Mancini goes young, Montella goes elsewhere

Roberto Mancini has announced a 34-man Italy squad for the upcoming Nations League fixtures, and nine of those names are new faces, according to Football Italia. Nine call-ups in a single squad list is a quarter of the group turned over in one go. For a manager who's had to answer plenty of questions about Italy's identity since his return, that scale of change points to a squad still being built rather than settled.

The scale of the turnover suggests Mancini isn't just filling gaps left by injury or rotation. Nine new faces in one squad list points to a manager actively widening the pool, giving himself more to work with and more players a look at senior level before decisions harden closer to bigger fixtures.

Montella's Serie A blind spot

Across the fixture list, Vincenzo Montella has gone in the opposite direction with Turkey. His squad for the same Nations League games, which include a meeting with Italy, contains just one Serie A player, per Football Italia. For a country with plenty of talent playing in Italy's top flight, that's a striking number to land on.

The brief reporting doesn't spell out why. It could be injuries clustered around Serie A-based players, it could be form, or it could simply be Montella leaning harder on talent from elsewhere in Europe right now. Whatever the reasoning, a Turkey squad built almost entirely around clubs outside Italy's top division is not the squad anyone would have guessed a few windows ago.

Two managers, two different problems

Mancini's issue right now looks like it's about finding the next wave. Montella's looks more like a squeeze on where his best players are currently playing. Put the two squad lists side by side and you get a neat snapshot of where each national team thinks it's heading into these Nations League fixtures: one manager widening the net, the other apparently fishing somewhere else entirely.

Neither manager has offered detailed reasoning beyond the squad announcements themselves, so the full picture, who exactly the nine new Italy faces are and why Serie A is so thin on the Turkey list, will only become clear once the squads report for duty and team news starts filtering through.