PARMA COULD'VE GONE for a safe pair of hands. Everyone would've understood. They lost the coach who saved them from relegation, Cristian Chivu, to Inter, and their top scorer, Ange-Yoan Bonny, seems destined to make the same move. Eighteen-year-old defender Giovanni Leoni is likely to go to the highest bidder, and European interest in goalkeeper Zion Suzuki continues to grow.

Big changes are coming. The risk of relegation remains high.

Coaches with enough Serie A experience to guarantee them safety were around. Relegation specialist Davide Nicola, who kept up Salernitana and Empoli in some of the greatest escapes in Serie A history, had just become available. So too had Marco Giampaolo, who secured Lecce's survival on the final day of the season.

But Parma president Kyle J. Krause wants a project and a plan. It's not enough for a club like Parma to pay their Serie A membership dues anymore. So he bypassed the old guard for a 29-year-old multilinguist who never played the game at a high level. Krause went for a foreign coach without any prior senior head coaching experience. He hired Carlos Cuesta, Mikel Arteta's assistant at Arsenal, in one of the biggest bets a Serie A president has made since Silvio Berlusconi appointed a previously unknown Arrigo Sacchi in 1987.

Cuesta is now the youngest Serie A coach since Elio Loschi took the reins of US Triestina as a 29-year-old in 1939. Serie A has had coaches in their 30s before — Salvatore Bocchetti served as Hellas Verona manager at the tender age of 35 — but they had previous ties to their club. Bocchetti was only a year removed from his final Verona appearance when he was hired midseason.

Cuesta never played professionally, quitting the game altogether at 18 years old to pursue a coaching career. Even as a teenager, playing for his local team on the island of Mallorca, Cuesta began coaching kids younger than him. But he soon realized he'd never make it past the Spanish third division. Unlike other young coaches like Julian Nagelsmann, injuries didn't rob Cuesta of a playing career. The decision to pivot was solely his.

But he didn't just start coaching. He couldn't. Cuesta didn't have any connections. He had to make them. As he studied for a sports science degree and picked up languages, including French, Italian, and English, Cuesta cold-called youth coaches for Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid, asking if he could set up cones and do menial tasks. One of them got back. A year later, he was coaching Atletico's youth team.

Later, he left to travel around Europe using his four years of personal savings. He wanted to learn from the best coaches around and had built a wide enough network to organize sit-in sessions with Roberto Martinez, Pep Guardiola, Massimiliano Allegri, Jurgen Klopp, and Mauricio Pochettino.

Juventus hired him to coach their youth team when he was only 22 years old. A number of people had doubts. But he slowly gained their support. Speaking six languages fluently, he managed to clearly communicate his ideas to his players and staff, finding a way to connect with people across borders and nationalities without using a translator.

It wasn't necessarily a tactical breakthrough that helped Cuesta land jobs. It was the way he could relate to his players that made the difference.

"The concept is simple: 'Listen and improve,'" he told El Pais in 2019.

While old-school coaches may have made examples of players, lecturing or scolding them in the hopes of getting a reaction, coaches like Cuesta understand the needs and disposition of the current generation, which responds much better to positive reinforcement. Given Parma's starting lineup is, on average, the youngest in Serie A, that's an important point to note.

Cuesta developed deep bonds with Arsenal's players during intimate one-on-one video sessions, using them to celebrate their strengths and highlight areas of improvement. He gassed up Ben White in a heart-to-heart with the Arsenal center-back, building him up as "world class" before going on to explain where he can be more aggressive and where he should tone it down. He also had a positive impact on Granit Xhaka, the Swiss international linked with AC Milan who rebuilt his career shortly after losing the captaincy at Arsenal.

"My feeling from the first meeting with him was that first of all, as a person, he is very honest, very straight," Xhaka told The Athletic last year. "But he also had great knowledge about football. He knows what he's doing. He knows how to speak with the players, what the players need. It was just amazing from the beginning."

He didn't have to send a DM to Kruse to get this job. Kruse reached out to him. But Cuesta still has skeptics. It's understandable and expected in a league that treats experience like a prerequisite. Being safe, though, doesn't change the status quo. And Parma want to do exactly that.