How a De Laurentiis email led to Napoli’s collapse in just 11 months

A trophyless season awaits Naples, just one year after dominating Serie A and reaching the quarter-finals of the Champions League. And when the regret fades from not beating injured Barcelona in the round of 16, they took their shot and didn't take it, but perhaps if Jesper Lindström's header had been on target and the challenge of Pau Cubarsí on Victor Osimhen had been punished with a penalty, who knows? — they can reflect on what has happened to their club over the past 11 months. Maybe one day this will be the subject of a case study at Harvard Business School and you can pick one up here. Except that it will be a collection of worst practices, rather than best practices — a series of not to do instead of TO DO.

This is the story of how a single certified ill-advised email set off a chain of events that led to the destruction of the greatest Napoli team since the days of Diego Armando Maradona. And all this in less than a year.

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Flashback to mid-April of last season. Napoli were just knocked out of the Champions League quarterfinals, but that's okay: They're running away with the Serie A title. Osimhen scores a ton of goals, Georgian sensation Khvicha Kvaratskhelia has been dubbed “Kvaradona” (without blasphemy accusation) and coach Luciano Spalletti is the toast of Serie A.

Spalletti is a proud and somewhat eccentric man. His contract expires on June 30, but everyone assumes his extension is a breeze, and with a big raise too. He built this team, he loves the club and the city, he is settled there and happy. All he has to do is sit down with club president Aurelio De Laurentiis and find a solution.

Except… De Laurentiis has a flash of inspiration.

Napoli have the unilateral option to extend Spalletti's contract for another season with the same salary. In real terms this doesn't mean much – no club, in any sport, will keep a manager against their will – but perhaps it can be a first step in negotiation? You assume that's what De Laurentiis was thinking when he (or his email assistants) pressed “send” on the certified missive informing Spalletti in dry legalese that his option year had been exercised .

Rarely has something had such a serious effect.

Maybe it would have worked with someone else, but not with Spalletti who, to say the least, was offended. This is not a Lexus whose lease can be extended. Yes, De Laurentiis is his boss, but he is a human being. They have a relationship. Surely this is something you discuss face to face? Instead, it was the equivalent of your partner giving you an unsigned Hallmark card for your anniversary.

Spalletti resigned. (Before you feel too sorry for him, consider that he landed another job almost three months later: he's now Italy manager.) With director of football Cristiano Giuntoli also gone — he's gone for Juventus, although in his case, unlike him. Spalletti, he wanted to go – De Laurentiis found himself alone, looking for a replacement. After several coaches turned him down, De Laurentiis appointed French coach Rudi Garcia, who was last seen coaching Cristiano Ronaldo at Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia.

Garcia had big shoes to fill, but there was reason for hope. Naples had lost only one starter, defender Kim Min-jae, who joined Bayern Munich. As often happens, Giuntoli's role in building the team was downplayed, with many believing he was more of a “coordinator” than a talent scout or negotiator anyway. There was plenty of talent: the team was arguably plug-and-play, while Osimhen and Kvaratskhelia were only going to get better.

Twelve games into the season, with the club fourth in the table but 10 points off the top of Serie A, Garcia was dismissed on 14 November. He was not popular with some players, and as De Laurentiis himself would later point out, when the owner told him he was screwing things up, Garcia had the temerity to ask to be allowed to do his work. “So I told him to fuck off,” De Laurentiis said.

Other managers turned Napoli down and De Laurentiis made another disastrous appointment. To be honest, few people were surprised that it went wrong.

That same day, he brought in Walter Mazzarri, who had managed the club more than a decade earlier and led the club to third and second place finishes… except Mazzarri had failed in each of his next four jobs, getting fired early in all of them. Furthermore, he had enjoyed his success playing a totally different scheme (with a three-man defense), and Naples was built to play with a four-man defense.

You won't be surprised to learn that Napoli have gone from bad to worse under Mazzarri. How much worse is it? When he was dismissed on February 19, Napoli had slipped to 10th place and were 27 points off the top of the table, just 16 points above the relegation zone. Napoli were also humiliated at home in the Coppa Italia round of 16 by Frosinone, losing 0-4.

De Laurentiis spent money on four players in January – defender Pasquale Mazzocchi, midfielders Hamed Traore and Leander Dendoncker, striker Cyril Ngonge – to try to turn things around. (This has not yet worked, as Ngonge and Dendoncker have yet to start a single match.) But, as if to make up for it, and in what looks like a fit of spite and pettiness, he ordered the club to leave midfielder Piotr. Zielinski absent from the squad for the knockout stages of the Champions League.

Zielinski, 29, had been a mainstay for Napoli for the previous six seasons, but had rejected both a move to Saudi Arabia and a contract extension, opting instead to become a free agent next June. We can't know for sure if this was the club's way of “punishing” him for wanting to leave on a free transfer – and, obviously, it doesn't mean they would have defeated Barcelona with Zielinski in the team – but it's hard not to put two and two together. Especially since the Poland international has been a regular throughout the season, starting 20 of Napoli's 28 league matches and all six Champions League group stage matches.

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Back to Mazzarri. Things got so bad that De Laurentiis felt the need to fire him just two days before Napoli's first leg against Barcelona last month.

Who did De Laurentiis find to replace Mazzarri? Perhaps convinced that existing managers will be better than unemployed ones, he opted for a guy named Francesco Calzona, the manager of the Slovakia national team. Before his appointment, Calzona had logged exactly zero minutes as head coach of a professional soccer club, but he had already been to Naples as an assistant and he was cheap since he was going to perform a dual function, having retained his position as coach of Slovakia. .

Calzona didn't set hearts racing when he was announced as interim coach, perhaps because few people knew who he was and because his work with Slovakia is very limited. (Anyway, coaching a national team is a very different skill). That said, he qualified Slovakia for the Euros by finishing ahead of Luxembourg, Iceland, Bosnia and Liechtenstein – make of that what you will.

What makes all this so frustrating is that for most of the last decade Napoli have been a model club, balancing the books and punching well above their weight. And a lot of that was due to De Laurentiis' good sense as a businessman and football operator. He can be blunt, aggressive and unnecessarily rude. On Tuesday, he reacted to the announcement of the resignation of Maurizio Sarri, one of his former coaches, from his position at Lazio by saying: “It's too easy to resign. … Those who have given up are losers!” — but when it comes to running a football club, he knows what he's doing.

Or at least he did…until about 11 months ago.