Vincenzo Italiano knew there was a little bit of poison in the chalice offered to him last summer but accepted it anyway. The opportunity to manageBolognawas a chance to lead a Champions League team for the first time in his career. It was also an invitation to become the public face of a project that had nowhere to go but backwards.
What could he possibly do to improve on the work of the previous manager, Thiago Motta, who led Bologna back into Europe’s top club competition for thefirst time in 60 years? Italiano would not even have the same group of players to work with. Joshua Zirkzee, the top scorer, was on his way to Manchester United and the newly capped Italy defender Riccardo Calafiori to Arsenal. Lewis Ferguson would be out for months with a cruciate ligament tear.
None of it seemed to faze him. “Bologna are coming off a happy season,” Italiano said at his unveiling. “I saw the piazza full, fantastic celebrations. We’re going to try to fill it up with fans all over again. We’ll find a scheme to do it – maybe by reaching the end of some competition.”
Eleven months later, there they were, fans flooding back into the Piazza Maggiore – Bologna’s central square – to set off fireworks and wave flags and sing. To celebrate their team beatingMilan1-0 in the Coppa Italia final. If there were fewer people here than there had been last May, it was only because 30,000 were away in Rome, at the Stadio Olimpico, watching their team raise the club’s first major domestic trophy since 1974.
Even that feels like we might be underselling things. The only major piece of silverware Bologna had lifted in the last half-century was the 1998 Intertoto Cup – a summer tournament with three winners, whose prize was qualification to the Uefa Cup.
Who could have imagined that this would be the year to end the drought? Bologna won one of their first 11 games under Italiano, their attack suddenly toothless without Zirkzee opening the space and Ferguson running on from midfield.
Italiano insisted they were close, that this was just a question of “details”. He was right. Few people outside Bologna’s changing room could see it back then, but the manager was still reshaping this team, adjusting it to his ideas. The formation remained similar to Motta’s: a 4-2-3-1 with familiar faces in familiar places, but the nature of it was different. Italiano’s version defends with a much higher line and takes more direct lines of attack.
Slowly at first, and then suddenly, his vision came together. Bologna started to win games in November. The goals began to flow: three in wins away to Roma and at home to Venezia. Four in a Coppa Italia rout of Monza. Two in a draw with Juventus.
It all came too late to rescue their European campaign. Bologna finished 28th out of 36 teams in the Champions League’s group phase, winning only their penultimate game, against Borussia Dortmund. But their domestic results continued to improve in 2025. They smashed a top-four chasing Lazio 5-0 and delivered a potentially fatal blow to Inter’s title hopes bybeating them at the Stadio Dall’Ara.
For a moment it looked as though they might even get back into the Champions League. A 3-1 defeat at Milan on Friday dented that dream, though it remains possible. It felt secondary now to the greater one of winning silverware. “If you make me choose between the Coppa Italia and Champions League, I will take the trophy,” said the club’s top scorer, Riccardo Orsolini, in an interview with Sky Sport last week. “I would really like that a lot.”
Orsolini, a 28-year-old playing the best football of his career, is an embodiment of the Bologna side that endured after last summer’s departures: unassuming, unselfish, underrated. Even after hitting double figures inSerie Afor the third season running, playing mostly off the right wing, he is regularly overlooked by the Italy manager, Luciano Spalletti.
Maybe a cup win will change that. Maybe not. The certain truth is that Bologna deserved their victory. Milan did threaten to punish that high line in the early exchanges, Álex Jiménez blasting over after Rafael Leão had got behind down the left, and Luka Jovic firing a rebound too close to the goalkeeper. But Italiano’s team had their own chances in a helter-skelter start and looked ever-more in control after the game stabilised.
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Dan Ndoye scored the only goal just after the interval, showing composure after Orsolini was tackled inside the box as he took his touches to sidestep a defender and blast into the right corner. A €10m signing from Basel in 2023, the 24-year-old winger flattered to deceive under Motta but has nine goals and five assists across all competitions with Italiano so far.
The team is packed with players flourishing under the new manager. The Argentinian Santiago Castro, signed as a teenager from Vélez Sarsfield in January 2024, has developed into a worthy replacement for Zirkzee up front. The Dutch centre-back Sam Beukema was perceived as a weaker link in the defence last season but was impassable for most of the night against Milan – even if he did get away with an elbow on Matteo Gabbia that might have deserved a red card.
On another night he and Ferguson – wearing the captain’s armband and playing with fire after a pair of fouls at the end of the first half – might have been sent off. Instead, images of both men bleeding – the Scotsman from his nose, Beukema from his head – will entrench their status as symbols of this team’s full-bodied commitment for ever in club lore.
As unjust as that will feel to many Milan supporters, it is the nature of football sometimes. Italiano knows better than anyone how fine, and how cruel, the margins can be. In his three seasons as manager of Fiorentina, before taking this job, he reached three cup finals – one in the Coppa Italia and two in the Europa Conference League. Each time he finished on the losing side.
Instead of being consumed by these disappointments, he showed courage to take the Bologna job and believed – against all outside scepticism – that he could take this club forward from its greatest season in most fans’ lifetimes.
“If I had lost, who knows how many people would have talked about this story of me being a ‘loser’,” he said on Wednesday. “We need to talk about the journey; the trophy only seals it. I’m 47 years old, fifth in Serie A and involved in the seventh final of my career. I’m so happy. I want to dedicate this victory to the guys on the team and on my staff who shared this fear with me. Instead, we celebrated together.”