Italian coaching merry-go-round set to kick in

The incessant speculation surrounding the future of AC Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti has sparked a wild guessing game in Italy’s leading newspaper: La Gazzetta dello Sport.

Convinced that Ancelotti will be coaching either Chelsea or Real Madrid next season, La Gazzetta published it’s projections for who would be where next season.

And they only gave nine of the 20 current Serie A head coaches a better than 50 percent chance of being in the same job at the start of the following campaign.

Not surprisingly, chief amongst those was Inter Milan’s Jose Mourinho but what the survey showed most was just how precarious a job as a Serie A coach can be.

On Tuesday former Serbia international Sinisa Mihajlovic became Serie A’s 10th coaching casualty of the season.

That did not account for 10 teams, though, as Torino and Bologna, who fired Mihajlovic, both changed coaches twice while Reggina replaced Nevio Orlandi with Giuseppe Pillon in December only to change their minds a month later and re-instate Orlandi after Pillon had suffered three straight defeats.

Palermo started the ball rolling when chop-happy president Maurizio Zamparini dismissed Stefano Colantuono after just one match and replaced him with Davide Ballardini.

Torino began the season with Gianni De Biasi at the helm, for his third stint at the Toro, but soon replaced him with his predecessor Walter Novellino, who was still under contract from his previous spell but then made way for Giancarlo Camolese.

One fears that the sackings have not finished for the season.

Interesting enough with regards La Gazzetta’s predictions is that they at times defy the laws of mathematics.

La Gazzetta believe that Cagliari coach Massimiliano Allegri is one of the front-runners to take over from Ancelotti at Milan and put his chances of sitting on the San Siro bench next season at 40 percent.

However, they also have him 50 percent sure of staying at Cagliari and 20 percent likely to take over at Genoa, making a tidy round total of 110 percent.

Worse still is La Gazzetta’s maths when it comes to Siena’s Marco Giampaolo, 30 percent sure to stay where he is, 50 percent certain to take over at Atalanta and in with a 20 percent chance of being Sampdoria’s new boss.

That is a tidy 100 percent until you add the 25 percent possibility of him coaching Lazio.

It may seem simply like wild tabloid speculation but club owners take it seriously enough.

Milan vice-president Adriano Galliano has had to oft repeat that Ancelotti is contracted to the club until 2010 while Juventus general manager Jean Claude Blanc was quick to refute the Gazzetta speculation about coach Claudio Ranieri’s position.

They gave the former Chelsea and Valencia boss a mere 30 percent chance of staying put but Blanc responded: “Ranieri is our coach and whatever results we achieve this season, he will be next season as well.”

That won’t dampen the rumours, though, in a country where coaching resumes often include long lists of clubs, and frequently with more than one stint at each.

It means coaches can quickly get plucked from obscurity and thrust into the limelight and vice versa.

Perhaps Allegri sums it up best: “To think that two and a half years ago I was fired by Grosseto (then in Serie C) and now La Gazzetta are attaching my name to a huge club (Milan).”

It seems crazy but anything is possible in Serie A coaching circles.