s youth setup. His route to the Türkiye job has gone through nearly every level of Italian football and a transformative two-season stint in the Turkish Süper Lig that fundamentally repositioned his career.

The Italian managerial record is uneven. A spectacular start at Catania, where he saved the team from relegation in 2011-12, earned him the Fiorentina job. His first three seasons at La Viola were excellent: two consecutive fourth-place Serie A finishes and a Coppa Italia final. Sampdoria (2015-16) was a brief and unhappy stop. AC Milan (2016-17) delivered a Supercoppa Italiana trophy but ended with his dismissal eighteen months into a three-year contract. Sevilla (2017-18) was a hard landing in La Liga — sacked after five months. A second Fiorentina spell in 2019 lasted eight months. By 2021 his Italian reputation had cooled enough that the move to Adana Demirspor — a recently-promoted Süper Lig club from Turkey’s industrial south — registered as a reset rather than a comeback.

It worked. Adana finished fourth in 2022-23, the club’s best-ever league position and their first European qualification. The Turkish federation, looking for a manager with European pedigree and a Süper Lig grounding ahead of Euro 2024, hired Montella on 21 September 2023 — a year out from the tournament. He delivered immediately: a credible Euro 2024 quarter-final run, beating Austria 2-1 in the round of 16 with Mert Günok’s last-minute save now part of Turkish football folklore, and a 2-1 loss to the Netherlands in the quarters with one of the youngest squads in the tournament.

The 2026 World Cup qualifying campaign was bumpier. Türkiye finished second in their UEFA group rather than winning it, and survived a tense play-off on 31 March 2026 to seal direct qualification — Türkiye’s first World Cup since 2002. Montella’s public framing has been characteristically measured: “no coincidence”, he has called the result, citing the squad’s tactical organisation and integration of Real Madrid’s Arda Güler and Juventus’s Kenan Yıldız into a generational front-four with veteran captain Hakan Çalhanoğlu (Inter Milan). His tactical signature — the fluid 4-2-3-1 with roaming attackers — is built around exactly that talent profile. The question for June is whether his sides’ historic vulnerability to aggressive pressing can survive against an American team built precisely to do that.