WHILE I’ve not found a direct link between Brighton and Europa League last 16 opponents AS Roma, there is an indirect one via Roberto De Zerbi’s assistant, Andrea Maldera.

Maldera’s uncle Aldo – a left-sided full-back or midfielder who was in the Italy squad at the 1978 World Cup – spent three years playing for Roma between 1982 and 1985.

The majority of his career was spent at AC Milan but as well as Roma he also played for Bologna and Fiorentina and won 10 caps for his country.

Maldera won Serie A with them in 1983 – only the second time they’d won the Scudetto with a 41-year gap in between.

Nicknamed the Giallorossi after the club’s kit colour of carmine red and golden yellow (that’s how it is described!), the club’s official history gives Aldo a special mention.

“The team put together by Nils Liedholm turned out to be a perfect machine: an impenetrable defence with pillars such as Tancredi, Vierchowod, Nela and Maldera, an admirable midfield with Di Bartolomei, Falcao, Ancelotti and Prohaska and an explosive attack with striker Pruzzo and winger Bruno Conti.”

Before you ask, yes, that was Carlo Ancelotti, later a successful manager with the likes of AC Milan, Chelsea, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich.

Brighton’s likeable assistant manager (pictured above), who was thrust into the media spotlight in early February 2024 when De Zerbi was absent following dental surgery, didn’t follow in Aldo’s playing footsteps, nor his dad Luigi, a centre-back who won the European Cup with Milan in 1969. Another uncle, Attilio, was also a professional at Milan, and later coached the club’s youth players.

Born in Milan on 18 May 1971, although young Andrea went through Milan’s academy system, his playing days were in lower leagues of Italian football with Leffe.

It was as a coach that he found his niche, starting out with Milan’s under-19s and then stepping up to be technical coach for the first team.

He worked under Massimiliano Allegri when they won the league title in 2010-11 and the Italian Supercup. And De Zerbi need look no further than his no.2 for someone with experience of European football because Maldera was part of Milan’s set-up when they reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League in 2012, where they lost to Barcelona. They’d beaten Arsenal 4-3 over two legs in the previous knock-out round.

Maldera reverted to head of video analysis for the under-19s after Filippo Inzaghi took charge in 2014 and the following year linked up with former Milan and Chelsea striker Andriy Shevchenko as head of analysis for the Ukraine national team.

It was in Ukraine that De Zerbi and Maldera talked together a lot about Ukrainian players and the assistant explained a little more of their background ahead of Brighton’s February game versus Spurs.

“My father was his coach when Roberto was in the academy of AC Milan and I worked for a lot of seasons at AC Milan and after that I worked with the national team of Ukraine.

“We spent a lot of time on the phone talking tactics because for me he’s one of the best coaches in this moment. When he was a coach at Foggia or Sassuolo, I was working at AC Milan and we spoke a lot about football and I studied his idea a lot.

“When he went to Shakthar Donetsk we spoke about the Ukrainian players and we always had a big discussion about football. Two years ago he changed some people on his technical staff, he called me and I was very happy.

“For me it’s a dream. I am 53 but I am young for a second time with him and working in the Premier League. Roberto he has a big energy, a big passion, he involves you a lot. I become younger with him.”

Another big fan of De Zerbi is former Brighton player Andrea Orlandi, who first saw the head coach at work when he was in charge of Italian third tier side Foggia. Although born in Barcelona, Orlandi’s parents were both Italian: a Juventus-supporting dad and an AC Milan-supporting mum!

He was winding down his playing career in Italy’s Serie B with Novara when he first saw De Zerbi taking training sessions. He told the Albion podcast in November 2023: “When you saw the clips of his Foggia team play, you knew the coach was going to be amazing. Then he went to Benevento and Sassuolo. In Serie A he was able to play a style of football that they would usually say no to – “this isn’t how you should play” – attacking and looking after the ball.

“In Italy, 80 per cent of the teams play the same style; the same pattern of play ‘give the ball to the wing-back and he will run…’ every team does the same.

“By being provocative at times is how he became successful at Sassuolo.”

There can be little doubt De Zerbi will feel he has an incentive to get one over on Roma because in 2021 the Giallorossi pipped his eighth-placed Sassuolo side to UEFA Conference League qualification on a narrow two-goal difference; both sides having finished the Serie A season on 62 points – six points behind sixth-placed Lazio.

Continuing his appreciation of Albion’s head coach, Orlandi said: “He’s a fantastic motivator and coach, he’s the next big thing in football. It’s great to have him at the club and hopefully Albion will be able to keep him for a long while. He’s impressed me, but he has probably gone beyond my early expectations.”

De Zerbi’s qualities as a coach are something Orlandi says were a part of the Italian’s makeup as a player. “He as a player was a number ten, he was left-footed player and he had this magic about him, they would call him anarchic. Managers wouldn’t play him because ‘he doesn’t fit the system’ and he probably thought, ‘well, I am going to be a coach and I am going to be different.’

“He was different as a footballer, he has the same magic and charisma in coaching.”

Although De Zerbi was on AC Milan’s books as a young player, the majority of his playing days were spent with lower league clubs in different regions of Italy.