After last term Stefano Pioli broke his Scudetto duck with a former great that had fallen on hard times and had fairly low expectations, Luciano Spalletti decided to go one better, writes Susy Campanale.
Napoli and Spalletti, the eternal nearly men of Calcio who would challenge and ultimately fall at the final hurdle, finally came good together. And, just like Pioli, Lucho got himself a tattoo to commemorate the victory.
Even and indeed especially the Napoli fans expected very little going into this season, with star names like Dries Mertens, Kalidou Koulibaly and Lorenzo Insigne walking away, President Aurelio De Laurentiis cutting costs and launching his own kit production line for every available occasion. They had hovered at the top last year only to crumble as soon as Springtime hit and that was the assumption in 2023 too. The flowers would bloom and Napoli’s bubble would burst, the way it usually does. Spalletti too is known for these late-season stumbles, but this time around the advantage accrued was so great and the chasing pack so busy falling over each other that the Scudetto was never in doubt for a single moment.
Spalletti has always been one of those coaches it is difficult to dislike. Even when he is responding to an insult or lobbing criticism, he does it with a smile and shrouded in a florid Tuscan turn of phrase that often makes translating a tricky prospect. This served him well in Naples, where he could relish his role as outsider coming in, heaping praise upon the atmosphere and passion of a people that can at times be so strong as to become stifling.
During his rivalry with Jose Mourinho in the days when one was at Inter and the other with Roma, Spalletti was always accused of being the man with ‘zero titles’ – the standard Special One response to accusations even then of having a negative and boring style of football. At Napoli, the man from Florence finally combined style with substance to get results with one of the most attractive teams in Europe. They tore shreds off Liverpool, Ajax and Eintracht Frankfurt in the Champions League, humiliated Juventus 5-1 and managed to beat every single Serie A opponent at least once this season. They had the most prolific attack with 77 goals and the best defence with 28, ticking every conceivable box to be named the strongest team.
This is the city that adored Maurizio Sarri, even when he was unable to bring home silverware, because he understood that they could never just sit through scraped wins or boring matches. It’s all about the show. Kvicha Kvaratskhelia and Victor Osimhen are the best examples, but Spalletti has above all transformed Stanislav Lobotka from a strange, lost figure under previous coaches to the metronome of the midfield. Giovanni Di Lorenzo has never looked better and Kim Min-jae settled in perfectly in a team where everyone knew what they needed to do. That was the most impressive thing about Spalletti’s reign, that even when he chopped and changed the XI, it always looked like the same side with an unshakeable identity and everyone who came off the bench was ready to dive right in rather than sulk at being left out. That is man-management at its finest.
The decision to leave this summer was also a wise one. Even Spalletti knows that you quit while you’re ahead and this campaign is unlikely to be repeated, at least not in the same way that it unfolded this year. As he noted during one particularly tense moment when the ultras were sitting in a silent protest during the 4-0 home defeat to Milan, “imagine having all these people angry at you.” The tsunami of feeling from the Napoli fans is one that can lift you up on a wave, but just as easily crush everything in its path. The bubble never burst. Spalletti brought to the city something they had been waiting 33 years for and can now float away safely ensconced in that memory forever.