Vittorio Pozzo: football immortal tempered in the trenches

Key Highlights

• But long before he masterminded the Azzurri’s twin triumphs, Pozzo was a young officer enduring the brutal realities of the first world war.
• Pozzo’s experiences in the trenches from 1915 to 1918, by his own admission, forged the discipline, resilience and leadership that defined his coaching philosophy. Born in Turin in 1886, Pozzo fell in love with football while watching Manchester United in his youth.
• By 1911 he was back in Italy, helping found Torino FC and managing the club’s early teams.
• When Italy entered the war in May 1915, the 29-year-old volunteered immediately as a lieutenant in the 1st Alpini Regiment, elite mountain troops specialised in high-altitude combat. Pozzo was thrust into the Dolomites along the Isonzo River front, a jagged hellscape of sheer cliffs, glaciers and perpetual fog.
• “The mountains were not romantic; they were murderers,” Pozzo wrote in his autobiography, La Mia Vita.