Being a great player does not necessarily mean that you will produce offspring who have your abilities.
Paolo Maldini emulated his father Cesare and went on to have an illustrious footballer while Sandro Mazzola was a great player in his own right like his father Valentino but they are exceptions.
In his respectable career Jordi Cryuff did not achieve the success his father Johan did and the legendary Pele has a son called Edinho, who flopped as a goalkeeper and is now in jail for money laundering.
Another child of a great player who looks set for a career of mediocrity is Andrea Mancini, the youngest son of former Sampdoria and Lazio striker Roberto.
While Roberto started playing professionally as a 16-year-old and went on to have a career that nearly spanned 20 years, Andrea has already become a football journeyman at 23 years of age.
In late March, he signed for MLS club D.C. United, which is owned by Inter president Erick Thohir, but he has not featured in the opening five rounds. This is not odd for Andrea, who has never established himself as a starter for any senior club.
He was a product of the Inter youth system during his father’s first stint as senior coach of the Nerazzurri and he also had a loan spell for the youth team of Monza. After he was released by Inter in 2009, Mancini spent a season in the Bologna primavera.
Manchester City were his next club and he played for the under-21 side in 2010-11 while his father coached the senior team. Andrea played 10 times for the Citizens reserves team, scoring twice and assisting in three other goals.
The season after was filled with two loan spells. He played his first senior game on Novermber 5, 2011, when he appeared for five minutes in Oldham Athletic’s 2-0 defeat to Bury in League One but he only played in two other matches for the English club.
After his sojourn at Oldham, Mancini moved to Alma Juventus Fano, a lower division team from the Marche region in central Italy. Manchester City released him in 2012 but a season with Real Valladolid B in Spain was not fruitful either.
Hungary was his next destination and he spent two seasons in the Eastern European country. Honved were his first club, which featured fellow Italians like Emanuele Testardi, Emiliano Bonazzoli and Arturo Lupoli, and he played 15 games, receiving four yellow cards in all competitions.
For the first half of 2014-15, Mancini had no club but he played two matches for Szombathelyi Haladas after they signed him in the middle of that campaign. Since the end of June 2015, he was without an employer again until D.C. United gave his career a lifeline.
With Roberto Mancini coaching Inter again, it is possible that he might have convinced Thohir to make Andrea sign with one of the Biscione patron’s other clubs. After all, Mancini did coach Inter and Manchester City while his son featured in the youth team.
Now that Andrea is in the MLS, he has followed a slightly similar path Sebastian Giovinco on the basis that he has left Europe before he has reached his 30s but he does not even possess the talent of ‘The Atomic Ant’.
While Roberto Mancini blossomed early at Bologna before spending 15 illustrious years at Sampdoria, having a successful time at Lazio and moving to Leicester City for a small stint, Andrea has not got his career going and it does not look like it will in the near future.
It seems to be a case of not like father, not like son.
