Vanni Sartini’s back coaching after a year in the football wilderness and he's ready to win trophies.
“I’m not trying to convince you to be a vegetarian,” says Vanni Sartini with a smile, minutes after being minted the new head coach and general manager of the Halifax Wanderers, a football club located on the hard edge of the North Atlantic.
“I tried vegetarianism as a challenge, in the beginning, and then I felt okay and that’s the reason why I kept being a vegetarian. There’s a lot of dishes in Italy that you can do. Hopefully we can celebrate a Wanderers trophy with you cooking a pasta alla norma!”
Sartini, 49, seems his old self: as sharp as Shakespeare’s Mercutio and deeply passionate about the topic he’s discussing, be it food, travel but especially football. It’s that passion which pulled him to the Vancouver Whitecaps in 2019. And it’s that same passion, nurtured as a young boy who adored Fiorentina’s Giancarlo Antognoni and that roared during Florence’s celebrations following gli Azzurri’s 1982 World Cup triumph, the cobbled streets echoing with Medici footsteps and Italian chants, which drew him to the Canadian Premier League (CPL) and Halifax.
His recruitment is a statement for both a club and a league with big ambitions who have yet to deliver. Wanderers president and founder Derek Martin made it clear Sartini’s expectations are shiny in nature.
But it’s easy to forget, with Sartini happily surrounded by a dozen media outlets, that the Italian coach is coming out of the football wilderness. He was fired by the Whitecaps in 2024 and spent this past year without a club. It was, Sartini says, the first year of his life without football to anchor him.
“I realized I really love this, I realized I need (football) more than I thought,” he explains when asked what he’d learned from his time away. “Of course, there’s the routine, going to games, but what I really missed was being part of a team. I really love being part of a team.”
His unemployment was also highlighted by an incredible Whitecaps campaign which saw his former side climb to the Concacaf Champions Cup and MLS Cup finals, not to mention hoisting a fourth consecutive Voyageurs Cup as winners of the Canadian Championship. He helped the Whitecaps win the competition in 2022, 2023 and 2024 but they never reached the heights they achieved this year under Jesper Sørensen. The Italian left Vancouver with a record of 57-51-39.
Sartini says his departure from the club, and its subsequent success, was good for both parties.
“I was really proud to see a lot of the guys I personally backed or gambled on or invested in reach that level. The development of guys like Tristan Blackmon,” he says, pointing his right hand to the sky, “went like this. Sebastian Berhalter developed like this. Yohei Takaoka developed like this. I was really happy for their development.
“I’m not unhappy to admit it was also painful, too, the fact that I wasn’t there. I thought: ‘Okay, now they’re at the great ball’ and I basically brought them from the house and drove them there. But I’m not there to enjoy the big party but I think that’s human.”
Time has dulled his grief and given way, like the ruler of Verona at the end of Romeo and Juliet, to epiphany: it was time for a change in how he manages.
“In 2025, it doesn’t make sense if someone comes to you and says: ‘This is my football, this is my style.’ It doesn’t make sense. I think you need to be able to play a different style, have a different methodology sometimes, mix it up, in order not to become stale. Every team needs to change a little bit,” says Sartini.
So, why the CPL?
The Italian made several huge decisions in the last few weeks as he walked away from possible MLS positions or a European return. Instead, Sartini explains, he’s decided to commit to coaching in Canada, looking to repay a debt he feels he owes to a country which changed his life. The Wanderers, of course, will be looking to turn that debt into silverware as they continue to search for their first trophy in club history. They’ve struggled in the post-season to meet expectations, falling to York United FC in penalties in the first round of the playoffs in October. Sartini is expected to guide them to the heights they’ve never achieved.
Sartini also says he had conversations for positions with Canada Soccer but chose club football on the East Coast as he liked the project and the opportunity to build something as coach and architect. He adds he’s focused, after a year of reflection far from the touchline, on enjoying the moment as much as he does waking at 5:00 a.m. to watch Fiorentina or his memories of his hometown following Italy’s World Cup victory.
"I hope that I’m going to be enjoying the moment of the thing instead of being led by the situation,” he says. "Canada changed my life, particularly the Whitecaps, but Canada did in every sense. Economically, in terms of recognition, in terms of being a public persona and I’m really happy it happened here.
"The (Wanderers), I would say, has done pretty well the last few years. Now, it's just a little bit of the last steps and hopefully we're going to do it. That's why we decided to come here."
Now, he’ll have to put his learnings to use in a new league but one that is very much happy to have a coach, not to mention a persona, of his stature. Haligonians would certainly rejoice in swapping out donairs for eggplant pasta for a trophy of any kind.
Further reading:
Josh Healey
Josh Healey
Josh Healey
Cover Photo Credit: Halifax Wanderers FC
