The Influence of Foreign Coaches on the Development of Italian Sport

Italian sport historiography has almost completely ignored the cultural aspect of coaching, which appears only intermittently in biographies or within the literature covering the broader social histories of specific sporting disciplines. This chapter paves the way for future investigations, choosing as a starting point a chronological connecting theme focused around the influence of foreign coaches. In Italy, a permanent dilemma characterized the question of coaching, the tension between the acculturation of superior techniques from abroad and the maturation of autochthonous coaching capable of supplying satisfactory levels of assistance to athletes. Where indigenous resources appeared to be sufficient, sport authorities did not seek external help, but, where these were inadequate, they hired foreign coaches, so contributing to a complex cultural patrimony. The chapter presents some paradigmatic examples. The first section analyses the variable impact of foreign coaches for athletics during the Fascist era. The second section focuses on the experiences of different generations of foreign managers in Italian football, where Britons, Hungarians, and South Americans introduced successful training methods and linguistic terms. The last section deals with the upgrading of techniques for bridging the international gap that appeared after the advent of professionalism in Olympic sports, such as volleyball and water polo, and ends with a commentary on family influences in coaching.