Conte questions his players' mentality as Napoli 'melt like snow in ...

Being an ultra in pre-season can be a little like a songwriter going into the studio to lay down some new tracks. The opening game is launch day for the first single off the album. How will the crowd react when it’s performed live for the first time?

Milan’s ultras spent the summer workshopping a chant for new coach Paulo Fonseca. They wanted to have a little fun with it and touch upon how the club didn’t appoint their first, second or third choice when hiring a replacement for Stefano Pioli. The first lyric is “we wanted Conte”.

Milan didn’t pursue him, in the end, because as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, now a senior advisor to Milan’s ownership and senior management, said at Fonseca’s unveiling: “Milan has a head coach, not a manager. We didn’t consider Conte because, with all due respect to him and he’s a great coach, he wasn’t what we were looking for.”

Milan, in keeping with the trend in modern football, include the coach in recruitment without letting him drive it. They plan their squad according to age profile, contract life, budget and how they believe a team should be assembled to be competitive. As Ibrahimovic joked only the other day, “Cardinale (Milan’s owner, Gerry) wants to spend more but I tell him: ‘No’. We only spend what we need in order to strengthen.” They’re disciplined.

Word of how Ibrahimovic viewed him got back to Conte in the way these things usually do; a reporter asked him for a reaction. The 55-year-old didn’t push back on the definition. Instead, he doubled down.

Sat beside Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis at his presentation as the Partenopei’s new coach, he did the intimidating Salentino mumble that precedes an assertion of pure Conte-ness. “That’s how I look at myself,” he said. “The president knows that very well. I want to have a say, chapter and verse. And perhaps at other clubs, this might be the cause of some bother.”

Napoli are not one of those clubs.

De Laurentiis is not one of these new wave, analytics au fait owners. At Conte’s unveiling, he told an anecdote about going to England in the 1990s as if it were only yesterday. “I encountered the most successful team at the time, Manchester United, and I realised why they were so successful,” De Laurentiis recalled. “They had a super coach in (Sir Alex) Ferguson who, in the meantime, had taken on the role of a true ‘manager’. From the job he did and his approach to it, I could see that even the smallest detail can contribute to success. That’s why I chose Conte. In him, I not only saw a great coach but a great manager.”

It’s why, in the past, De Laurentiis appointed Rafa Benitez. The Spaniard was granted a level of autonomy he felt he’d earned as a Champions League-winning manager. Benitez then went out and found Kalidou Koulibaly and Dries Mertens. He also persuaded Jose Callejon and Gonzalo Higuain to leave Real Madrid for a club they’d never ordinarily consider. Benitez won the Coppa Italia and the Super Cup and even though his achievements were surpassed by Maurizio Sarri and Luciano Spalletti, the players he recommended worked out tremendously well for Napoli.

Higuain broke the single-season scoring record in Serie A and moved to Juventus for €90million (£76.7m; $99.4m). Koulibaly could have fetched a world-record fee for a defender. In the end, he stayed so long Napoli had to settle for the highest price paid for a centre-back over 30. Mertens left for Galatasaray as a free agent, but he’d given everything and the club wanted nothing in return. The Belgian is the club’s all-time leading scorer and called his baby boy Ciro, a Neapolitan name.

Might Conte do the same as Benitez? Rather than scare him, he filled De Laurentiis with “great enthusiasm”.

A new sporting director, Giovanni Manna, was appointed to close the deals the manager demanded. Within a fortnight, Napoli signed flying wing-back Leonardo Spinazzola on a free, hoping he might recover the form he showed at Euro 2021. They then bought defender Rafa Marin from Real Madrid and cut a cheque for €40million to buy Torino captain Alessandro Buongiorno, the centre-back many expected to start for Italy in Germany only for Riccardo Calafiori suddenly to take Spalletti’s fancy. This was, briefly, Manna from heaven. Players were arriving quickly and in time for pre-season.

But Napoli’s transfer window then ground to a halt.

Frustratingly for Conte, he could see the money he wished to spend. The money walked, talked and even trained alone. The money was locked up in Victor Osimhen. Top scorer in Serie A when Napoli won the title in 2023, Osimhen has asked to leave, but Napoli haven’t been able to sell him.

No one has stumped up the buy-out clause that was written into the new contract he signed over the winter. No one thinks he is worth the reported €130million it would take to extract him from it. Even half that figure looks high considering his injury record and the fact his 2022-23 campaign feels like an exception rather than the rule.

“The situation is clear,” Manna said. “(Victor’s) desire is clear. There are 12 days of the transfer window remaining and we will try to find the best solution, but it has to be one that’s to our satisfaction as well as his. He is a top player.” In other words, as was the case with Koulibaly for many seasons, Napoli will not let Osimhen go for a discount. The hope is Paris Saint-Germain pick up the phone now Goncalo Ramos is injured or Chelsea start thinking about him again after Samu Omorodion’s move from Atletico Madrid fell through.

In the meantime, Conte’s eyes have turned ever more glacial, his mumbles have taken on the effect of bubbling and boiling blood.

Where’s Billy Gilmour? What’s the latest on Scott McTominay? Is David Neres finally here? “He’s on holiday,” Manna joked. Why hasn’t Romelu Lukaku moved into the spare room? Conte has tried to manage expectations since he walked into the Palazzo Reale for his unveiling. He was taking over a team that had overseen the worst title defence in Serie A history. A team that had finished 41 points behind champions Inter. A team that had finished 10th.

But these are the conditions in which Conte won titles at Juventus and Chelsea. And so, as he sees it, he is a victim of his own success, condemned to win.

By making these things look easy, people just don’t understand how hard it is. They forget this squad was built to play 4-3-3. They forget Piotr Zielinski left for Inter on a free transfer. They need reminding that Napoli’s captain, Giovanni Di Lorenzo, had a torrid Euros and needed to write a letter to the fans effectively renewing his vows to the club after “I entertained the idea of leaving”. They forget his agent wasn’t the only one agitating for a move. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia’s representative also said, during the Euros, “we want to leave”.

It’s a lot for a manager to manage.

After Napoli needed penalties to knock out second-division Modena in the Coppa Italia, Conte put everyone on alert. He then sounded the siren again on the eve of his first game in Serie A away to Verona. “A total rebuild is needed,” Conte said. “From the foundations. When a team puts 10 or 12 players on the transfer market, it means there’s a rebuild underway and it’s going to take time, patience, humility from the fanbase and understanding. We can’t allow ourselves to get carried away.”

Opta’s algorithm is predicting Napoli will finish eighth this season. “We can’t think last year was a fluke,” Conte insisted. “It was not a fluke. I guarantee that. Whoever thinks it was the result of bad luck or other situations, watch out. The league table speaks for itself, as does the gap between us and the rest — enormous gaps!”

If Conte thought he had it bad, spare a thought for his opponent on Sunday, Paolo Zanetti.

Verona needed a play-off to stay up in the year Napoli won the league. Last season, the Guardia di Finanza, a law enforcement agency under the authority of the minister of economy and finance, seized the holding company that owns a majority stake in the club. Verona were forced to sell their best players over the winter, including Isak Hien to Atalanta and Cyril Ngonge to Napoli for €18million. That they stayed up under Marco Baroni, who got the Lazio job on the back of it, was a miracle. It will take another one this season.

Or will it? Playing in their pristine white Armani jerseys, Napoli, to use Conte’s phrase, “melted like snow in the sunshine” at the Bentegodi.

They were without the injured Buongiorno, Kvara then went off with a blow to the head shortly after Jackson Tchatchoua, one of Verona’s eclectic signings, blocked a goal-bound shot. Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa hit the upright. But the way Napoli faded in the second half was, in Conte’s words, “worrying”.

Verona showed, once again, that you can find good players anywhere. Their goalscorers, Daniel Mosquera and Dailon Livramento, cost €1.1million combined. Mosquera, a Colombian from C.D America, had never played in Europe before. Livramento has been capped once by Cape Verde and arrived from the Dutch second division. “We surprised everyone a bit, even ourselves,” Zanetti said after the 3-0 win. “We were coming off a bad defeat in the Coppa Italia (to Cesena).”

It was the first time Conte had lost on the opening day of the season. Usually, he uses these games to make a statement of intent, like when Juventus beat Parma 4-1 in 2011 and Inter destroyed Lecce 4-0 in 2019. This was a statement of a different kind. “I can only apologise to the people of Naples,” Conte said.

Two years ago, Napoli began the season at the same stadium against the same opponent with a 5-2 win. It was the beginning of their first league title since 1990. Many of the faces are familiar, but they are unrecognisable from that team.

“We could sign one, two, three, four, however many players the clubs wants. This is relative,” Conte said. “The problem needs solving at source and it’s not easy to find a solution… What I’ve found with this group of lads is when the going gets tough, they find it hard. And that’s a serious problem because it’s not something you can coach in a short space of time.”

For now, though, Conte will just have to do what he thinks he’s best at. He’ll just have to manage.

(Top photo: Emmanuele Ciancaglini/Getty Images)