On this day in 2013, Sunderland turned to Paolo Di Canio to fill the vacant managerial seat - a left field move for a far right man. The appointment was met with some condemnation, notably from David Milliband who was then involved with SAFC. He resigned from his post and the appointment evoked disgust from the Durham Miners Association, who threatened to remove a banner from our ground.
On the pitch, the appointment also looked a strange one – Di Canio had only managed at League Two and League One level. He did a decent job at Swindon, but this was often overshadowed by the antics of the insane Italian. He is a walking advertising board for a violent ideology at odds with Sunderland’s politics broadly speaking, his body adorned with tributes to Italian fascism, the ‘DUX’ tattoo on his bicep leading to his dismissal from Sky Sports Italia.
Anyone with tattoos celebrating dictator Benito Mussolini is bound to have psychological, let’s call them quirks, which will carry over and define his management style. At Swindon, he had run an almost totalitarian regime, creating a gruelling training pattern which instilled a work ethic probably unmatched in English football, but at the cost of alienating many players.
Mussolini had created the city of Littoria after reclaiming swamp land in the Lazio region and perhaps Di Canio viewed the job at Swindon as is own version of his idol's crowning achievement. Di Canio invested heavily in a project, he had a £4 million budget in League One, and he did reclaim Swindon as it were from the swamp that is League Two. Di Canio overspent at Swindon and resigned when their best player, Matt Richie, was sold to Bournemouth.
This meant that Di Canio was able to take over as our manager, the mad man following on from mild mannered Martin O’Neill. Di Canio succeeded in the task of keeping us up, but made hard work of it. He did provide some brilliant moments as our manager in the process and because of this, our fans warmed to Di Canio surprisingly quickly. His first game as manager resulted in a 2–1 away defeat to Chelsea but his second game was the Tyne–Wear derby at St James’s. It was truly an unforgettable victory and spawned iconic celebrations from Di Canio on the touchline, reacting wildly after each of our three goals and ruining his designer suit in the process. Not long after, we beat our bogey team Everton at home. After the final whistle, Di Canio came into the centre circle and mock conducted his own song as it rang out from the terraces, which is something I’ll never forget. Di Canio got off to a pretty good start and maybe even the most ardent leftie was beginning to warm to him, despite his obviously abhorrent politics.
However things were not this good for long. They seldom are at SAFC. We didn’t win again that season and got hammered 6-1 by Villa. We had an unprecedented summer in terms of recruitment and Di Canio had to integrate an astonishing 13 players into our squad, recruited chiefly by his fellow countryman Roberto Di Fanti, who was then our ‘Director of Football’. The list of players brought in reads as a who’s who of Sunderland rejects, with a few decent players thrown in for good measure. I suppose when you bring in what amounts to a completely new side, there are going to be a few players who flop, but some of them flopped so badly it’s hard to put into words.
Out of Jozy Altidore, Fabio Borini, El-Hadji Ba, Cabral, Ondrej Celustka, Modibo Diakite, Andrea Dossena, Emanuele Giaccherini, Ki Sung-Yueng, Vito Mannone, David Moberg-Karlsson, Charis Mavrias and Valentin Roberge, only four players were good enough to get in our starting 11, with many actually giving the impression that they didn’t know how to play football at all. Di Canio came in and the whole culture around the club eventually changed for the worse, our squad was inflated with a staggering amount of deadwood and we were getting beat comfortably basically every single game.
Di Canio lasted only 13 games on Wearside, winning twice and it effectively ended his managerial career. As we enter into an era of seemingly nicer managers, the smiling, kindly Klopp, and the reserved but polite Guardiola seemingly the chief architects of the movement, there seems to be no place for insane, fascistic Italian bosses. That’s probably for the best. Essentially all accounts seem to portray Di Canio as a bully and anywhere else in the world of work, his behaviour would not be tolerated. People might decry modern footballers as ‘snowflakes’ and defend a tough talking manager as giving these overpaid prima-donnas a much-needed kick up the arse, but the fact is that Di Canio’s methods saw a very short amount of success before his reign imploded, as it does for every fascist.
