Farioli: “I was a very poor goalkeeper, really poor” | OneFootball

Francesco Farioli swapped the press room for the more intimate register of memory and opened up about the path that took him from a fascination with the sky to Philosophy, and from the goalmouth to the bench. In a talk in which he revisited his student life and the way football intersected with that journey, the FC Porto coach spoke about detours, decisive encounters, and the courage to change direction. Along the way, he poked fun at himself and assured everyone: “I was a very bad goalkeeper.”

At a time of constant demands on coaches, Farioli appeared far from tactical talk and close to biography. Francesco Farioli went back to his formative years to explain a simple but central idea: neither are linear paths mandatory, nor does an initial mismatch with a path mean the destination is wrong.

Asked to speak about his journey as a student, about whether football or Philosophy came first, and about the origins of the thesis with which he finished his degree, Farioli responded like someone piecing together an old map. The starting point, he said, was very far from where he is today.

“First of all, thank you all very much for being here. For me it is a huge pleasure. Not too long ago I was sitting where you are, and when the opportunity comes up to share feelings, history and experiences — not all of them about success, but also about the detours my life and my journey as a student and worker took — I think it can be interesting. That’s why, when I received the invitation, I couldn’t refuse. It is also interesting to see so many people; as you know, our work as coaches involves talking a lot with the media, but our press conferences are not usually this full, especially with the enthusiasm I see on your faces,” he said. “As I said, 15 years ago I was a student who was almost finishing his course of study, but the most interesting part is how or why I decided to study Philosophy. My path as a student and the decisions I made before getting to university were a bit different. My initial expectations and desires were very different from what I ended up doing. And, looking back, we start connecting the dots and finding a logic where it didn’t seem to exist at the beginning.”

The coach then pulled on the thread of childhood and adolescence, when his imagination was tied to space exploration and the scientific disciplines. The change, he explained, did not come from a plan, but from a clash with his own limits and an encounter with philosophical thought.

“When I went to secondary school, my ambition was to become an astronaut or be involved in everything related to that. I watched many films about NASA and became fascinated by what is above our heads. That was the first thing that caught my attention. I wanted to be an engineer working on those things. As you can see, some years later, I am far from that first goal. In the first two years, my results at school were reasonable, mathematics was fine. Then I got to the third year and ‘hit a wall.’ Mathematics, physics, chemistry and everything connected to the scientific world became for me an enemy to fight against. At that time, I came very close to failing the year. Somehow I managed to get over the line and pass,” he explained. “And it was then that, in the Italian system, in the third year of secondary school, we begin studying Philosophy. In the first class we had, our teacher, Emilia Galassi, stood in front of the desk and began reading Epicurus’s ‘Letter to Menoeceus.’ It is the letter about philosophy and the crucial part says that it is never too late nor too early to be a philosopher and to be a student of life, because in the end I think that is what philosophy really means. That was the first contact.”

In Farioli’s telling, Philosophy does not appear as an abstract refuge, but as a new way of asking questions. What began as an escape from the scientific world turned into a more intimate way of looking at the same sky.

The coach then went deeper into the names and moments that fixed that detour in place. Between Epicurus, Socrates and Kant, it was the latter who closed the loop between curiosity about the universe and the need for interpretation.

“Over the years, the other milestone was when we began to approach the life of Socrates, whom we can clearly recognise as one of the great not just thinkers, but human beings who have lived on this planet. And the third moment, which was the literal ‘K.O.’ and when I truly fell in love, was the following year, when we studied Kant. Coming back from a break, I sat down in my place and on the board there was a sentence written that I will say in Italian and then we will translate it: ‘Due cose riempiono il mio animo di ammirazione sempre nuova e crescente, quanto più spesso e a lungo la riflessione si sofferma su di esse: il cielo stellato sopra di me, e la legge morale dentro di mim’ [translation into Portuguese: ‘Two things fill my soul with ever new and increasing admiration: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.’],” he described. “She started from there and, as you can see, it was one of the moments when the dots started to connect. Deep down, I had always had the desire to study what is in the sky from a scientific point of view, and then I realised that you can study the same things with a different approach. I felt that approach was closer to who I am, in the sense that the opportunity for interpretation, discussion and, especially, questions, was what really motivated me.”

There was also a decisive figure in that journey: the teacher who showed him not only content, but a way of passing it on. And it was also there, he suggested, that the idea of leadership he would later carry into football began to emerge.

“Those are three moments, three different thinkers and philosophers. And I cannot forget the role of my teacher, because I fell in love with what she told us, but also with the way she passed that information on to us. Very often, faced with decisions like ‘who do you want to be when you grow up,’ I would say: ‘I don’t know what I want to do, but I know how I want to be, and I would like to be someone close to her,’ because the ability to transfer, communicate and make people passionate about something was what truly changed my way of thinking and living life. I reached the last year of secondary school and it was the moment, as you went through a few years ago, of deciding: ‘if you study economics, you have a 25% chance of finding a job in the first two months.’ We start seeing numbers and percentages. All of that created in me a feeling that pushed me away from that path,” he stressed. “I took my time and said: ‘I don’t really know what to do, but I want to invest in myself. Maybe after three or four years I still won’t have clarity about what I am going to do, but I will try to prepare myself to do whatever it is in the best possible way.’ That was when I decided to choose Philosophy as the first step into adult life.”

The choice, as he tells it, had nothing utilitarian about it. It was instead an act of fidelity to an inner restlessness, the same one that would later force him to change skin within football.

When the conversation moved on to the way university coincided with football and his experience as a goalkeeper, Farioli did not look for glamour or romanticism. He preferred bluntness, with self-irony, to explain why the goal eventually pushed him toward another role.

“On the one hand, I was studying philosophy. On the other, I was a very bad goalkeeper. Very bad indeed. I was doing it professionally, but literally I was not good enough. At a certain point, something happened that I hope you take with you when you leave here: sometimes we meet people who tell us a hard truth that, at that moment, we do not appreciate as much as we should, but which years later takes on another value. That conversation happened when I was 19,” he admitted. “One of my former coaches came to me and said: ‘Francesco, I want to be honest and transparent with you. I see the effort you are making to keep playing, but I don’t believe you can make it. I don’t believe you will be rewarded for the effort. You can drag out your career a little longer, but you will never be a professional player. But I suggest that you start helping me, working with me as a coach, because ever since I have known you — when you were 15 or 16 — you were already a coach in the way you behaved, the way you saw the game and the way you led your teammates.’”

More than a surrender, that moment appears in the story as a revelation. Farioli describes it as a bitter truth in the moment, but a fruitful one from a distance, the kind that changes an entire path without making any noise.

From then on, the road was made of sheer effort, kilometres and the accumulation of roles. The coach recalled a phase in which studying, coaching others and continuing to play all had to fit into the same day.

“It was difficult and it took me some time to process it. For two years, I dropped even further down the ladder — and it was not easy because I was already almost at the lowest level — but I also started working as a goalkeeping coach. It was triple work: in the morning I went to Florence for classes; on the way back I would stop to train one team; a few kilometres later, sometimes without even remembering to change my T-shirt, I would stop to work at a second club; and at 7 p.m. I would go to the other side of Tuscany to keep playing and stay active. I was doing almost 300 km a day. I changed cars a lot in those years! I did it without feeling tired. Compared with what I do now, I think I worked seven times more back then. I had incredible energy,” he said. “Two years later, I had my first opportunity to work at semi-professional level with a first team, in the fourth division, with a salary that could be called a job. In the middle of all that, I was in my final year at university.”

At that intersection of road, classes and pitch, the idea emerged of uniting the two sides of his life. The thesis, it becomes clear, was not an academic whim, but an attempt to give intellectual shape to the place where he was already living.

Farioli then explained how he decided to propose an unlikely topic and how he met resistance before finding space. The episode has the humour of youthful boldness and the stubbornness of someone who already knew, at least, what he wanted to try.

“I had a lot of time to think during the car journeys, with music and reflection, and I said: ‘I have to try to combine these two passions.’ I went to one of the professors I felt was closest to me and said: ‘Good morning, I would like to do my thesis with you.’ Normally it is the professors who give the title or guide the student. I said: ‘I would like to do this thesis: “Philosophy of play, the aesthetics of football and the role of the goalkeeper”’,” he explained. “He took a step back and said: ‘Mr Farioli, let me remind you that we are in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Florence, we are not at La Gazzetta dello Sport,’ which is like O JOGO, or something similar. I had to react quickly and explain the idea. He became curious and gave me time to come back with something more organic. ‘But if I don’t like it, it all goes in the bin and you start from zero,’ he said.”

The coach also stressed that, at the time, the ground was almost untouched. Talking about football and Philosophy as if they belonged to the same field required digging work and a considerable dose of persistence.

“Fifteen years ago it was not common to type ‘football and philosophy’ into Google and find results. I tried to build a chaotic idea into more fluid language. I spent three months sending thousands of emails to professors who might perhaps have a quote or something that touched on the subject. Three months later, the thesis was done, more than 100 pages long. I put it on his desk. He looked at me and said: ‘I told you to come with an idea and you did everything?’ ‘Yes, because you asked me for an organic presentation, so I put everything there,’ I replied,” he recounted. “He asked for time to read it. Four days later, he called me. He had only a few corrections and elements to adjust. And that is how the thesis was born. It generated a lot of curiosity, it was published in various formats and drew attention to a boy who was not a football player, but a ‘crazy’ student for following this path.”

It is a faithful portrait of someone not much given to rigid boundaries: a man who sought to think the game before even leading it at the highest level. And it is also there that one understands how the identity of a coach was maturing before it gained the job title.

In the final movement of the talk, Farioli linked together the stages that led him to the present and left a broader message about failing, adjusting and starting again. Above all, he used his biography to defend reinvention.

“From there on, it was one step after another. From [aerospace] engineer to philosophy student, to semi-professional goalkeeping coach, until reaching Serie A as a goalkeeping coach, with a two-year experience in Qatar in between. When I felt I was at the top or close to it, I decided to change again. At 30, I decided to go to Turkey to try the transition from goalkeeping coach to head coach. I spent six months as an assistant at a small Turkish club and, six months later, I began my career as a head coach. Two clubs in Turkey, a return to Central Europe at Nice, last season at Ajax in Amsterdam and now here in Porto,” he summed up. “A lot of things changed, very quickly, with many changes of direction in my path. The only thing I want to say with this CV I have shared is: do not worry if sometimes you feel lost or feel that you are not on the right path. Follow what you have inside, have the courage or the ‘madness’ to follow your instinct. The only way to achieve something is to accept the fact that you may fail. I always say to players: I demand curiosity and belief. You have to go step by step and know that, if we want to get somewhere, there are 7,000 different ways to do it. The path is not always straight; when it seems straight, an obstacle appears. I believe that humanities students have the ability to reinvent themselves. In my brief experience, there is nothing better than being able to adapt, change and remain constantly open to modifying and adjusting our identity.”

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.