Conte repeating the same old pattern at Napoli and will walk away

epa12092720 Napoli’s head coach Antonio Conte during the Italian Serie A soccer match SSC Napoli vs CF Genoa at Diego Armando Maradona stadium in Naples, 11 May 2025. EPA-EFE/CESARE ABBATE

Antonio Conte is somewhat addicted to being an underdog, which explains why he runs away from clubs straight after success, but Susy Campanale feels Napoli should be offended by his description of the club.

Going into the final 90 minutes of the season, only a total collapse against already-safe Cagliari would stop Napoli taking the title now. They would need to drop points and at the same time for Inter to beat on-form Como at the Stadio Sinigaglia to turn this around, even more implausibly to force a play-off with their defeat and the Nerazzurri picking up a draw. The banners are being hung and open top bus parades planned through the city streets.

Antonio Conte is set to become only the second coach after Fabio Capello to win the Serie A title at three different clubs, having already succeeded at Juventus and Inter. In both those situations, he bolted during the celebrations, insisting what they had achieved could never be replicated. This is his mantra, and it does get rather wearisome.

If there’s anything more irritating than excessive arrogance, then it is faux humility, and Conte has it in spades. Every time he depicts his club as being some pathetic outlier with no hope of achieving success until he came along, where right to the final moment they must show heart to overcome the obstacles in their path. With Juventus, they had been on a dismal run before he took charge, Inter were without a victory in Serie A since Jose Mourinho’s Treble a decade earlier.

Napoli are no Conte miracle

Conte is trying to paint the same picture at Napoli, but it doesn’t quite work. He focuses only on the fact they finished 10^th in Serie A last season, not that many of the same players won the Scudetto at a canter only the year before that. He acts as if the city didn’t have a year-long party in the streets, forgetting the 30-year wait was already ended by Luciano Spalletti.

He might’ve said that their target this season was to qualify for Europe, at best the Champions, but nobody else thought it. With the huge investments of Romelu Lukaku, Scott McTominay, Alessandro Buongiorno and Billy Gilmour, plus the benefit of not having any midweek commitments to distract them, Conte’s arrival was always going to create a Scudetto push. It is faux naïve to suggest otherwise, downright insulting to claim that it was “unthinkable and historic” for a club like Napoli. They won the title in 2023, not 1923.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Conte’s communications strategy is his continual insistence they “never complained” while at the same time constantly complaining. How many times must he point out they’ve had a few injury problems, as if no other teams had far more to deal with? His assertion that there was nobody to call from on the bench was purely down to his own refusal to consider them, so for several weeks we’ve seen left-back Mathias Olivera squeezed into a central defensive role while Rafa Marin rots on the touchline. Poor Giacomo Raspadori was only given a possibilità because David Neres was hurt, otherwise he’d have been left watching from the bench too.

All this is why we can expect Conte to walk away this summer, probably announcing it during the celebrations. The row with Aurelio De Laurentiis is just part of the predictable pattern with him. The rest is knowing this precious underdog status is gone and expectations are raised, plus a tantrum over not having a strong enough squad to be truly competitive, failing to realise it’s his own fault for not developing any of the other players. It’ll be off to the next underperforming club for the same old routine. It’s never his fault if he fails, any success is always a miracle, don’t ever ask him to build upon it.