Antonio Conte has taken a step back from the touchline after two demanding years at Napoli, but his thoughts remain fixed on the kind of club where winning is not an ambition but an obligation.
The decision
The former Napoli coach described his time in Campania as a “wonderful experience”, while acknowledging the strain involved in carrying the club to the Scudetto ahead of Italy’s traditional northern powers.
Conte led Napoli beyond Inter, Juventus and Milan in the title race, a task he presented as particularly taxing for clubs outside that established northern group. Napoli, Roma and Lazio, he suggested, do not approach those battles with the same margin for error.
“It took a great deal of energy and it was not easy,” Conte said of his Napoli spell. “Facing Inter, Juventus and Milan is not a simple matter for clubs such as Napoli, Roma or Lazio. I used up a lot of energy.”
He is now without a job following his two-year Napoli chapter and is in no rush to make the next appointment. Conte said he is using the quieter period to watch matches, examine emerging ideas and consider how football’s developments can be incorporated into his own work.
“When I am not working, I can sit down, watch games, study new approaches and be calmer and clearer as I try to adapt changes in football to my ideas,” he said.
Conte’s next move will depend on the scale of the challenge as much as the name on the door. The 57-year-old said he would be attracted by a club that has drifted away from its own past and needs to recover its competitive identity.
“There are many clubs that have, in some way, lost sight of their history,” Conte said. “I would like to go to one of them and bring that history back into focus, making it shine again. A club where there is pressure, where you know you are not there merely to take part but to compete.”
For now, Conte is observing rather than intervening. Yet his description of the ideal destination leaves little doubt about the terms: a major club, a demanding environment and a project in which the coach is expected to restore the weight of the shirt.
