Ayodeji5172
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No city has ever wanted anything in sport as much as Naples wants its team to get a point at Udinese on Thursday night. That is all Napoli need to win their first Serie A title since 1990 (presuming second-placed Lazio beat Sassuolo tonight), the moment many fans have waited their whole lives for. If they do it then the scenes in the city will be unlike anything European football has seen for a generation. Nothing else will come close.
The title will belong to the whole city, to the fans who have waited since Diego Maradona’s time to become champions. It will belong to Victor Osimhen, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Kim Min-jae. It will belong to owner Aurelio De Laurentiis, who has spent almost 20 years trying to get Napoli back to the top of Italian football. But in an important way, it will belong to Luciano Spalletti, the manager appointed two years ago and who is on the brink of doing something the last 31 Napoli coaches could not.
The fact it will be Spalletti, of all the various Napoli coaches, who will end this long wait is worth thinking about. Go back to when he got the job, replacing Gennaro Gattuso in the summer of 2021. Spalletti had spent the previous two years effectively on gardening leave, at home on his farm in Tuscany, after Inter Milan sacked him to appoint Antonio Conte. Spalletti was 62 years old and it was natural to wonder whether his moment had passed.
Spalletti had a good career up to this point. He was most famous for his four years in charge of Roma, where his imaginative and innovative style of football took root. It did not win Roma the title — something they have not won since 2001 — but he had two Coppa Italias to show for it. And it reinforced the image of Spalletti as a coach who could get his teams playing beautiful football, rather than someone you would turn to to ensure you won a trophy. The two Russian Premier League titles he won with Zenit Saint Petersburg did not convince many people otherwise.
So when Spalletti took over at Napoli, it felt like he was there to transform the technical quality of Napoli’s football post-Gattuso, and ideally to get them back into the top four. The idea that he would end the 33-year drought would have been fanciful in the extreme. Because Napoli had already tried appointing proven winners, managers who had won trophies almost everywhere they had been. And if they had hoped that some of that winning experience or winning mentality would rub off on their football club and help them to finally win Serie A, well, it did not.
Rafa Benitez had won almost everything there was to win with Valencia, Liverpool, Inter Milan and Chelsea when he showed up at Napoli in 2013. He won them a Coppa Italia but finished third and fifth in the league and left to take over at Real Madrid. Carlo Ancelotti arrived in 2018 having won three Champions Leagues and league titles all over Europe, but he only lasted one season and a half, before being sacked and joining Everton.
The only manager to get really close to winning Serie A for Napoli before Spalletti was Maurizio Sarri. Over three years at Napoli his teams racked up 82-, 86- and 91-point seasons, winning more top-flight games than they ever had done before. Only Juventus in their imperial phase could stop Sarri’s Napoli from winning the title.
So what is the lesson here for any team desperately trying to end their long title drought — for there are many of those — and looking jealously across at Napoli?
First, that ‘born winners’ or ‘proven winners’ or ‘serial winners’ come with no guarantee that they will win trophies at your club just because they have won before. Neither Benitez nor Ancelotti could move the dial at Napoli, just like neither Jose Mourinho nor Conte could end the long trophy drought at Tottenham.
The best way to win a league is not to put your faith in the possibility of a ‘winning mentality’ transferring from a coach to the players by osmosis. The ‘Honours’ section of a manager’s Wikipedia page wields no power of its own. Rather, you need a coach with winning methods, who can connect with the players and has a plan to win games. Win the most games and you win the league. (This should sound insultingly obvious to readers but there are still so many people who think that winning games and winning competitions are two completely different skills.)
Napoli is not the only evidence of this across Europe this year. Look at Feyenoord in the Netherlands. They are a huge club but have underachieved for years. They have only won one Eredivisie title since 1999, which was 2016-17. During this underwhelming century they have appointed plenty of big-name coaches: Ruud Gullit, Bert van Marwijk, Ronald Koeman and Dick Advocaat. But it has taken the arrival of Arne Slot to get Feyenoord winning again.
No one would have described Slot as a born or proven winner when he took the Feyenoord job in 2021. He was not in charge of AZ Alkmaar for very long, getting the job after being promoted from assistant manager. But he transformed AZ’s style, replacing their passive football with more proactive pressing. He knew how to get the best out of his players and improve the team on a budget. That appealed to Feyenoord. They signed Slot from AZ and a new era in Rotterdam was launched. The final of last year’s Europa Conference League was only the start. This year Feyenoord will win back the Eredivisie. Slot’s lack of winning experience on his CV was irrelevant, because he had winning methods.
Look elsewhere in Europe and you will see other examples pointing us in the same direction. There are still four games left in Bundesliga and Bayern Munich are one point ahead. But if they slip up, then victory could go to Borussia Dortmund and Edin Terzic, their 40-year-old coach in his first permanent senior management job. Dortmund have not won the Bundesliga since Jurgen Klopp’s second title in 2011-12.
Barcelona is a unique story in many ways but they have not won La Liga since 2018-19, a mini-drought which is their worst since 1999-2005. But that is close to being ended by their young head coach Xavi, working in his first job in European football. (Even here in England, Arsenal got themselves into a position where they could have won the league, a position no one thought they could reach, and they did so with a 41-year-old manager rather than someone who had merely won trophies in previous jobs. You may argue that Mikel Arteta’s lack of experience cost Arsenal in the end but that seems to ignore the achievement of getting this squad to that position in the first place.)
The lessons of Spalletti’s Napoli are not only true there, and they extend beyond Rotterdam too. Football is full of teams who have not won anything for a long time and are desperate to end the drought. Many readers will think of Tottenham Hotspur, whose failures with big-name managers have been the main story of their last four wasted years. But there are many others.
If those teams realise that the solution is not in simply appointing the man with the best personal trophy cabinet at home, then maybe they will shed themselves of the ‘born winner’ fallacy and stumble on an insight into what winning actually involves. Because if Napoli wanted the most decorated man for the job they would not have replaced Gattuso with Spalletti two years ago. But that far-sighted decision, putting the quality of his work over the glitter on his CV, has taken them to the brink of where they always wanted to be.
