Napoli will be in for a trophyless season, just a year after dominating Serie A and reaching the quarter-finals of the Champions League. And when the remorse of not beating the injured Barcelona in the round of 16 fades away, he took his shot and missed it. However, maybe if Jesper Lindström’s header had hit the target and Pau Cubarsí’s tackle on Victor Osimhen would have been punished with a penalty, who knows?They can reflect on what has happened to their club in the last 11 months. Maybe one day this will happen. It will be the subject of a case study at Harvard Business School and you can choose one here. Except it will be a compendium of the worst practices, rather than the most productive practices: a series of things that should not be done rather than things that should be done.
This is the story of how a single qualified and misguided email set off a chain of events that led to the destruction of Napoli’s greatest team since the days of Diego Armando Maradona. And all this in less than a year.
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Let’s take a look at mid-April last season. Napoli have just been knocked out of the Champions League quarterfinals, but that’s okay: they take the Serie A title. Osimhen scores a lot of goals, Georgian sensation Khvicha Kvaratskhelia has been nicknamed “Kvaradona” (no blasphemy). and coach Luciano Spalletti is the star of Serie A.
Spalletti is a proud and eccentric man. His contract expires on June 30, but everyone assumes that renewing it is a piece of cake, and with a big increase at that. He’s built this team, he loves the club and the city, he’s settled here and happy. All you have to do is sit down with the club’s president, Aurelio De Laurentiis, and look for a solution.
Except. . . De Laurentiis has a flash of inspiration.
Napoli have the unilateral option to extend Spalletti’s contract for one season with the same salary. In real terms, that doesn’t mean much: no club, in any sport, will remain a coach who opposes its will, but perhaps it can be an option. First step in the negotiation? I suppose that’s what De Laurentiis thought when he (or his email assistants) hit “send” in the qualified missive informing Spalletti in dry legalese that his option year had been exercised.
Rarely has it had such a serious effect.
Maybe it would have worked with someone else, but not with Spalletti, who, to say the least, was offended. This is not a Lexus whose lease can be extended. Yes, De Laurentiis is his boss, but he’s a human being. a relationship. Surely this is something you talk about face-to-face. Instead, it’s the equivalent of your spouse handing you an unsigned Hallmark card for your birthday.
Spalletti resigned. (Before you feel too bad for him, just three months later he got another assignment: he’s now Italy’s coach. )It also happened with director of football Cristiano Giuntoli: he went to Juventus, although in his case, unlike him. Spalletti, looked to pass – De Laurentiis found himself alone, looking for a replacement. After several coaches rejected him, De Laurentiis appointed French coach Rudi Garcia, who was last seen coaching Cristiano Ronaldo at Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia.
Garcia had big shoes to fill, but there was reason to be hopeful. Napoli had lost only one starter, defender Kim Min-jae, who joined Bayern Munich. In fact, Giuntoli’s role in building the team was downplayed, with many believing that he was more of a “coordinator” than a skill seeker or negotiator anyway. There was a lot of skill: the team was probably plug-and-play, while Osimhen and Kvaratskhelia were only going to get better.
Twelve games into the season, when the club was fourth in the standings but 10 points behind the top seed in Serie A, Garcia was sacked on Nov. 14. He was not popular with some players and, as De Laurentiis himself would later point out, when the owner told him he was messing things up, Garcia had the temerity to ask to be allowed to do his job. “So I told him to fuck off,” De Laurentiis said.
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Other coaches rejected Napoli and De Laurentiis made a disastrous appointment. To be honest, few people were surprised that everything went wrong.
On the same day, he brought in Walter Mazzarri, who had controlled the club more than a decade earlier and led the club to third and second place. . . except that Mazzarri had failed in his next four jobs, getting shot early in them. In addition, he had enjoyed his good fortune by betting on a completely different scheme (with a three-man defence), and Napoli were made to play with a 4-man defence.
It may not surprise you to learn that Napoli went from bad to worse under Mazzarri. How much worse is it? By the time he was sacked on 19 February, Napoli had slipped to 10th place and were 27 points off the top of the table, just 16 points above the relegation zone. Napoli were also humiliated at home in the Coppa Italia circular of 16 through Frosinone, squandering 0-4.
De Laurentiis spent money on four players in January — defender Pasquale Mazzocchi, midfielders Hamed Traore and Leander Dendoncker, and striker Cyril Ngonge — in an attempt to turn things around. (It hasn’t worked out yet, as Ngonge and Dendoncker have yet to start a single game. ) But, as if to make up for it, and in what appears to be a combination of spite and pettiness, he ordered the club to leave midfielder Piotr Zielinski absent from the squad for the Champions League round of 16. .
Zielinski, 29, had been a mainstay for Napoli for the past six seasons but had turned down a move to Saudi Arabia and a contract extension, opting instead to become a free agent next June. We can’t know for sure if this was a way for the club to “punish” him or just leave with a sluggish move – and obviously that doesn’t mean they would have beaten Barcelona with Zielinski in the squad – but it’s hard not to add two and two Especially since the Polish team has had a normal season, starting 20 of Napoli’s 28 league games and all six Champions League games at the organizational level.
Craig Burley describes everything that happened to Barcelona when they beat Napoli to qualify for the quarterfinals of the Champions League.
Things went so smoothly that De Laurentiis felt the desire to sack him just two days before Napoli’s first leg against Barcelona last month.
Who did De Laurentiis locate to upgrade to Mazzarri?Perhaps convinced that the current coaches will be better than the unemployed ones, he opted for a guy named Francesco Calzona, the coach of the Slovakian national team. Prior to his appointment, Calzona hadn’t exactly logged a single minute as head coach of a professional football club, but he had already been at Napoli as an assistant and was not wanted because he would take on a dual role, having retained his task as coach of Slovakia.
Calzona didn’t make any central moves when he announced him as interim coach, perhaps because few people knew who he was and because his work with Slovakia is very limited. (Either way, coaching a national team is a very different skill. )Qualified Slovakia for the European Championship by completing the forward line of Luxembourg, Iceland, Bosnia and Liechtenstein; Do with it what you want.
What makes it all so frustrating is that for most of the last decade, Napoli has been a club of style, balancing the books and hitting well above its weight. And this is largely due to De Laurentiis’ not unusual sense as a businessman and footballer. operator. They can be outspoken, aggressive, and unnecessarily rude. On Tuesday, he reacted to the announcement of the resignation of Maurizio Sarri, one of his former coaches, from his post at Lazio by saying: “It’s too easy to resign. . . Whoever has given up is a loser– but when it comes to running a football club, he knows what he is doing.
Or at least that’s what he did. . . until about 11 months ago.