From zero to hero: Napoli coach Luciano Spalletti lifting the trophy with his players at the Diego Armando Maradona in Naples after winning the Serie A title on June 4.
LUCIANO Spalletti’s farm sits high on a ridge outside Montaione, a peaceful, strikingly pretty Italian village set on a hilltop an hour or so southwest of Florence. It is picture-perfect Tuscany: cobbled piazzas lined with cafes; echoing, cobbled streets; a panorama of deep blue skies and verdant olive groves on rolling hills.
It is, though, just a little off the beaten path. The stretch of the Tuscan countryside Spalletti calls home is not quite so well-touristed as, say, Chianti. But Spalletti grew up here, in the medieval walled city of Certaldo, and he saw in the farm the chance to draw more people to the region. The five vacation cottages he has constructed on its grounds can be rented for a (surprisingly competitive) few hundred euros a night.
Business was not his primary motivation. The farm serves as Spalletti’s haven. He has turned it into something approaching the Platonic ideal of an idyll. As he says in a promotional video on the farm’s website, it is “a place to rediscover simple, forgotten emotions, between nature and animals.”
He makes his own olive oil. He uses the grapes from his vineyard to produce his own wine. There are hens and ducks, donkeys and horses and alpacas, and even a couple of ostriches. The view stretches all the way from Pisa, in the west, to the Apennines in the east. “For my family, it was love at first sight,” he tells prospective visitors.
It is here, to his own little slice of Arcadia, that Spalletti withdrew at the start of the month, his two-year spell as the coach of Napoli at an end. He had informed the club of his decision a few weeks earlier. “I told them I needed a year off,” he said. “I will not work for any club. I’ll rest for one year.”
ose Mourinho once mocked Spalletti as a ‘possessor of zero titles’. — Reuters / AFP
Spalletti of course has earned the break. His first year at Napoli ended as most first years at Napoli do: in a swirling eddy of uncertainty and disappointment and regret. The club’s ultras stole his car and vowed to return it only once they had proof of his resignation. A raft of key players left.
His second season, though, was utopian. For the first time in 33 years, Napoli won the Italian title. That is, in fact, underselling it. Napoli swept to the Italian title, obliterating the rest of Serie A. They lifted the trophy with a month to spare. Their final few games were a carnival, a celebration. Spalletti and his players found their images splayed across the city, afforded the same kind of worship as more traditional religious icons.
That he should choose precisely that moment to step away, then, is so unorthodox that it borders — in football’s traditional thinking — on heresy.
Napoli were vastly superior to all of their domestic opponents. Spalletti’s team were on autopilot for the last five games of the campaign and still finished 16 points ahead of second-placed Lazio. Even allowing for the impending departures of two key players, Victor Osimhen and Kim Min-jae, there is little reason to assume they will not at the very least compete for the title next year.
More important still, it was at Napoli that Spalletti, 64, had finally made manifest his vision of how the sport should be played. He had, for much of his career, been admired as a gifted coach, a sophisticated tactician — even an occasional visionary. It was Spalletti, during his time at Roma, who either pioneered or popularised the idea of the “false nine.”
He was, though, widely — and not a little affectionately — regarded as one of the sport’s “nearly” men. He almost won Serie A with Roma, but did not. He almost won it with Inter Milan, but did not. He was one of several managers dismissed as the possessors of “zeru tituli” — zero titles — by Jose Mourinho, for whom significance is gauged by the honours section of a Wikipedia page.
At Napoli, Spalletti’s style finally found its substance. His team played no less attractively, no less innovatively, no less imaginatively than the sides he had forged elsewhere, but this one won, and won, and won. Napoli were his masterpiece, and yet no sooner had he completed it than he left it abandoned.
He did not do so, as tradition would dictate, to take on a bigger, better or more lavishly remunerated role. In his own telling, he did so because he wanted to take a break, to retreat to his farm, to find sanctuary from the stress and the strain of the last two years. The real rationale, however, is in the subtext. Spalletti left because his job was finished.
There is an adage in football — in sports in general, in fact — that there is no such thing as a happy ending. All managers are fired, sooner or later, regardless of what they achieve or how much they win. At some point, results will turn, and take the fans and the front offices with them.
That is true, of course, but it is partly true because managers are so rarely willing to do what Spalletti has done, and walk away. There is always some problem to solve, some improvement to make, some slight flaw to polish and burnish and finesse. There is always the chance that next year will be even better. And there is always, most of all, another trophy to win.
The finest managers are — as they should be — conscious of their legacies. They are driven not just by proving their superiority to their peers, but by winning their place in history.
There is a reason that Alex Ferguson, and Arrigo Sacchi, and Pep Guardiola are held in the first rank of managers: They are the coaches, after all, who attained not just dominion, but dynasty. Their example encourages managers to twist, rather than stick.
Spalletti has done the opposite.
At some point in Napoli’s month-long celebration, he decided that he had reached the pinnacle, and that whatever came next would inevitably involve a descent.
Rather than risk tarnishing what he has achieved, rather than doubling down, he has preferred to leave it, perfect and inviolable, where it stands. He has his prize, and in winning it he has his monument, too. In doing so, he has done what so many others expend so much energy doing: He has ensured that his legacy will remain unsullied, untouched. In the haven he has built for himself on the outskirts of Montaione, Spalletti will savour the simple, forgotten joy that comes from knowing when to step away. — NYT
