Spalletti on barriers of discord: replies to Conte over De Laurentiis | OneFootball

It's never just a matter of logistics. When Luciano Spalletti decides to draw a parallel between the equipment at Continassa and that at Castel Volturno, he is not offering a mere technical review. He is outlining, with his usual Tuscan irony, the boundary between two opposing ways of understanding the football business. The statement made at the press conference is clear: “When I came to Juventus, I found movable barriers for taking free kicks, in Napoli, there are still rigid ones. From a technical point of view, I have nothing to envy about his team.” These words formally respond to the statements of Antonio Conte, the current Napoli coach, but the real recipient of the message is on a different frequency. The target, not too subtly, is Aurelio De Laurentiis.

“Here they are movable, in Napoli rigid”: Spalletti's accusation and those unresolved issues with ADL

The statement from the Certaldo coach should be read between the lines. The “movable barriers” at Juventus represent, in Spalletti's narrative, efficiency, structured organization, the ability of a club to serve the technical staff by anticipating their needs. On the other hand, the “rigid barriers” left in Napoli become the emblem of a management perceived as static, bossy, where modernization—be it technical or contractual—often arrives with culpable delay or only after exhausting negotiations. By citing an apparently marginal detail of daily training, Spalletti reopens the never-healed wound of his post-Scudetto departure. It is the claim of a professional who, despite having made history at the foot of Vesuvius, has always lamented the lack of that structural support he now flaunts having found in Turin.

If one could leaf through Luciano Spalletti's now-famous 2023 agenda, which held the secrets of the tricolor campaign, one would probably find the genesis of this acrimony. The pages of that spring do not only tell of tactics and Osimhen, but record the silences and cold formal communications that led to the break. Today's jab is the direct consequence of that abruptly interrupted relationship. Spalletti seems to want to reiterate that if Napoli won, it did so despite the “rigid barriers,” thanks to the fieldwork that compensated for the club's shortcomings. In this scenario, Antonio Conte ends up being the necessary point of comparison. Conte, a demanding manager par excellence, now finds himself managing the same “rigidity” that Spalletti abandoned. The statement from the Juventus coach sounds like a warning to his colleague-rival, but also as a justification for his professional choice: the move to Juventus not as a sentimental betrayal, but as a necessary evolution towards a work context deemed more suitable.

Over time, the umbilical cord between Spalletti and the Napoli world has not been severed but has transformed into a constant electric tension. Aurelio De Laurentiis, for his part, observes. The challenge between Napoli and Juventus is now played on two tables: the field, where the teams are equal, and the dialectical one, where a piece of rigid plastic becomes the blunt weapon to settle old outstanding scores.

Andrea Alati

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇮🇹 here.