Arne Slot put the kettle on. As the tea brewed, he started pitching Feyenoord to Sam Beukema. His guest was an up-and-coming centre-back at hometown club Go Ahead Eagles. Sitting in Slot’s house, Beukema had brought his uncle along. They were both big Feyenoord fans and passing up the invite wasn’t an option.
When Slot began to talk it was clear he had carefully studied the defender’s playing style. “There were a couple of eye-openers where I was like: ‘Woah, I’ve never thought about the game like that before’,” Beukema tells The Athletic. “He said: ‘In the build-up you’re very good but when it’s unpredictable in the midfield and you go to intercept the ball at that age (20) you sometimes lose control’. I was like: ‘You’re right. I’ve never thought about that before’.”
Slot must have thought he had Beukema in the bag. Instead, the centre-back joined AZ Alkmaar, the club Slot had recently departed, because the structure he left in place made it a better, more stable place for a young player to develop.
Tonight, Beukema is set to step foot inside Slot’s house again. It’s bigger and brighter than the one in the Netherlands. The sign in the tunnel reads, “This is Anfield.” This is also Bologna’s biggest game in 60 years. “We would never have dreamed of being in the Champions League,” Beukema says, smiling.
Beukema applauds the fans (Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
And yet maybe it was predictable after all. Because this is what Giovanni Sartori does. The anonymous and unassuming executive arrived in Bologna a little before Beukema to head up the club’s recruitment operation. He is in some respects Italian football’s Hans Christian Andersen, famous for his fairytales, who built teams at Chievo and Atalanta that broke new ground and improbably reached the Champions League.
Beukema and winger Jesper Karlsson were among his first signings from a fertile old hunting ground in Alkmaar. Sartori bought Teun Koopmeiners from the same club three years ago. This summer, Atalanta sold Beukema’s compatriot to Juventus for a €40million (£33m; $44m) profit. Bologna, as we’ll see, are now benefiting from the same nous. They outperformed their wage bill, the 13th-highest in Serie A, to finish fifth last season.
Marco Di Vaio works alongside Sartori as Bologna’s sporting director. An outstanding striker in a super-competitive era for Italian centre-forwards, he scored as many times in Serie A (142) as Christian Vieri and finished his career in Italy with Bologna before moving to owner Joey Saputo’s MLS team, Montreal Impact. Di Vaio knows what it takes to play in Europe. He was part of the great Parma side of the early 2000s and contributed to Juventus reaching the Champions League final at Old Trafford in 2003.
While watching training at Bologna’s soupy Casteldebole training ground, the 48-year-old traces when his club finally broke out of mid-table mediocrity and gathered momentum. “It happened over time,” he explains. “There was a change of mentality when we brought in Sinisa (Mihajlovic, in the winter of 2019).”
Bologna broke glass and hit the emergency button when Filippo Inzaghi left the club in the relegation zone mid-season. Mihajlovic pulled them out of the mire and led them on a charge. Bologna’s results for the remaining four months of the season were the seventh-best in Italy. Tragically, the charismatic Serb then contracted leukaemia and Covid-19 hit. Bologna stood by Mihajlovic as he underwent treatment. The players celebrated wins under his hospital window coached, in the meantime, by his assistants Miroslav Tanjga and Emilio De Leo.
It was inspiring and yet the team was understandably inconsistent. Bologna occasionally shone but never recaptured the same sustained form as in the early days of Mihajlovic’s tenure. The decision to sack him in the early autumn of 2022 was incredibly hard. Roberto De Zerbi claimed to refuse the offer to replace him out of solidarity for his friend and colleague, and Mihajlovic passed away before the end of the year. Still Bologna tried to do the right thing by him. “No one at the club forgot me,” Mihajlovic’s widow, Arianna told Vanity Fair. “They honoured his salary until the end of his contract, even after his death. It was a wonderful gesture at a time of loss and it gave me some peace.”
Sinisa Mihajlovic died in 2022 (Gabriele Maltinti/Getty Images)
These were not easy circumstances for Mihajlovic’s replacement, Thiago Motta, to step into. Some were sceptical about another recently retired player who, for instance, couldn’t call upon Inzaghi’s experience of getting teams like Venezia promoted. A 1-0 defeat to Empoli in his first game in charge did not augur well.
Nevertheless, Di Vaio felt it was the right fit. Already under Mihajlovic, Bologna had started going younger and more obscure in the transfer market. The higher the potential, the higher the reward. Alkmaar games weren’t the only ones Bologna scouted. They were at Pittodrie to watch Aberdeen where they found Aaron Hickey and, later, Lewis Ferguson, who was magnificent last season until an anterior cruciate ligament tear left him on the sidelines. “Those deals (in Scotland) have been great for us,” Di Vaio says. “We were able to get players with great mentalities and work ethics. They give 100 per cent every day. They’ve got quality. They were two very positive surprises.”
The thinking with Motta was simple.
“He had potential but had yet to show it, like our players, and here he found the right environment to show his stuff,” Di Vaio adds. At the end of Motta’s first season, Bologna came ninth in Serie A. It was their best finish under the ownership of Saputo, a Canadian-Italian billionaire, and the best since Di Vaio’s last year as a player in Rossoblu, when he skippered the team in 2012.
This marked progress.
Thiago Motta was brought to Bologna by sporting director Marco Di Vaio (Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)
While Saputo had helped save the club and got them back up to the top flight at the first attempt, albeit via the Serie B play-offs just shy of a decade ago, Italy’s longest-standing foreign owner struggled to take the next step. It wasn’t for a lack of trying. He hired the best sporting directors in the business; Pantaleo Corvino then Walter Sabatini in partnership with Riccardo Bigon. But mid-table resembled a glass ceiling and it grated with fans. Sassuolo, a village team from the same region, qualified for Europe. Atalanta and Udinese appeared in the Champions League. Sartori’s father – Camillo, a Bologna fan – used to take him to games at San Siro. It was to watch the great Bologna sides of the ’60s — with Giacomo Bulgarelli and Ezio Pascutti — play away from home, a team that won the club its seventh scudetto. That’s as many as Lazio, Roma and Fiorentina put together.
The project, as presented to Beukema a year ago, was to end this wait. “To be honest, when I joined they told me they had this project to play in Europe in the coming years,” he recalls. “Not the Champions League immediately after one year! From the day I arrived it was more like finishing in the top seven, top eight, maybe Conference League. Then after a magical year we ended up in fifth position and reached the Champions League.”
Di Vaio insists Bologna did “nothing new” in terms of recruitment. Casteldebole has not suddenly become M.I.T. They have not cracked the football code.
“We monitor players in leagues that play the most youngsters, leagues that are still accessible to us.” Such as the top flights in Scotland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. “Then we figure out what kind of investments we want to make on players who are 18, 22, 23, at max 24. That’s the idea, the target. We also take into consideration guys who can give us a hand.” Sartori signed Remo Freuler, for instance, at Atalanta and later brought him back from the Premier League (with Nottingham Forest) to Bologna to lend his experience. Lorenzo De Silvestri, the captain, acts as Roman statesman Cicero in teaching the players about the city.
“In Thiago’s second year we carried on building,” Di Vaio explains, “and little by little he was able to impose his mentality.” Beukema calls him “a mastermind”. Bologna started last season slowly. They lost to AC Milan, drew unluckily with Juventus and then, in a mirror image of what recently happened to Motta at his new club (Juve), were held 0-0 for three consecutive games. Then his concepts of positional play, interchanging roles and domination through possession came to the fore.
“There was not one big moment when we thought: ‘OK, we can really compete with the big boys’,” Beukema says. “We were focusing game-by-game. Then (in December) we won against Roma and Atalanta at home. Then Lazio away. We were slowly realising that if we are focused in every game we’re really strong, not unbeatable but it’s really hard to beat us. And we kept going.” Bologna kept 17 clean sheets. Only champions Inter Milan boasted a better home record.
The two standout players were Riccardo Calafiori and Joshua Zirkzee, both of whom are now in the Premier League with Arsenal and Manchester United. “We signed Riccardo to cover two positions,” Di Vaio says. “We didn’t initially think of him as a starter. We wanted him to develop behind Jhon Lucumi at centre-back and Victor Kristiansen at left-back but when he began playing in the middle (as Lucumi recuperated from injury), he interpreted the role as a full-back would but with the defensive awareness, physicality and concentration needed from a centre-back.”
Motta also asked Beukema to alternate with Calafiori in going into midfield, which he did to great effect in the 2-0 win against Torino last November, when his defence-splitting pass set up the talented box-crashing youngster Giovanni Fabbian to score the opener. “Motta said to me you need to go into midfield because their striker (Duvan) Zapata sometimes forgets to run back. So I was the guy who became the plus-one in midfield or the plus-one in attack. The goal we scored was exactly what he planned and at the end I saw his reaction. He was so happy.”
The more intrepid Calafiori excelled at going forward and finished the season with five assists, the most of any defender in Serie A last season. His brace on the final day of the campaign when he burst into the box to help Bologna establish a 3-0 half-time lead over Juventus summed up his style. “Sometimes I was like: ‘Cala, stay back! We need you at the back. Don’t go all the way up front’. And he was like: ‘Why? Why can’t I go?’. So that was funny,” Beukema recalls. “He’s complete. He just scored this amazing goal against Manchester City. It’s crazy.”
As for Zirkzee, again Di Vaio acts modest. It was only a matter of time before the velcro-slippered Dutchman fulfilled his potential. “Everyone could see his quality,” Di Vaio says. “Our job and that of the coach was to make him improve when it came to his intensity in games, to always be present in them and decisive. After quite a tricky first year, the strides he made in his second were incredible, particularly mentally. He can play anywhere. He’ll make a difference in the Premier League.”
For Beukema it was an education to face Zirkzee every day in training. It was his toughest assignment all week. “He is one of the best attacking players I’ve played against,” he says. “Last year it was him and Ademola Lookman, who is also a really good player with Atalanta. It didn’t surprise me when Joshua moved to United. I remember watching him play. It feels like the ball is stuck to him and for a defender that’s really tough because if you try to step out in front of him, he uses his body and if you give him space he does something really unpredictable with the ball.”
It was an unforgettable year for all involved. After Bologna clinched Champions League football in May, 40,000 fans piled into Piazza Maggiore to twirl flags, light flares and sing songs. “Three generations of Bologna fans came together to be happy that night,” Di Vaio says. “It was incredible. I’ve been here 16 years. We’ve had some good times but never a season like that.” The enthusiasm matched, maybe even surpassed the years Roberto Baggio played at the Renato Dall’Ara in the late ’90s. “I’ve heard it was never that full in the city,” Beukema says. “Every little street was full. It was such an amazing night and it felt like we’d already won the Champions League or something.”
Zirkzee moved to Manchester United after his success in Italy (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Vultures inevitably circled over the summer, carrying off Motta, Zirkzee and Calafiori. Continuity of manager is usually key in going again, as we’ve seen with Atalanta over the past eight years. But Di Vaio and Sartori attracted Vincenzo Italiano, who seemed primed for a crack at one of Italy’s big three after leading Fiorentina back into Europe and to three finals in three seasons.
Di Vaio believes he will need time. Motta and Italiano are not like-for-like. Qualifying for the Champions League will be hard to repeat, although as someone who has gone the distance in the Conference League twice, Italiano knows what it takes to balance Serie A and Europe. “He likes to play more direct than Motta,” Beukema explains. “Motta really liked to play short, short, short, keep the ball. Italiano likes to dominate games as well.” His Fiorentina teams tended to rank highly in Serie A for percentage of touches in the opposition third. “But when there is a moment to ‘salta’ (play a line-breaking pass), we should do it immediately. Motta was calm during the training session, Mister Italiano screams a lot during training but it’s because he’s a perfectionist and he wants everything to go perfectly.”
Bologna will have to be close to perfect to follow Atalanta (last season) and Genoa (in the 1991-92 UEFA Cup) in winning at Anfield.
There are a lot of new players still to bed in, such as Thijs Dallinga, the former Toulouse centre-forward, who scored home and away against Liverpool in last year’s Europa League although the livewire Santiago Castro has kept him out the side so far this season. Samuel Iling-Junior, the English winger on loan from Aston Villa, scored a beauty on his debut against Como and will be competing for places with Dan Ndoye, a star at Euro 2024 with Switzerland, and Riccardo Orsolini who has been more consistent than Liverpool’s Federico Chiesa on his flank this past year.
Italiano (left) with Atalanta manager Gian Piero Gasperini (Emilio Andreoli/Getty Images)
Goalless under the rain against Shakhtar Donetsk last time out, when goalkeeper Lukasz Skorupski saved a penalty, Wednesday’s opponents represent an altogether different proposition. “I think I can speak for everybody,” Beukema says. “It will be a dream to play at Anfield.”
After a big 60-year sleep, Bologna have earned their chance to dream with eyes wide open.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
