2023-12-22 14:00:09
His speeches are always a spectacle, and those he has decided to scratch rarely come out unscathed. This Friday, in an interview published by the Italian daily Corriere dello Sport, the president of the reigning Italian champion Naples, Aurelio De Laurentiis, spoke at length about the difficulties of his club in maintaining its brilliant level of last season.
A fact that he attributes, in particular, to the choice of having trusted the Frenchman Rudi Garcia to succeed Luciano Spalletti, who took the reins of the Italian selection this summer. Not really a fan of wooden language, De Laurentiis admits to having realized that he had made a bad casting choice “on the day of his presentation”.
“I should have made a dramatic move and said: here he is presented, but now he is leaving,” he goes so far as to say. Because a person who arrives and says: I don’t know Napoli, I haven’t seen a match… I should have understood, but I preferred to laugh about it. The problem is that he repeated it several times. All you had to do was play the same game as Spalletti. Rather than doing that, he preferred to have me fire a perfect trainer, to bring in another who… I was warned: he’s going to shoot you players. I had to stay at the training center from morning to evening. »
Thiago Motta and Luis Enrique were contacted this summer
De Laurentiis also admits that Garcia was not the first choice on his list, and that he notably contacted two personalities well known to Paris Saint-Germain followers. “The first contacted was Thiago Motta. I saw it pretty well, didn’t I? (Bologna, his team, is currently 4th in Serie A). But he didn’t feel like coming. For what ? Because it’s not easy to take the legacy of someone who won the Scudetto that way. »
He also tried his luck with the current Parisian coach, Luis Enrique. Without success, again: “He brought his entourage to Naples. He blocked me for three days asking me for a lot of money. We almost reached an agreement, then he said no because he wanted to win even more. »
In total, “I consulted five or six,” admits De Laurentiis. “In the end, I went for Rudi Garcia who, in Italy, had come second twice with turbulent locker rooms, full of high-level players. »
Rudi Garcia, who was coming out of a mixed experience at the head of Al-Nassr (Saudi Arabia), was dismissed in mid-November, after only 16 matches spent on the bench at the Diego Armando Maradona stadium. Despite a record that is anything but catastrophic: 8 wins, 4 draws, 4 defeats. He was replaced by Walter Mazzarri, who has enjoyed equally relative success: 3 wins and 4 defeats in 7 games since his arrival. It’s definitely hard to succeed Spalletti.
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