Sport and Time: two closely linked elements, “Le temps est mouvement”, he who hesitates is lost.
This is why, for those of us that love watches and football, today’s meeting is a special moment to share and experience two great passions with someone who represents them both at the highest level: Mister Roberto Mancini, an exceptional footballer and coach but also a sophisticated connoisseur of timepieces, enough to sign two crazy Richard Mille watches.
Presentations might look superfluous and risk being necessarily synthetic. The “Mancio”, a phenomenal player, made his debut in Serie A with Bologna in 1981 and then continued a sublime career in the midfields of Sampdoria, Lazio and Leicester City. Years of play in which he has collected victories and trophies like few others. Taking off his football gears, he becomes one of the best coaches in the world (Inter, Manchester City, Galatasaray) up to the lead of the Italian national team with the victory in the last European championship.
Now, I would say that we have dwelt enough so we let you get to the heart of the interview with the Coach!
Benedetta Valcastelli: Mister Mancini, first of all thank you for being here with us to share our passion for watches, a world that has always been linked to sport. “Only through time can time be conquered”, said the poet Thomas Eliot. The link between time and winning performances is inherent and essential in sport. In Roberto Mancini’s life, in his prestigious career, how important is timing?
Roberto Mancini: Each one of us is made up of time, it’s up to us to make the best of it, it is the only chance we have and the worst thing we can do, as far as I’m concerned, is to waste this chance.
BV: How and when was the passion for watches born for Mancini? Is it innate or is it a coup de foudre that has taken place over the years?
Roberto Mancini: I’ve always had a passion for watches, for beautiful ones! I don’t think it’s innate, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve always appreciated a beautiful watch as an important element for a classy outfit.
BV: 2013 saw the birth of the collaboration with the prestigious Richard Mille brand, through the model RM 11-01 Roberto Mancini. In 2019 the wonder is repeated with the RM 11-04 model. How did this extraordinary partnership come about?
Roberto Mancini: Richard Mille watches embody what I love most: quality, class and sport. The quality of the materials with which his watches are made are known to all, it is one of the reasons why they are so precious, but the class of his sports line is what won me over the most.
BV: The latest model, the RM 11-04, has become legendary because it accompanied us to the last (winning) European Championship. In addition to the proudly patriotic look, we were struck by the sophisticated mechanics with the dedicated dial for monitoring the two 45-minute game times, minutes of added and any overtime. Combined with the use of the flyback chronograph, it is a monstrous performance watch. How has your experience as an athlete and as a coach influenced the design of this sophisticated watch?
Roberto Mancini: The perfection with which the mechanisms of this model are assembled and highlighted is something special; it is a set of steps combined with skill that through the passage of time lead to an exceptional result. Here’s how I hope I have influenced the design of this watch.
BV: You, who have the privilege of wearing it, and having seen it born, what do you admire most about this timepiece, what is the characteristic that you notice and look for first and foremost in a watch?
Roberto Mancini: Of this model I mainly admire, as I said before, its link with the unforgettable experience of the Europeans. What I notice and look for in a watch is the ability, through its class and beauty, to distract me from the incessant flow of time and to make me dwell mainly on beautiful things.
BV: Mancini triumphs at the final of the 2020 European Championships with the RM 11-04 model on his wrist; Rafa Nadal grabs the last Australian Open with a brilliant RM 35-03: is there also a “superstitious” link with the watch, which takes on the role of good luck charm in moments of maximum tension?
Roberto Mancini: I don’t believe much in superstition but I like to believe that luck favors the bold, and we must admit that these watches have something very bold!
BV: As we said, there is an intimate link between time and football. A player must have a sense of time, also in terms of pace of play, precision, speed of movement, coordination. Some players shoot “first intention”, others have a slow, loosey pace (Socrates, but Maradona himself in part): today, but also in the past, who is the player who most embodies the sense of time according to you?
Roberto Mancini: Francesco Totti. In my opinion, he mastered perfectly the playing times, the perfection of his throws proves it, especially the long ones that ended exactly on the footballer’s legs. Not to mention his famous “cucchiaio” (Panenka kick). If you don’t have the sense of time, 2 times out of 3 goes on the hands of the goalkeeper.
BV: During football matches all of us, as spectators, look at the clock very often, hoping that time will pass quickly, if our team is winning or trying to stop the clock, if instead we are losing. Therefore, we can only imagine what a watch really means for the coach and for the players, when a second is enough to change a match… Coach, how many times during the game do you “turn” to the clock? Is there an episode or an anecdote that you want to tell us?
Roberto Mancini: Usually I’m so caught up in what happens on the pitch that I don’t often look at the time, but I don’t deny that especially towards the end of the 90th minute, a closer look at the clock happens. As it happened in the European final, but when the referee whistled the end of regulation time and I knew we would go to penalties, time stopped and the rest was a series of timeless emotions.
BV: We at IWS, as watch enthusiasts, are interested in calibers, mechanisms, complications… but basically we are hopeless romantics and we are convinced that every watch is linked to an emotion. Would you like to tell us a memory from his life, personal or professional, linked to the clock?
Roberto Mancini: The victory of the Premier League with Manchester City in which in the extra time we scored the decisive goal not of a match but of the award of the Premier in 2012. It is from this experience that the Richard Mille Extra Time model was born
Thanks for following us up to here guys, now we Italians have to give all our support to the Coach and the Azzurri during the World Cup play-offs!
If you want to know more about the collaboration between Richard Mille and Roberto Mancini, visit the official website of the Maison.
