Christian Lattanzio is never far from Rome. It guides him as coach of Charlotte FC
Sometime in the early 1980s, a boy named Christian Lattanzio approached a hero named Carlo Ancelotti.
The boy wore an excited, 10-year-old smile. He was with a bunch of his excitable, 10-year-old friends. Lattanzio was probably walking home from the football pitch at his local church, San Camillo de Lellis. He’d often play there from school dismissal to sundown.
Lattanzio breathed football, and Roma was his hometown club, and one of his favorite players on that team was Ancelotti — the spry midfielder who would one day help deliver one of Roma’s three Serie A titles. He was a wonder in Lattanzio’s eyes. A hero.
Ancelotti, meanwhile, leaned on a pair of crutches.
“Where I used to live, there used to be a restaurant (Taverna Flavia) where many football players used to go, and one day, with a couple friends, I met him just outside the restaurant,” Lattanzio recalled to The Charlotte Observer with a smile. “He had crutches because he broke his knee, broke his ligaments, I think. And I remember asking him for an autograph, and he was nice, and he signed, and we were all excited.”
More than four decades have passed since then. Lattanzio, 51, is now the head coach of Charlotte FC.
He’s been everywhere. From England to New York to France to North Carolina. He’s compiled a world-class resume that includes experience with Premier League clubs and all-time great managers. He supervised a late-season resurgence as an interim coach in Charlotte FC’s inaugural 2022 season, and he’s managing some transitional early season struggles in 2023 — his steadfastness springing eternal.
Yet despite everywhere he has been, despite all the time that has passed, memories flood when you ask him about his childhood. Rome will always be held “close to my heart,” he said. It’s what guides him to this day.
He remembers soccer games with rival neighborhoods. He remembers 80,000 people streaming into Stadio Olimpico to catch a glimpse of Roma’s beautiful, innovative, Nils Liedholm-coached brand of football.
“Even now, when I go back and sometimes look at videos of the team,” he said, “it’s crazy how forward they were in their thinking.”
He even remembers a second meeting between him and Ancelloti. This was only a few years ago: Lattanzio was in the academy ranks at Manchester City, and Ancelloti was the head gaffer at Chelsea (and in the throes of one of the greatest coaching careers the sport had ever seen).
In that encounter, Lattanzio told Ancelloti the story of how they first met, and Ancelloti was flattered and amused.
“I must admit,” Lattanzio said with a smile, “I was much more emotional when I met him when I was 10.”
Of course he was.
Back then, Rome was his world. It was all Lattanzio knew.
He didn’t yet know how far his hometown could take him.
Lattanzio’s beginning in coaching
Lattanzio lives by a few mantras. He’s passed many of them on to his son, Marco, and his daughter, Mila, and his Charlotte FC players — who will be looking for their first win or draw when they play at Orlando City on Saturday night.
His big one was probably one he forged on the playgrounds of Rome: “There is no substitute for work.”
Lattanzio’s coaching dream began when he left Rome when he was 25. He had no professional playing career on the horizon, he said, and he’d just finished up his studies at the University of Rome, so he decided to head to England to help an old friend start a “soccer school.”
In England, he practiced his English. He studied the game from a new but familiar point of view. He started earning his UEFA badges, which are essentially credentials that allow coaches to be able to coach at certain levels, and he sent his CV to different clubs, open to any experience anyone was willing to offer.
Soon — around the year 2000, just as the Premier League was starting to ascend as the world’s best league in football — Lattanzio scored some hours at West Ham United. Those hours turned into a part-time job, and then that part-time job turned into his first full-time job as a coach, working in the youth ranks of West Ham.
He stayed at West Ham for seven years and built quite a network there. He soon learned how valuable his Roman roots would be.
“When I was in England, I was invited to many conferences because in Italy, especially, they were very curious about an Italian guy working with an English team at a time when the Premier League was starting to become the best league,” Lattanzio said. “And as you do that, the network grows. You start to know more people.”
More Italian connections would follow.
That included Lattanzio getting hired onto the English National Team staff in 2008 by Fabio Capello, a Pieris, Italy, native. And that also included getting a chance a few years later under Italian legend Roberto Mancini at Manchester City, where Lattanzio worked in the academy ranks.
Lattanzio’s time at Man City connected him with Patrick Vieira, whom Lattanzio then would follow to New York City FC (2016-18) and then OGC Nice (2018-22) as an assistant.
After the 2022 season, as Vieira contemplated his next move, Lattanzio tapped into his network once more. An American friend connected Lattanzio with an agent who set up a meeting with Zoran Krneta, the sporting director of MLS’s newest team.
Krneta and Lattanzio hit it off. Krneta made an offer and would later say that Lattanzio was always his “Plan B” for the head job. And despite how difficult it would be to split ways with Vieira — “Football is a very emotional business, no?” Lattanzio said — he ultimately joined the staff of Charlotte FC as an assistant under Miguel Angel Ramirez in July 2021.
Becoming Lattanzio’s team in Charlotte
If it feels like there were several moments of right-place-right-time serendipity in Lattanzio’s path to Charlotte, it’s because there was. Lattanzio acknowledges it. He’s grateful for it, he said.
But he was nonetheless prepared when the Charlotte FC job unexpectedly became his.
Lattanzio was made interim head coach on May 31, 2022, just a few months into the team’s inaugural season. Ramirez was ultimately fired as a result of reportedly deep discordance between the players and Ramirez — who’d at times used press conferences to explain how Charlotte FC was “screwed” and how he “wasn’t Harry Potter” and couldn’t magically supply a winning roster.
At practice the day after Lattanzio took over, team captain and veteran defender Christian Fuchs said he could feel the relief Ramirez’s absence introduced — and the assurance Lattanzio’s presence brought.
Fuchs retired at the end of 2022 and subsequently joined Lattanzio’s coaching staff.
“He’s a nice person, a caring person,” Fuchs said of Lattanzio. “We are trying to create a family here that is always trying to achieve the best possible, that is ambitious. Just the way he has guided me personally, and the way he’s given me this opportunity as well, it’s amazing.”
It didn’t take long to discern that Lattanzio was much different than his predecessor.
Instead of combative, he was unwavering. Instead of loud and punchy, he was long-winded and professorial. After a loss against Columbus Crew in 2022, one where a MLS rule prevented a few key Charlotte FC players from playing, instead of bashing the league, Lattanzio opted for a larger perspective and went on a minutes-long press-conference detour: “Only football,” he began, “can give you this kind of mixed emotions.”
After a while, players began buying in. It started to become Lattanzio’s team. The team steadied its ship, went through a summer skid, added impact players — and then went on a remarkable late-season run that included a win over one of the best teams in the league, Philadelphia, thanks to a four-goal effort from Daniel Rios.
“It’s a fantastic culture,” Karol Świderski, Charlotte FC’s leading goal-scorer, said after Charlotte’s penultimate match in 2022. “What he does with our group, it’s crazy because how we play before and how we play now, we’ve improved a lot.”
An eventful offseason leading into 2023 played out. Lattanzio signed a two-year deal with an option to extend for 2025 with Charlotte FC, shedding the interim tag after recording eight wins, 10 losses and two draws under his guidance.
Charlotte also added a ton of players — like striker Enzo Copetti, Premier League veteran Ashley Westwood, MLS first overall pick Hamady Diop and former Portland Timber defender Bill Tuiloma.
The team grieved the sudden and tragic death of CLTFC defender Anton Walkes, too, and Lattanzio’s steadfastness flourished once more.
“I’m not going to talk about him in the past tense,” Lattanzio said. “I said to the boys, ‘I’m always going to talk about him in the present tense because I want him to be with us.’ ”
Lattanzio staying steadfast in 2023
It’s still early in Charlotte’s 2023 season, but legitimate questions have since surrounded the club after its 0-3 start.
These questions involve players having to play out of position on the back-line; about attacking-third chemistry; about Lattanzio’s possession-based offensive philosophy; about how quickly key players can return from injury, like Guzman Corujo and Adam Armour and Kristijan Kahlina (goalkeeper).
Lattanzio has acknowledged these questions. He went as far as apologizing to the fans after his team’s 3-0 loss to rival Atlanta United FC, saying, “We will all take responsibility for that. Me first, but then altogether.”
But he’s also remaining steady.
Like he always has.
“I know that the results show differently,” he said, “and I know that I also come from a country that’s very much like the U.S. — where the result is the end of everything, or the beginning of everything. It is everything, in a way.
“But I believe that in my job, and in my coaching staff’s job, we have to look at how the team is progressing, how the team is playing, how the team is creating an identity that will ultimately give us satisfaction.”
It’s not the first time Lattanzio has looked back to Rome to understand where he is. It won’t be the last either.
