Empoli’s typecast saviour thriving in his latest Mission Impossible

Davide Nicola is used to it by now. He has been compared with Liam Neeson from Taken in as much as he has a very special set of skills. Others have likened him to Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction. The clean-up guy. Then there’s Harry Houdini. A master of escapology. Ethan Hunt, too. Your mission, if you choose to accept it and all that.

When the history of the last decade in Serie A is written, Nicola most likely won’t be identified as the defining coach of his generation in Italy. He has no Scudetti to speak of, no Champions League glory to boast about. YouTube videos dissecting his tactics and proclaiming him a Roberto De Zerbi-esque disruptor don’t exist. Whatever’s attracting millions of views, it isn’t him.

And yet Nicola, with his greying curtains and tracksuits straight out of The Sopranos’ wardrobe, should be in Hollywood. The aforementioned parallels are a reflection of his jobs. Thrillers. Underdog stories. Missions impossible. The magical.

He remains the only coach to keep a team up with 13 points after 24 games. No one thought he could surpass what he did at Crotone. The Pythagoreans were dead and buried this time seven years ago. Players passed on the chance to join them throughout January. They were a lost cause. But Nicola maintained their top-flight status, a miracle he repeated at Salernitana in 2021-22.

The algorithms said the Seahorses were 93 per cent down. “I’ll take the seven per cent,” their sporting director Walter Sabatini said. He hired Nicola and never looked back. Saving teams has become routine for him to the extent that more low-key feats such as the times he ensured Genoa and Torino avoided relegation have all but been forgotten.

Now Nicola is at it again.

“If we’re here to unveil our third coach of the season, it’s clear something has gone wrong,” Empoli sporting director Pietro Accardi said in mid-January. One of the mistakes was not calling Nicola earlier, although where would the fun have been in that? The waterline was at their ankles, not lapping uncomfortably under their noses. The air wasn’t yet thin of oxygen.

Empoli price-in a fight against the drop every year but perhaps didn’t expect to be in so much bother this time around. Last season was their best in seven years, a throwback to when Massimo Maccarone was captain, Leandro Paredes and Piotr Zielinski were in midfield and Marco Giampaolo was on the cusp of the Milan job.

Vultures circled.

Tottenham picked off goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario. His replacement, Elia Caprile, made a costly mistake against Hellas Verona on the opening weekend, tore his ankle ligaments and missed two months. Fabiano Parisi, Empoli’s intrepid full-back, hopped on a motorino and decided Fiorentina’s side of the river Arno was better. Veteran striker Francesco ‘Ciccio’ Caputo, once a guarantee of goals, suddenly looked old and Mattia Destro forgot how to score all over again. It piled pressure on youth internationals such as Matteo Cancellieri and Nicolo Cambiaghi to make the difference.

Empoli went out of the Coppa Italia in the first round to second-division Cittadella, their Paduan equivalent, and became the first team since Padova 29 years ago to be pointless and goalless after the first four league games of the season. A 7-0 defeat to Roma was the biggest in Empoli’s history since Pescara beat them by the same scoreline in 1948. The gruff-voiced Paolo Zanetti lost his job afterwards. “I feel the need to apologise to all our followers,” he said.

Empoli brought back Aurelio Andreazzoli, a man after whom this skill was named, for a fourth spell. An assistant to former Empoli coach Luciano Spalletti before going it alone, Andreazzoli has got Empoli promoted in the past. He’s relegated Empoli in the past. He’s saved Empoli in the past. And this time? Andreazzoli narrowly lost his first game 1-0 to leaders Inter Milan. A first win and goal of the season then followed in a six-pointer against Salernitana (1-0), who swiftly seized the crisis club baton.

In three and a bit months, old man Andreazzoli experienced some good moments.

Empoli upset Fiorentina away 2-0 in the derby and beat champions Napoli 1-0 at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona with a stoppage-time winner from Viktor Kovalenko, but they continued to make scoring goals look tremendously hard. Empoli drew blanks in eight of their first 10 games. When Andreazzoli’s side did find their shooting boots, as was the case against embattled Sassuolo in November, they contrived to lose 4-3 in stoppage time.

The Tuscans were second from bottom and winless in eight games when owner Fabrizio Corsi picked up the phone in mid-January. “We hope Nicola is the right medicine to cure this team,” he said. A miracle cure.

Nicola is unbeaten at Empoli. He switched system to three at the back, a heresy at the Castellani where 4-3-3 is set in stone. He reintroduced Szymon Zurkowski into the team and was rewarded on his debut in the dugout with a hat-trick in a 3-0 win against Monza, a club that has muscled in on Empoli’s turf when it comes to signing some of Italy’s best young talent. A timid, blunt team has scored three goals in three of Nicola’s six games in charge.

Risks have paid off. Days after Empoli became the first team since Inter in September to take points off Juventus in Turin (1-1), the scorer of their long-range equaliser, Tommaso Baldanzi, was sold to Roma. The diminutive Baldanzi figured as arguably Empoli’s most talented and hyped player, but he’d lost his place in the team in October and there was no place for him in Nicola’s 3-5-2.

Empoli reinvested a fraction of the initial €10million (£8.5m; $10.8m) Roma paid for him in a couple of strikers. One was the lumbering Alberto Cerri on loan. The other was M’Baye Niang, a striker who has followed Mario Balotelli around for a decade. They played at Milan back in the day, forming the ‘tridente con la cresta’ — mohawk trio — with Stephan El Shaarawy in the twilight of Silvio Berlusconi’s ownership and, more recently, partnered each other at Adana Demirspor in Turkey, where Niang was scoring a goal every other game.

Just as Nicola has become the first coach in Empoli’s history to go undefeated in his opening six fixtures in Serie A, Niang’s penalties against Salernitana, Fiorentina and Sassuolo made him the first foreign player to score three games running for the club since Opta began collecting data.

Not even crashing his Mercedes G-Class coming back from prayer stopped him this weekend. Niang was back on the pitch doing the business. Late wins away to Nicola’s old club Salernitana (3-1) and then Sassuolo (3-2) cost both Filippo Inzaghi and Alessio Dionisi their jobs. Both must wish he was still available. Empoli are up in 13th, five points clear of the drop zone and this salvezza would rank as another Scudetto in Nicola’s career; a third, epic one.

It raises the question: why is he typecast as a specialist? Isn’t he due consideration for a bigger job? The benches at Milan, Napoli, Roma and even Juventus could be vacant this summer.

Nicola won’t be in the frame in any of those posts. Some will say his face doesn’t fit. But neither did Arrigo Sacchi’s when he went from second-division Parma to Milan. Others will say he failed the intermediary step at Udinese in 2018 and didn’t kick on at Genoa, Torino, Crotone and Salernitana after pulling off great escapes.

It makes him the Jason Statham of Serie A; an actor destined to play the same role in different guises, Fast and Furiously.