A FOOTBALL AND TENNIS TALE
Latin (Catullus 85)
Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
I hate and I love. You may well ask me why.
I don’t know — I only feel it, and it tears me apart.
Catullus was a Roman poet of the late Republic, best known for short, razor-sharp love poems “carmina”, including the two-line “Odi et amo”
In Melbourne, January 2024, something happens that isn’t on the draw sheet. Cobolli beats Kotov, he’s exhausted, and instead of the automatic ritual — fist to the sky, a shout — he lifts his shirt. On his ribs there’s a long line, more captain’s armband than Court 3: «Sei tu l’unica mia sposa, sei tu l’unico mio Amor» (You are my only bride; you are my only love)
It isn’t a gimmick: it’s a message to Daniele De Rossi who, in those very days, returns to Roma as head coach and “puts me in a difficult spot”, Cobolli says — to the point he doesn’t even know how to celebrate.
That line is Roma-supporter to the bone, and a little cryptic too: AmoR, written like that, is Roma backwards, they explain. It’s a declaration of belonging and, at the same time, an ID card: Cobolli has never pretended to be neutral. When he’s asked to choose between Totti and De Rossi, he doesn’t make up pub-league rankings: he takes both, with a distinction that already reads like a one-line editorial: De Rossi “idol”, Totti “legend”.
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To understand where this hunger for symbols comes from, you have to go back, before tournaments and rankings, to when the boy really was someone else: a right-back in Roma’s academy, brought up “under Bruno Conti”, and with a friend who, in his story, isn’t a cameo but a fixed point: Edoardo Bove.
Bove (born 2002) is a midfielder developed at Roma and a friend of Cobolli’s from their academy days: in December 2024 he suffered a cardiac arrest on the pitch (Fiorentina–Inter), he survived, and in 2026 he restarted from England, at Watford.
Here the bend is sharp: football trains you for the group, for “we’ll sort it out together”. Tennis doesn’t. Tennis leaves everything on you: what you do well and what you mess up, the good days and the crooked ones. Cobolli, who off court looks like a team guy, on court has made a job out of solitude.
Bove stays off the court but inside the story. In a long interview Cobolli calls him “my hero. A brother”, wants him close on the big days, takes him to Wimbledon, describes him like a mirror:
“I see myself in him all the time.”
They’re unusual words for a tennis player: on tour you learn quickly to be on your own; he, instead, keeps trying to build a “country” around him.
Then there’s the other country, smaller and heavier: home. In Cobolli’s tennis, the central figure isn’t a manager and not even a super-coach: it’s Stefano Cobolli, father and coach. A father his son doesn’t simply “put up with”: at a certain point, he chooses him. And a coach who doesn’t cut him any slack, because he can’t afford to.
Stefano sums it up with a line worth more than a thousand photos from the stands: «viviamo sul filo dell’odi et amo» (We live on the knife-edge between hate and love.)
It’s an elegant way of saying they argue — plenty — and yet they always end up back there, on the same court, doing the sums again with the same question: how much do you really want this life?
The cleanest anecdote comes from Antalya, an ITF Futures — one of those tournaments where you learn not to expect anything and to work anyway. Stefano sees his son with an attitude he doesn’t like, packs up and goes back to Italy, leaving him there. Flavio doesn’t complain, doesn’t wallow: the next week he wins his first pro title, and his father calls it a “turning point”. It isn’t an uplifting scene: it’s a hard training scene, with no music underneath.
When Cobolli truly breaks through, Stefano keeps using the same yardstick: not the peak, but continuity. After Acapulco 2026 he says it live, with that slightly Roman bluntness of a father-coach:
“For me he isn’t a champion yet… a champion is continuity of results.”
And then he drops the references, almost to remind you it isn’t a fluke: Bucharest, Hamburg, Wimbledon quarter-finals, a Davis Cup, and then a 500 on hard courts.
At that point, Cobolli’s career isn’t a string of “won / lost”. It’s a series of thresholds.
The first real sign, in fact, comes early and not in singles: Roland Garros juniors 2020, a doubles title with Dominic Stricker. Cobolli doesn’t tell it like a chosen one:
“At last the first trophy has come… I’d been waiting for it for ages.”
Then there’s Melbourne 2024: it isn’t a title, it’s a moment. The tattoo, the dedication, the feeling of stepping into a huge place without feeling it’s his yet. Cobolli doesn’t pretend he’s impermeable: he says tennis “can drive you mad”, that you travel ten months a year and you lose more than you win. And inside that meat grinder he tries to stay light:
“I’m enjoying it”, “it feels like living in an endless holiday”.
It’s a way of protecting himself: keeping his head up, so he doesn’t get swallowed.
2025 is the year the story stops being a “promise”. In Bucharest he wins his first ATP title after arriving on eight straight losses: he doesn’t win it in a rush of emotion, he sees it out like someone who knows exactly what he’s doing. In Hamburg he goes up another level: his first ATP 500, beating Rublev in the final. At Wimbledon he reaches the quarter-finals for the first time, beats Cilic, and earns that rare right: to play a big match against Djokovic with the noise of an entire tradition on his shoulders. And in Bologna, in the 2025 Davis Cup, he takes the point that wins the trophy against Munar, coming back after a first set from hell: there Cobolli becomes something that can’t be measured by ranking, but by the ability to stay standing when everything is telling you “enough”. In February 2026, in Delray Beach, Cobolli reveals a new tattoo, Hulk on his right thigh, as a reminder of the Davis Cup moment when he tore his shirt: “I feel like Hulk.” He says he has around thirty tattoos in total.
Finally Acapulco 2026: an ATP 500 title against Tiafoe, third title of his career and a best ranking somewhere around the Top 15. It isn’t the news itself — everyone knows that — it’s what it means in his father’s telling: winning on hard courts too, carrying his game on to another surface, not getting stuck to a label.
Cobolli today is this: a boy who came out of Roma’s academy, chose the loneliest sport, and carried two things with him that in tennis you usually try to keep off the court: belonging and family. The first he writes on his skin with a line fit for a captain’s armband; the second he lives every day with a father who doesn’t sweeten anything, because — as a father — he can afford only the truth.
And when he lifts his shirt he isn’t putting on a show: he’s saying where he comes from. To remind himself when tennis — which is beautiful — tries to take everything.
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