Napoli at a Crossroads, Should They Stick or Twist?
When was the last time Napoli won two scudetti in a row? Never. Not even in their pomp during the Diego Armando Maradona days. Who is, to many of us, still the greatest football player to ever grace planet earth.
What about Roma? Never. Lazio? You guessed it. But if you think of the big Italian three — Juventus, Internazionale, and AC Milan, then it’s a different story.
When we start with that premise, it becomes easier to cool off expectations for Napoli’s season. Winning a scudetto outside of the big three is near impossible, winning it twice in a row is probably against the unwritten laws of calcio.
The last team to win it outside of the big three before Napoli was Fabio Capello’s Roma in 2001. The following season, they missed out on a repeat by a single point, and then collapsed to eighth place the year after. And that was Capello, a strict disciplinarian and a serial winner. Yet even he couldn’t stop the ongoing party in Italy’s capital after a single title. Think of Naples as the same.
With that in mind, it becomes clear that Luciano Spalletti, a man with a high penchant for drama, understood his cue to leave. In leading Napoli to the scudetto, he had reached the mountain top, and was in no mood to go downhill.
But if Spalletti’s the drama actor, then Aurelio De Laurentiis is the producer (no, for real) and perfectly knows how to play a crowd. After the scudetto, De Laurentiis ambitiously declared that they should attack the Champions League next, but fifty years in the movie business meant he had picked up a few acting tricks, enabling him to say that with a straight face.
In reality, Napoli knew they were about to lose Kim Min-jae, Serie A’s best defender, due to a release clause in his contract, and that automatically weakened the side significantly. They also lost the brains behind their savvy signings, Director of Football Cristiano Giuntoli, to the giants of the north Juventus. Never mind the Champions League, Napoli seemed ready for an uphill battle for the top four from the get go.
Enter Rudi Garcia. A man perfect for the supporting actor role after spending the last decade mastering that craft at Roma, Marseille, and Lyon. Garcia became the following act to Spalletti, returning the favor, after Spalletti had replaced him at Roma in 2016. Back then, Spalletti’s intensity lifted Roma after Garcia’s lax methods had caused them to stagnate. Now, it was the other way around.
Under Spalletti, two years of coaching circuits meant Napoli were in perfect sync. Their most important player was neither capocannoniere Victor Osimhen nor the league’s best player Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, but the previously out of shape and out of favor, Stanislav Lobotka. Spalletti gave him the keys to the midfield, convinced Piotr Zieliński and Frank Anguissa to do his running, and lit a fire in Osimhen’s and Kvaratskhelia’s bellies. With each of the three northern giants busy self destructing, Napoli ran away with the title.
Garcia is another coach who focuses on repititive drills and memorizing movements. But he’s different from Spalletti in the relative lack of intensity in his sessions, and his preference for attacking through wide areas and with more direct passes. On paper, that’s all well and good, but on the pitch that actually translates to losing the control of midfield that was Napoli’s trademark from last season, and exposes a defense that doesn’t mind conceding.
A look at Napoli’s training reports on their website would reveal that their main training sessions almost always revolve around tactical possession drills followed by a match on a small pitch. To investigate further, some of Garcia’s training sessions from his Al-Nassr days are available online, as are some of his drills from Lyon and Marseille. They don’t paint the full picture, but they give a hint to the ideas of the man. Garcia wants his team to play vertical with the ball as fast as possible and to exploit the wide areas. When it clicks upfront, Napoli should do better, but out of possession remains an area with a lot to improve.
Another obvious problem would be that Garcia is no star whisperer. Imagine your club signing Cristiano Ronaldo and then the coach publically joking that he’d rather have signed Lionel Messi instead. No one would do such a thing, one might think, but that’s exactly what Garcia did. So it was perhaps of little surprise when he found himself out of a job a couple of months later. Hardly Mister Charisma, his handling of Kvaratskhelia, and especially Osimhen (who doesn’t hide his frustration at his repeated substitutions), is clearly less than ideal.
With all that said, Napoli shouldn’t be in crisis mode yet. Before their defeat to Fiorentina at the weekend, they were in fourth place and had scored four goals in each of their last two Serie A matches. Their defense is in shambles, but that should improve once Amir Rrahmani is back to full fitness. With only eight rounds played, it’s still too early for a final verdict on Garcia, especially as Napoli are still fifth and fully in contention for a Champions League spot.
De Laurentiis knows this all too well, and most probably chose Garcia as an inexpensive hire capable of steering them to a top four finish. As any savvy producer, if he can’t hire a star leading man, he goes for an affordable one instead. But affordable also means replaceable, hence why Garcia has to improve Napoli’s intensity and performances, before De Laurentiis loses his patience and looks to cast a new lead.