CorSport: Napoli ‘threatened’ as Milan and Juventus eye Conte – the situation

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·25 April 2025

CorSport: Napoli ‘threatened’ as Milan and Juventus eye Conte – the situation

Antonio Conte’s future remains up in the air, and Napoli reportedly feel under pressure amid interest from AC Milan and Juventus.

As Corriere dello Sport reports this morning, Conte has appeared ‘grumpy’ in recent press conferences and has highlighted some of the problems that he has faced at Napoli, even suggesting he will consider his position.

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This has attracted the interest of clubs like Milan. Conte could, for example, put a club like the Rossoneri back in line, where the right-hand man has no idea what the left-hand man is doing. Where very confusion reigns, with too many roosters crowing and no one obeying.

Juventus meanwhile ‘don’t know where to start’ to try to fix the disaster created in a few months by the Cristiano Giuntoli-Thiago Motta duo, who were supposed to bring the football of the future and then we know how it ended.

The Conte appeal

Why Conte? The coach is a hurricane of energy. He arrives with his method. He raises the bar. He overturns rules and habits. He gets anyone who isn’t part of his staff out of the room. He changes the way he coaches.

He thinks and experiences his job. He gets into the players’ heads. He overturns their vision. But, be careful, he also changes the way he manages the club. It is a fundamental step: it is almost as if the club became his.

He decides. He commands. Because he knows how to do it. Until the inevitable clash, obviously. The paradox is that teams want Conte even if you know how it will end, given you can’t keep someone like that for much longer.

Yet, they hire him anyway, because when you are dying, you would accept anything to save yourself. Antonio, let’s face it, has a very particular vision of everything that concerns him. Let’s call it co-centric. Like when he declares that he came to Naples to do a personal favour to De Laurentiis and his family.

Conte was speaking as if he works for free. Wherever he goes, he tends to fuel the rhetoric of the extraordinary feat. He gets angry when people call him a whiner or, worse, a crybaby. But it’s hard to find one who doesn’t say it. It must mean something.

Photo by Lars Baron/Bongarts/Getty Images

The Napoli feat

The paper claims that no one else other than Conte, in the same conditions, would be top of the table (on equal points with Inter) with five games to go. This doesn’t mean Napoli are a Serie B club, but there must be a reason why De Laurentiis pays him a salary that is by far the highest in the league.

There must also be a reason why he backed him with a €150m summer mercato. He did it because he knew it was the only possible cure and that it would work. A detail that’s not exactly irrelevant for clubs like Milan and Juve, aiming to bounce back from sub-par campaigns.

This is Antonio Conte: a luminary of dying teams. A man who takes care of every detail and who dedicates every minute of his day to getting closer to perfection and success. A builder of victories.

Wondering why everyone wants him is a useless exercise. Whether he is nice or unpleasant is completely irrelevant. Perhaps this time – after not considering him last summer – the Rossoneri will be more tempted.