Fulvio Bernardini

Fulvio Bernardini
George Knobel and Fulvio Bernardini (1974)
Personnel
birthday	December 28, 1905
place of birth	Rome ,  Italy
date of death	January 13, 1984
Place of death	Rome ,  Italy
size	177 cm
position	midfield
Juniors
Years	station
	Lazio Rome
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1919-1926	Lazio Rome
1926-1928	Ambrosiana-Inter	58 (27)
1928-1939	AS Roma	286 (47)
1939-1943	MATER Roma
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1925-1932	Italy	26 0(3)
Stations as a trainer
Years	station
1939-19 ??	MATER Rome
1949-1950	AS Roma
1950-1951	AS Reggina
1951-1953	Lanerossi Vicenza
1953-1958	ACF Fiorentina
1958-1960	Lazio Rome
1961-1965	Bologna FC
1965-1971	Sampdoria Genoa
1971-1973	AC Brescia
1974-1975	Italy
1 Only league games are given.

Fulvio Bernardini (born December 28, 1905 in Rome , † January 13, 1984 ibid) was an Italian football player and coach .

As an active player with Lazio Rome , Ambrosiana-Inter , AS Roma and MATER Roma as well as in the Italian national soccer team , he became a successful coach after the end of his playing career.

Bernardini led AC Florence to their first championship in 1956 and thus to the first great success in the club's history. The Bologna FC reached in 1964 his only post-war championship among Bernardini. He was also the first coach to win the Coppa Italia after its reintroduction in 1958. At the end of his successful coaching career, Fulvio Bernardini was the Italian national coach from 1974 to 1975. The qualification for the European Football Championship in 1976 failed, however.

After he had been general director at Sampdoria Genoa for a short time , Bernardini fell ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and died in 1984.

Player career

Club career

Fulvio Bernardini was trained in the youth department of the SS Lazio , at that time the non plus ultra of Roman football, and started his adult career there. In 1919 Bernardini made his debut in the Lazio jersey. As a result, he was in the position of midfielder for seven years, until 1926, for Lazio.

Between 1926 and 1928, after changing clubs, Fulvio Bernardini was active for Ambrosiana-Inter , now known as Inter Milan . For Inter, Bernardini brought it to a total of 58 games in the Italian championship with 27. At that time, before the establishment of Serie A , it was played in a preliminary round in two groups and a final round. The team led by Fulvio Bernardini reached the final round in both seasons, but it was not possible to seriously intervene in the championship race in 1926/27 or 1927/28.

In the summer of 1928, Fulvio Bernardini joined AS Rome, which had just been formed a year earlier from a merger of several local clubs, and thus returned to his homeland. As a player of the arch-rivals of his home club Lazio, Bernardini not only experienced the establishment of Serie A as a single-track league-like championship, but also the rise of AS Roma to a solid force in Italian football. The team around players like Rodolfo Volk , Attilio Ferraris and Guido Masetti finished second in Serie A 1930/31 , just four points behind the new champions Juventus Turin . In the following years the AS Roma team was able to establish itself in the top group of the Italian elite league. This successful phase in the club history of AS Roma reached its climax with the championship of 1941 under the Hungarian coach Alfréd Schaffer . Fulvio Bernardini did not experience this success as a Roma player . He left the club after 286 league games with 47 goals in 1939.

After that he was under contract with the MATER Roma club for four more years . The club, which only existed from 1933 to 1945, was in Series C and Series B at the time. Bernardini ended his football career at MATER and ended it in 1943 at the age of 37. At times, in addition to his activity as a player, Fulvio Bernardini was also the coach of MATER and thus started his later, very successful coaching career at this club as a player- coach .

National team

Between 1925 and 1932, Fulvio Bernardini played a total of 26 games in the Italian national football team as a player from Lazio, Inter and AS Roma . His first international match was on March 22, 1925 in Turin in a 7-0 victory over France . About seven years later, Fulvio Bernardini's national team career ended on October 28, 1932 in Prague in a 2-1 defeat against Czechoslovakia .

During his career in the Italian national soccer team, Fulvio Bernardini was part of the team that represented their home country at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam . The Italian team reached the semi-finals with players like Adolfo Baloncieri , Angelo Schiavio and Virginio Rosetta , where they lost 3-2 against the large Uruguayan team around José Leandro Andrade . A little later, with an 11: 3 win against Egypt, third place was achieved.

Coaching career

Beginning in Rome, Reggina and Vicenza

Fulvio Bernardini worked as a player-coach at MATER Roma from 1939. However, nothing is known about the exact duration of his engagement with the now forgotten club.

After the end of the Second World War and the resumption of gaming in Italy, liberated from fascism , Fulvio Bernardini held the post of head coach of his old club AS Roma from 1949. However, the success here was kept within narrow limits, the Roma played the entire season of Serie A 1949/50 against relegation. After a series of negative results, Fulvio Bernardini was after the 35th match day and a 1: 2 defeat at bottom of the table AC Venice , standing on a relegation zone, dismissed and replaced by Luigi Brunella. With one win and one defeat as well as a 2: 6 bankruptcy at AC Milan, this was able to prevent the relegation of AS Roma after all, the team finished 18th in the table, two points ahead of the first relegated AS Bari .

After his first coaching station was not exactly marked by success, Fulvio Bernardini went to third division AS Reggina , where he just managed to stay in the Girona D in Serie C 1950/51 and ended up in 13th place. Then the paths of Bernardini and AS Reggina parted again.

In the summer of 1951, Fulvio Bernardini was coach of Lanerossi Vicenza in Serie B. In Vicenza , Bernardini worked for two years. In his first season, tenth place in the table was placed in the secured midfield of the second highest Italian division. The situation was different in Bernardini's second year as the responsible coach of Lanerossi Vicenza. After a weak start to the season, the coach was relieved of his post after the 17th match day and a 2-0 defeat at AC Monza Brianza and replaced by Umberto Menti. But even under the new head coach, Vicenza's performance did not improve significantly, and Menti was dismissed only four game days later. Only Vicenza's third coach of the season, Pietro Spinato, created an improvement in the sporting situation. At the end of Serie B 1952/53, the class was still held in twelfth place, five points before the first relegated, the US Siracusa .

First and second places with the Fiorentina

The ACF Fiorentina was at the beginning of the fifties a steadily in the top third of the tables to be found club, which was not able to seriously and permanently intervene in the title fight. In the 1952/53 season they ended up in seventh place in the table; The years before gave a similar picture. In this situation, nothing changed when Fulvio Bernardini took over the Fiorentina in 1953 as head coach. In the first season under the leadership of the previous Vicenza coach, the Florence team finished fourth, seven points behind the new and old Italian champions Ambrosiana-Inter. The ACF Fiorentina ended the season 1954/55 with nine points separating the team from AC Milan, which won the championship.

In the 1955/56 season , the ACF Fiorentina under coach Fulvio Bernardini managed to provide a big surprise. For the first time after the end of the war, a team that is not based in Turin or Milan managed to win the Italian championship. The team around players like goalkeeper Giuliano Sarti , midfielder Giuseppe Chiappella and Argentine striker Miguel Montuori finished first in Serie A with a comfortable twelve point lead over previous year's champions AC Milan. Bernardini's team was by far the best defense in the league; only twenty goals were conceded in 34 league games. With only one defeat in the entire season (this happened on the last day of the match at CFC Genoa , when the championship was already decided), they also set a record for the fewest defeats in a season, which was only set in the later 1970s by the AC Perugia under Ilario Castagner should be outbid. In general, winning the title in 1956 represented the first major triumph in the history of ACF Fiorentina - before that, the greatest success was probably the cup victory in 1940 - and at the same time it was the starting point for an era of the club that was characterized by both national and international successes.

As the Italian football champion from 1956, the ACF Fiorentina was eligible to compete in the 1956/57 European Cup . After victories over IFK Norrköping from Sweden , Grasshopper Club Zurich from Switzerland and Red Star Belgrade from Yugoslavia, they reached the final. In the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu of Madrid , however, retained the famous white ballet of Real Madrid , where under coach José Villalonga Llorente , among others, like the captain and later successful coach Miguel Muñoz , France's top players Raymond Kopa and the great Alfredo Di Stéfano acted with 2: 0 gained the upper hand and prevented a Fiorentine title win. It was not until four years later that ACF Fiorentina won the first and to this day only international title by winning the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1960/61 .

At the league level, the years after winning the title were marked by a number of second places. Starting the season as defending champions, they had to be content with second place in Serie A 1956/57, six points behind AC Milan. Something similar happened to the Fiorentina in the following season, when they started again as one of the title favorites, this time Juventus Turin had to give way and were again runner-up. In 1959 and 1960, two more runners-up championships followed, so that between 1957 and 1960 they came in four second places in a row - a record that has never been achieved in Italy's elite league.

Fulvio Bernardini left the ACF Fiorentina in the summer of 1958 after five extremely successful years, in which he made a significant contribution to the fact that the club from Tuscany could establish itself permanently in the upper reaches of Italian football and land its first important successes. Bernardini signed a contract with league rivals Lazio Rome for the new season .

Lazio and the cup success in 1958

At Lazio Rome, Fulvio Bernardini took over as the successor to Dino Canestri a middle class club that, although always in Serie A, was far from old successes from the time when Bernardini was an active player here. It is therefore quite astonishing what success Bernardini was able to celebrate with Lazio. In 1958, a cup competition was held in Italy for the first time in fifteen years. In this, Lazio played a good game in the preliminary round, still under Bernardini's predecessor, and came first in front of AS Roma, US Palermo and AC Napoli . In September 1958, the quarter-finals continued, and at Lazio Rome, Fulvio Bernardini, a new coach sat in the coaching bench. Against Valdagno Calcio , a club that has now completely disappeared from the scene, the Laziali were able to prevail with 2: 1. In the semifinals, Juventus Turin was one of the best Italian teams of the time. But against Lazio Roma Fulvio Bernardinis Juve could not assert themselves and lost 2-0, while ACF Fiorentina prevailed 4-2 against FC Bologna in the second semi-final game . So it came in the final of the duel between Lazio and ACF Fiorentina. With a goal from Maurilio Prini, the Lazio team around players like Francesco Janich , Humberto Tozzi and Roberto Lovati managed to beat Fiorentina 1-0 and secure the first Coppa Italia after the end of the Second World War.

At the league level, however, Fulvio Bernardini's involvement with Lazio was crowned with little success. In the Serie A 1958/59 they finished twelfth and thus ranked in the middle of the field. They didn't have to fight relegation throughout the season, but they weren't able to get into higher-up table regions either. A similar picture emerged in the following season. Also in 1959/60 , Lazio finished twelfth after all match days and thus again a place in the table in the secured midfield. However, things went differently in the 1960/61 season . From the first nine league games, including two 4-0 defeats against local rivals AS Roma and ACF Fiorentina, Lazio only scored two points. After the ninth matchday of the season, coach Fulvio Bernardini was relieved of his post shortly after a 2-1 defeat at AC Padua , his successor was Enrique Flamini on an interim basis before the English coaching legend Jesse Carver took over, but the club was not before relegation could save.

Successful years in Bologna

Under coach Federico Allasio , FC Bologna finished Serie A in 1960/61 in tenth place in the table. In general, the club has only been in the midfield in recent years, albeit in its upper part. The successful years of the then AGC Bologna, which had won six Italian football championships in 1925, 1929, 1936, 1937, 1939 and 1941, seemed far away. But after the war there hasn't been much to get for the club from the Stadio Littoriale .

Fulvio Bernardini was unemployed for a year after leaving Lazio. In the summer of 1961 he received an offer from FC Bologna, who was looking for a successor to Allasio and who finally found him in Fulvio Bernardini. With the new coach, the long-missed success returned to Bologna . In the first year under Bernardini's aegis, Bologna was in a respectable fourth place after all match days; In the end, eight points were missing for AC Milan, which was able to secure the championship. The same placement was able to achieve the team of FC Bologna in the following season when they finished fourth again at the end of the season; Bernardini's team was seven points short of the new Italian champions Inter Milan. The 1963/64 season was all about the duel between FC Bologna and Inter Milan . The FC Bologna Fulvio Bernardinis, who with players such as the Dane Harald Nielsen , the German Helmut Haller and the Italian Giacomo Bulgarelli , was concerned about an attractive style of play, was opposed to Inter Milan, overseen by the Argentine Helenio Herrera , which in the 1960s with players like Giacinto Facchetti , Tarcisio Burgnich and Mario Corso became the epitome of bad, unsightly football. After 34 match days, both teams were tied at the top of the table. Since the better goal difference of FC Bologna was not taken into account at the time, a decider had to decide on the Italian champions of the 1963/64 season. In this, the FC Bologna sat on June 7, 1964 in the Roman Olympic Stadium after goals from Facchetti (own goal) and Harald Nielsen with 2-0 and secured the championship. This first national title win was the first for the club in over twenty years and the first after the war. To date, it is the last notable title win for Bologna FC, apart from the cup wins in 1970 and 1974.

Starting the season as defending champion, FC Bologna was unable to match the performances shown in the previous season in Serie A 1964/65 . At the end of all game days, there was only a disappointing sixth place in the table, twenty points behind title holder Inter Milan. The end came very early in the European Cup. The adventure of the National Champion Cup against the Belgian representative RSC Anderlecht was over in the first round . After the first and second leg it was 2-2. The fact that Anderlecht had scored an away goal in contrast to Bologna did not count at the time. Neither side managed to score in the playoff, and it was a goalless draw after extra time. As a result, the away goals rule, now an integral part of European Cup games, was still applied and sealed the end of Bologna FC.

Fulvio Bernardini's tenure at FC Bologna ended after four years with the end of the 1964/65 season. He was succeeded by the Argentine Luis Carniglia , who was able to lead Bologna to the runner-up in his first year as a coach.

Further positions at Sampdoria and Brescia

In the summer of 1965, Fulvio Bernardini succeeded Giuseppe Baldini as coach of Sampdoria Genoa . With the Genoese, however, he did not achieve nearly as much success as he did with Fiorentina and FC Bologna. Already in his first season as coach of Samp you had to start third from last in Serie A in 1965/66 in the second division. Nevertheless, Sampdorias club leadership stuck to coach Bernardini and was rewarded; in the following second division season they were sovereign first and secured direct promotion. With tenth place in the following Serie A season you could deliver a result that was quite respectable for a climber. After the relegation was more or less easily ensured with placements in the lower midfield of the table in 1968/69 , 1969/70 and 1970/71, Fulvio Bernardini and Sampdoria Genua parted ways in the summer of 1971. As in Florence and Bologna before, the coach was unable to turn a middle-class club into a team that can play in the Serie A title fight.

Fulvio Bernardini was the new coach of the second division Brescia Calcio for the 1971/72 season , where his work had the goal of leading the former first division back into Italy's elite league. However, this requirement failed very thoroughly in Serie B 1971/72 , after all match days they only occupied a disappointing twelfth place in the table. There was no improvement in the following season either; with seventeenth place the relegation was only avoided by one place and only because of the better goal difference compared to AC Mantova . After that, Brescia Calcio separated from Fulvio Bernardini.

Italian national coach

After the Italian national football team at the 1974 FIFA World Cup in Germany had failed in the preliminary round, came for the 1967 reigning coach Ferruccio Valcareggi the corner. He was succeeded by Fulvio Bernardini and experienced his last position as a football coach. Under the aegis of Fulvio Bernardinis, however, the national team's successes were limited. The qualification for the European Football Championship 1976 in Yugoslavia was missed as third in the group behind the Netherlands and Poland and before Finland; only the first in the table qualified for the championship.

In general, as the Italian national coach, Fulvio Bernardini was responsible for a generation change in the national team. The old forces of the dreaded Catenaccio were getting on in years, could no longer call up their achievements from the late 1960s and ended their careers. During Bernardini's tenure, new players made it to the pillars of the national team. Examples are Giancarlo Antognoni from ACF Fiorentina, Gaetano Scirea from Juventus Turin and Francesco Graziani from Torino Calcio . Bernardini's tenure was characterized by the frequent use of players from clubs that are not based in the football metropolises of Turin and Milan. This fact is characteristic of the coaching career of Fulvio Bernardinis, who - although very successful - only worked for smaller clubs from the province and never found its way into the establishment in Turin and Milan.

In 1975 the national team time of Fulvio Bernardini ended. He was succeeded by Enzo Bearzot , who led Italy to the world championship title in 1982 during his tenure.

Retirement

After Fulvio Bernardini had to give up the office of the Italian national coach, he worked from 1977 to 1979 as general manager at his old club Sampdoria Genoa, which had since slipped into Serie B. However, the return to excellence did not succeed during this time.

In 1979, Bernardini had to give up his position as General Manager of Genoas because he fell ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , an incurable nervous disease. Fulvio Bernardini died of the disease on January 13, 1984 in Rome . He was 78 years old.

successes

As a player

• Bronze medal at the Summer Olympics :

1928 in Amsterdam

• European National Team Cup :

1927-1930

As a trainer

• Italian champion :

1955/56 with the ACF Fiorentina

1963/64 with FC Bologna

• Italian cup winner :

1958 with Lazio Rome

• Series B :

1966/67 with Sampdoria Genoa

• Coppa Grasshoppers :

1952–1957 with the AFC Fiorentina

• Seminatore d'oro :

1955/56 as coach of the ACF Fiorentina

Trivia

• As an active, Fulvio Bernardini not only played in the position of a midfielder, but also acted as a goalkeeper .
• Fulvio Bernardini has been a member of the Hall of Fame of Italian Football since 2011.
• In 2012 he became one of the first eleven players to become a member of the newly established Hall of Fame of AS Roma.
• The AS Roma training center in Trigoria bears his name today.

Web links

• Fulvio Bernardini in the database of weltfussball.de
• Bernardinis profile (PDF; 79 kB)
• enciclopediadelcalcio.it Data on his playing career
• figc.it list of his international matches
• Bernardini's biography

Individual evidence

1. ↑ rsssf.com Olympic Games 1928
2. ↑ storiedicalcio.org Florence under Bernardini
3. ↑ rsssf.com Coppa Italia 1958
4. ↑ postadelgufo.it Bologna's master season 1963/64 ( Memento of the original from March 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ taziopeschera.blogsport.de ALS for soccer players
6. ↑ storiedicalcio.org Bernardini goalkeeper
7. ↑ asroma.it Hall of Fame of AS Roma