Mehdi - The Prince

For a time, Andrea Stramaccioni looked like Italian football's next coaching prodigy. Four years earlier, Pep Guardiola had set the precedent, taking charge of Barcelona almost as a bold gamble after just one season coaching Barcelona B. His rise helped usher in a new wave of coaches in the early 2010s: young, confident and media-savvy, equally at home in TV studios and in the dressing room.

Stramaccioni was handed the Inter job directly from the Primavera, having just won the NextGen Series, the forerunner to the UEFA Youth League. Things went brilliantly at first, then less so, and his time at the club came to a fairly abrupt end. He went on to coach Udinese, Panathinaikos, Sparta Prague and Esteghlal, an Iranian club. Strama also opened an Instagram account for his new adventure, which ended in a rather unusual way. He left the club while they were top of the table, with unpaid wages and an impossible working environment ultimately leading to his departure. There was no interpreter, for example, and even the showers had no running water. Esteghlal's fans were inconsolable. They flooded the only post on the coach's official account, begging him to stay. The post then became a place for fans to exchange opinions about the team's performances and Iranian football in general. Today, seven years later, it has the most comments of any post in Instagram history, and perhaps on the entire internet. Nearly 10 million comments, almost all from Iranian fans using the post to talk about football and everything else, turning it into something resembling a virtual town square from the early days of the internet.