Roberto Mancini claims that Marco Macina was the greatest talent of his time. Unfortunately, things went wrong at every crossroads in the career of the now 58-year-old former attacker. Mancini would eventually become one of the greatest playmakers in the history of Italian football, while Macina would play his last game at the age of 23 and then literally disappear from football. This is the story of a player who was so good that ‘he could have been Lionel Messi’.
It is 1977 when FC Bologna calls up two thirteen-year-old boys for trial training. One comes from Jesi and his name is Roberto Mancini. The other is from San Marino, he plays for Tre Penne and is Marco Macina. They are two strikers who are very talented. Both are taken over by the Emilian club and will play together in the youth of Bologna. “Forward”, says Mancini later. “Technique and personality are important, but not everything. I had quality that God had given me. Once I knew that, I developed a lot through hard work. If I hadn’t, I would have lost myself, just like Macina. He was born in 1964 just like me. He was my teammate in the Bologna academy, was the best in the world in the Under 15 and could have been like Messi. I’ve never seen anyone with his talent, but he didn’t like training and got lost along the way.”
Being compared to Messi is not for everyone. Therefore, it is worth returning to the early 1980s to understand how it is possible to throw away a football career that began at such a high level. At that time, if you ask people who will go the furthest in football, they will all say Macina. He has a lot of talent and also opportunities to make a difference for his team. Mancini and Macina play together in the Bologna youth team for four years, until they are not yet eighteen years old in 1981/82 and are brought into the first team. That’s an unlucky year in which the Rossoblus relegated to Serie B. Mancini still manages to profile himself in that season with nine goals in thirty games. This makes him the best in Bologna that year. These are different stats than Macina, who only comes into action eight times without scoring and struggles to match his level of previous years.
In 2018, after years of being out of the news, Macina and Mancini look back on his debut at Bologna in conversation with San Marino Fixing. “I had to do a trial training for Internazionale, but due to an infection I couldn’t go to Milan. Some time later I did a trial training at Bologna. It was complicated because Mancini and I were under fourteen. Despite the age issue, we were both admitted anyway. We were friends and got on well, also because we were the youngest in Casteldebole. We had different roles. He was a half striker, I was a wing striker. My characteristic was dribbling out an opponent and creating an extra man in midfield. I was the one with the last pass, someone who dribbled out the defender. Together we went through the entire process of the youth academy until we came to the first.”
The missed trial training at Inter is the first unfortunate miss in Macina’s career, as he himself explains in 2015 to Sports live. “What mistakes have I made? It’s hard to talk about that, the lack of luck weighed in at key moments. Actually, as a young player, I should have gone to Inter, not Bologna. That was the last training they did that year, so I went to Bologna. If Inter had taken me my life would have changed. Not that Bologna was not a high level, but Inter is something else. I was a great talent, but in the important moments I was not lucky. If you don’t have that, you won’t get anywhere.” Back to the summer of 1982. Mancini says goodbye to the relegated Bologna and goes to Sampdoria at the age of eighteen, where he would eventually become champion. Mancini and Macina part ways once and for all, who instead stays with Bologna to try to get promoted to Serie A. not yet affiliated to UEFA).
The 1982/83 season is going even worse for Bologna. They change coaches three times, finish seventeenth and are relegated to Serie C1. Macina started fourteen times in that season and scored two goals, but the first problems in his career then started to play. On February 21, 1983, the then general manager Giacomo Bulgarelli sends him a registered letter stating that he will be removed from the team indefinitely. He was seen by members of the company in Club 37, which was against company rules. Club 37 is a famous disco located in Strada Maggiore, in the heart of Bologna. At the end of the season, he is loaned to Arezzo, which is currently active in Serie B. He eventually plays eleven games for the club due to nose surgery. Then Macina goes to Parma in the summer of 1984, with which he is relegated to Serie C. For the then twenty-year-old striker from San Marino, however, it is the best season of his career with three goals in 26 matches. Shortly afterwards it becomes known that he is being watched by Milan, who then take over and immediately rent him on to Reggiana. This is the second decisive crossroads in Macina’s career, he says later Sports live.
“In Parma I did well and in November 1984 Milan bought me, who had an injured attacker in the squad. However, I could not leave because it was not allowed to make two transfers in the same season (he had already switched from Arezzo to Parma, ed.). That is how I arrived at Milan the following year, in 1985. The trainer, Nils Liedholm, adored me. The competition was fierce. There were strikers like Rossi, Hateley and Virdis. If I had gone the year before, I probably would have played more given the injuries they had then. What Liedholm taught me? Not to sound arrogant, but I was a talented player who made actions on intuition. He mainly taught me things in a human way.” Liedholm is very satisfied with Macina. He claims that he is a faster player with the ball at his feet than without the ball. Talent or not, Macina plays little at Milan. The Swedish trainer has several good attackers and the rumors about unprofessional behavior from Macina are becoming more and more persistent. The 21-year-old attacker also has difficulty with the city of Milan, because he has always lived in the province.
On February 20, 1986, Silvio Berlusconi takes over in Milan, where Macina does not get a job. He is loaned to Reggiana in the summer of that year to gain experience in Serie C. He plays 23 games, scoring four goals. Macina therefore has a large share in the third place that is achieved that season. Milan then loaned him again in 1987, this time to Ancona in Serie C. That summer, Macina ran his last preparation for a season. One Sunday, in Ospitaletto, he feels pain in his right knee. After several examinations, the doctors realize that a ligament has been torn. After a complicated operation and a long recovery, the Ancona striker only plays the last games of the season, which would unfortunately also be the last professional games of his short career. “It just looked like a sprain. The knee wasn’t swollen,” Macina says later Sports live. “I could run straight, just not change direction. I just kept training. In December I had an arthroscopy and they discovered a torn collateral ligament. I then had surgery and it was the end of the season. If my knee had caused problems right away, I would have operated faster and I would not have lost three months.”
October 11, 1987. That is the last time Macina takes the field for an official game with a club. He is then 23 years old. Fate has decided that from that moment on everything goes wrong. “In 1988 my contract with Milan expired. There was an opportunity to play in Rimini, so I did a trial training at Lucca. But even economically there were fewer opportunities than in Ancona. So I stopped for a year.” Macina plays his last game in December 1990 for the San Marino national team. He shares a record with Juventus player Massimo Bonini. They are the only two national team players to have played in Serie A. After he hangs up his shoes, Macina leaves the football world completely. He has been working at the tourist office for twenty years now, where you can go for tourist information.
“But no, it’s not true that I ran away from training camps or went to the disco too much,” Macina denies years after his career. La Gazzetta dello Sport. “I had that reputation and went to the disco when the season was over. I am 56 years old, I could admit things now. What I would change? I didn’t do anything wrong. But in that time we may have started looking for the reasons why such talent was wasted. It didn’t fit well into my career. You won’t get anywhere without happiness in life. Errors? I certainly made mistakes. After the injury I still had to come back and prove my worth. I did not accept offers because I hoped for better solutions. I made a mistake and at some point clubs never approached me again. But if you still mention and remember me now, after more than thirty years, it means that I was really worth something. From a technical point of view, I was better than Mancini. He was always the one who said that. At a tournament in Monte Carlo, among the strongest national youth teams of all countries, I won the prize for best player. Until that age I was among the best in the world. I risk coming across as arrogant, but in reality it was.”