Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis confirmed that Massimiliano Allegri ‘visited his office four times’ before he decided to appoint Luciano Spalletti as head coach.
The Partenopei have emerged as one of the best teams in Europe this season, easily flying to the top of the Serie A table and putting themselves in contention for the Champions League, facing Milan in the quarter-finals.
Spalletti has received widespread praise for his work with Napoli, having taken over in the summer of 2021 following the departure of Gennaro Gattuso.
Speaking at an event where Spalletti will win the ‘Bearzot Award’, De Laurentiis recounted the thought process behind the coach’s arrival and how things happened.
“I’m happy for the award won by Spalletti. I had a happy intuition. I had to throw him off. Gattuso wasn’t feeling happy at the time and I went to Milan, to the Bosco Verticale, to meet Spalletti, whom I had spoken to before he went to Roma, when he said no.
“He came to open the door for me, and I said: ‘Luciano I have a big problem, if Gattuso isn’t feeling happy I need you’. And he said: ‘No, I’ll come in June’. In the end I got him to say yes, even for the immediate future if it was needed.
“Then we went ahead until June because I’m a gentleman and I didn’t want to saw off Gattuso. Maybe we would have been first in the Champions League if I had.
“In the meantime, to throw everyone off the scent I went through Conceicao, through Allegri who came four times to give me football lessons in my office and then in the end it was the good Luciano who brought us back among the top three in Italy and even that year, last year, something different could have happened.”
The Napoli president assured that the coach wouldn’t be leaving the club in the summer.
“If the rules of football were different, perhaps we would have brought the Scudetto to Naples already other times. At the end of the season, it will be a super party. Spalletti will stay at Napoli.”
De Laurentiis was then asked about the possibility of some of the club’s stars leaving at the end of the season.
“There is always the indecent proposal… numbers are made by others. We’ll wait. They are extraordinary guys. My contracts are unique, they come from cinema, so no one moves if we say no. We’ll see.”
At the end of the 2020-21 season, both Allegri and Spalletti were unattached, both having stepped away from football in 2019. The former eventually returned to Juventus, whilst the latter replaced Gattuso in Campania.