2 hours ago
4
There’s always a Tottenham exception. Since leaving Siena in 2011, since he got his first break with a club that had a realistic chance of winning trophies, Antonio Conte has won league titles with Juventus, Chelsea and Inter. Going into Sunday’s matches, with three games remaining, his Napoli lead Inter by three points. In a decade and a half he has won a trophy with every club he has managed, apart from Tottenham.
Maybe Tottenham simply aren’t a club that had a realistic chance of winning trophies. Certainly it’s not as familiar to them as it is to Juventus, Chelsea and Inter. Napoli were Serie A title winners the season before last. Conte led Tottenham for 17 months and although he has the fifth-best win record of any Spurs manager, although he took them to fourth in his first season, having replaced Nuno Espírito Santo in the November, and although they were fourth when he left in March 2023, by the end the situation was so toxic as to be unsustainable.
His eruption after they had squandered a two-goal lead to draw 3-3 against Southampton was simultaneously an abnegation of responsibility and a brutally honest evisceration of the club and its culture: “Tottenham’s story is this – 20 years there is this owner and they never won something. Why?” It was also entirely characteristic. This is how it always ends with Conte; it’s just that at Spurs he missed out the intermediate stage of winning something.
But Tottenham are Tottenham. No manager should be judged on their time at Tottenham. No one wins there and so complex are the competing impulses that Ange Postecoglou could end up being relieved of the job not long after winning a major semi-final, as happened to José Mourinho and Mauricio Pochettino.
Assessing Conte is difficult. On the one hand, his career has been a story of consistent success. If Napoli do win Serie A it will be his sixth league title with four clubs in two countries in 13 years, a period in which he also transformed an unremarkable Italy into a dynamic side who beat Spain at Euro 2016 before going out to Germany in an 18-penalty shootout. On the other, it’s a tale of strife and constant tension. For club directors, he is a permanent migraine.
His tactical acumen is not in doubt. Conte has historically often favoured a back three and that was how he began this season. But the signings of Scott McTominay, Billy Gilmour, Romelu Lukaku and the former Ajax and Benfica winger David Neres in the final days of the transfer window changed that. At first, Napoli played a narrow 4-2-3-1 with McTominay almost as a second striker alongside Lukaku and Neres and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia tucking in, but then switched to a 4-3-3 with the wingers wide and McTominay as the most advanced of the three central midfielders.
The sale of Khvaratskelia in January, which coincided with an injury to Neres, cost Napoli their width and forced another rejig. Conte began playing with a front two of Lukaku and Giacomo Raspadori, with McTominay used as a driving player from advanced midfield, occasionally drifting left, although width on that flank has tended to come from the full-back Mathias Olivera. McTominay has thrived in systems that play to his strengths, scoring 11 league goals and becoming a cult figure with the fans. They won’t be painting over the tributes to Diego Maradona, but if Napoli do win a fourth scudetto, there will be murals of McTominay.
The man most responsible for Napoli’s form, though, is Conte, in part because of his flexibility and in part because of his ferocious, all-consuming intensity. No previous manager, surely, has simultaneously been so consistently furious and clear-sighted. His passion and genius are clear and so is the price he pays for that. Given how Maradona, an artist whose creative suffering was never hidden, remained revered in Naples, it might have been expected that Conte would also be celebrated, but he is not.
Life for Napoli managers is always complicated. Ottavio Bianchi and Alberto Bigon, who led them to their first and second scudetti in 1987 and 1990 respectively, struggled to handle Maradona, who was brilliant on the pitch and wild off it, and fans tended to side with the player. Luciano Spalletti was so exhausted after winning Serie A in 2023 that he insisted on a sabbatical.
That was in part because of the crowd – the notoriously demanding ultras had staged a silent protest during a 4-0 defeat by Milan after a dispute over the part they would play in title celebrations – and in part because of the owner, Aurelio De Laurentiis. “I would have preferred if he had shown more humanity toward me,” the coach said, referencing a “conflicting relationship”.
after newsletter promotion
Even by Napoli’s standards, the interaction between fans and Conte feels awkward. It is not even that it’s strained; more that it’s coldly transactional. There is no great warmth there and no one expects him to stay beyond the end of this season with De Laurentiis reportedly in talks with, among others, the former Juventus coach Massimiliano Allegri and the Ajax manager, Francesco Farioli.
Coach and president, inevitably, have clashed. Conte was careful not to name De Laurentiis, but when he complained last month that “many things can’t be done at Napoli”, it was obvious who he was talking about, not least because he has said similar things at every club he has managed. Despite his frustration and bleak vision of the future, Juve and Inter reached Champions League finals within two seasons of him departing.
McTominay has spoken of Conte’s demanding nature, which is both his gift and his curse. He would become the first manager to win Serie A with three different clubs – Fabio Capello’s two with Juventus were revoked – which should mark Conte out as one of the greats.
Yet his combustibility, the way his psychodrama always becomes the central theme even as he wins trophies, counts against him. Many respect Conte, but he is a hard manager to love.
