by Joe James
“I always talk about education and respect. I give this. But I demand this. And if someone hasn’t a good attitude in the training session or good behaviour in different circumstances, I prefer to kill him.”
These words of Antonio Conte during his short, partially sweet, partially hostile stint at Chelsea typify the man who stays winning in a way only he can.
In a fickle football world, Conte, a coach so combustible, confrontational and truly brilliant, is an anomaly. Success follows him everywhere, and he’s a man who gives ultimatums that you adhere to, reap the rewards of and face the consequences of later down the line.
Many coaches can profess to philosophies and systems that work in time, yet Conte’s a serial winner who generates instant results.
Managers compared with Conte for their siege mentality and temperament have seen diminishing results in recent seasons. Jose Mourinho hasn’t won a league title since 2015 and is gambling on a return to Benfica after underwhelming results at Manchester United, Tottenham, Roma and Fenerbahçe.
Diego Simeone, a deity for those of an Atletico persuasion in Madrid, has secured four domestic trophies since 2012, the latest being La Liga in 2020/21, along with over €350m spent on players since January 2024. In his 14th season, the highest-paid coach in the world cannot afford another campaign without silverware.
Antonio Conte spends wherever he goes and has a Tottenham blemish on his CV, but he’s still winning titles. At the one big club where he left without any silverware, Conte basically pleaded during his press conferences to be sacked, citing Tottenham’s story under Daniel Levy as the chief reason for their barren spell.
Aspects of Conte which are overlooked are his sense for the right move and when to leave. This is why his reputation remains intact. He takes a job where he knows he can win. He comes, he sees, he conquers – he leaves you in a mess with no skin off his nose.
His style of play is often described pejoratively and dogmatically, but his teams have nearly always shared goals throughout the team and have seen boldness in an attacking sense with progressive wing-backs and midfield-stepping centre-backs.
If you look at the league positions the previous season of teams he’s taken over, there’s a pattern. Juventus finished 7th, Chelsea and Napoli were 10th. A year later, they’re champions.
The cycle of Antonio Conte is a played-out act, and he always leaves you wondering, do you dare to love him, or will he walk away with your heart broken?
The Portrait of a Winner
Conte made his professional debut for Lecce at 16, described as a terrier of a box-to-box midfielder. Within a year, he suffered a broken leg, which nearly ended his career before it really started.
He recovered, and by 22, he had joined Juventus and would stay there for the rest of his career. Signed by the iconic Giovanni Trapattoni, he looked at him as a father figure, but it became clear to Trapattoni that Conte’s self-criticism and rumination on minor errors were detrimental to his performances. Under him, Conte was encouraged to view mistakes more holistically and rationally.
“If you saw me as a footballer, when I played, I always showed a great passion. You saw Antonio Conte during the game showing passion.” A midfielder who played with such intensity that allowed players like Zinedine Zidane and Roberto Baggio to flourish at Juve, it is no shock that the Conte we see on the touchline kicks every ball, flies into every tackle and contests a decision like it is life and death.
When Marcelo Lippi arrived in Turin, oozing with confidence and ambition, Juve won Serie A and the Coppa Italia in his first season. In Lippi’s second campaign, Conte lifted the Champions League and was named captain the following season. Juventus would go on to lose three European finals in 4 years.
Lazio snatched the league title off the Old Lady as they clawed back a five-point deficit with three games to go. Carlo Ancelotti, in charge at the time, drew strong criticism from the board and the following season, Conte would receive another runner-up medal and finish the campaign empty-handed.
Conte would still win two more league titles – the 2001/02 triumph on the final day – under Lippi. He ended his playing career with five Serie A titles, one Coppa Italia, one UEFA Champions League, one UEFA Cup, four Italian Super Cups and a single UEFA Intertoto Cup. For Italy’s national team, he lost the Euro 2000 Final and the 1994 World Cup Final.
The genesis of the prolific title-winner we know today should be credited to the honours he didn’t win over the ones he did. By no means immune to failure, as shown through the last-gasp title slip-ups and European defeats, those moments of anguish fired up something of an allergy to ever wanting to feel second best again.
A Call From An Old Friend
For the 2011/12 season, Conte got his dream job – Juventus. A club where he’d spent the majority of his career, winning five Serie A titles, a Champions League and a UEFA Cup, and later captaining the side.
His coaching stock wasn’t exceptionally high. A couple of promotions to Serie A with Bari and Siena, paired with a disastrous and hostile spell at Atalanta, with Conte resigning from the club after needing police protection from the ultras as the club languished in 19th.
Despite this, there was optimism that a club legend and fan favourite could drill some discipline and order into the side after back-to-back seventh-place finishes. Andrea Pirlo, who joined Juve in the same summer as Conte, recounted one of the Italian’s early team talks, “We’ve finished seventh each of the last two seasons. Crazy stuff; absolutely appalling. I’ve not come here for that. It’s time we stopped being crap.”
Under Conte’s stern stewardship, Juventus became the first side to go unbeaten in a 38-game Serie A season. As a side reborn, Conte’s man management was exceptional, and his meticulousness earned the respect from senior figures in the dressing room, like Gianluigi Buffon and Pirlo.
Alternating between a 4-3-3 and 3-5-2, the backline of stalwarts in the shape of Giorgio Chiellini, Leonardo Bonucci and Andrea Barzagli saw Juve concede just 20 league goals and aided Buffon’s 21 clean sheets. Pirlo’s deep-lying playmaker role was a masterstroke as Arturo Vidal and Claudio Marchisio did the heavy lifting, allowing the Italian maestro to control and dictate as he saw fit.
Juve would then win the league the next two seasons as Conte’s parting gift to his club would be a record 102-point season in the 2013/14 season. He would then depart by mutual consent in 2014, reportedly due to disagreements over transfers for the upcoming season – an event that has reared its head many a time.
Pirlo described Conte as “allergic to error”, something you’d recognise instantly through the furious intensity of Conte’s touchline antics. If you asked the man himself, he says it is nothing more than focus, and it is for the betterment of his players.
“When he talks, his words assault you,” Pirlo said. “They crash through your mind, often quite violently, and settle deep within.”
Battle of the Bridge
After a short stint as the coach of the Italian National team, Conte agreed to join Chelsea, marking his first-ever job outside of his homeland.
Infamously, after a 3-0 defeat to London rivals Arsenal, Conte abandoned the 4-3-3 formation in favour of the 3-4-3. The change was lauded as his side won 11 league games on the trot and ultimately became the champions on 93 points. Again, Conte reigned supreme in his first season.
The midfield duo of N’Golo Kante and Nemanja Matic helped Chelsea progress the ball, Eden Hazard and Pedro were able to come inside, and the attacking wing-backs of Marcos Alonso and Victor Moses were a revelation. Diego Costa, a challenging player to control, notched 20 league goals.
Players have since spoken of Conte’s relentlessness in all facets of the club. On the training pitch, many players were physically moved by him to make sure their positioning was exact. Those sessions were meticulous and hands-on, leading to a method of training that wasn’t for everyone and was a reason for the issues in his second season on the Stamford Bridge dugout.
Yet again was an example of where Conte’s shelf-life at a club seems to be short. The obsession with nutrition, going as far as checking a local restaurant to see what the players were eating, is something not every coach troubles themselves with. The absolute discipline required under him is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, you see the results and end up with success, but after a while, the intensity grows tiresome and increasingly alienating.
In Conte’s second season, his combustibility arose. Chelsea finished fifth, and Conte was sacked after a complete breakdown with the club’s board, the alienation of players and a standoff with Costa.
The ending was acrimonious, the parting gifts were sour grapes, but he still won again.
A Self-Proclaimed Ultimate Challenge
Conte’s first Juventus coach and father figure, Giovanni Trapattoni, described managing Inter Milan as a “centrifuge”, something he would come to realise himself.
Visceral reactions to the last-gasp, precarious performances of which were an antithesis to the razor-sharp efficiency and precision he’d come to expect from his sides were the norm for Nerazzurri.
Finishing a point behind Juventus in the league in 2019/20, Conte sent a warning shot to the club whose dominance he created that he was about to dismantle it.
He did, however, end the season with a classic Conte rant, detailing a lack of praise from senior club officials for the team’s and his work. He described himself as a “lightning rod” but said if those above didn’t learn at the club, then it would be crazy.
Using a 3-5-2, Conte added Achraf Hakimi and Nicoló Barella to a team containing talismanic figures like Milos Škriniar and Romelu Lukaku, as well as his strike partner Lautaro Martínez. Christian Erkisen, largely ignored by Conte upon his arrival, became a crucial figure alongside Marcelo Brozović in the midfield.
This melting pot of talent stormed to the title on 91 points and became an emphatic machine.
Conte had dethroned Juventus comfortably, but at the end of the season, he had decided to leave by mutual consent. Again, disagreements over the club’s transfer business resulted in the departure.
The Italian felt let down by Inter’s ownership, and clearly, there was a disparity between the owners and himself. As a coach with such self-assurance and conviction in his vision, few can ever argue against him, meaning very few can actually work with him. Breaking the club’s transfer record was not enough; winning the league was ultimately not enough to convince him of aligned thinking, either.
It is worth remembering that Conte spent money that the hierarchy ultimately did not have in hindsight. The pandemic’s economic consequences were felt, and this simply was not part of the Antonio Conte book of success.
A familiar outcome for a Conte cycle – give me what I want or I am gone and you’ll be worse off for it.
The European Blemish
Antonio Conte in Europe is a paradox to the serial winner that the domestic leagues have come to expect.
Throughout his Champions League career as a coach, he has won 16, drawn 14 and lost 15. His sides have never looked the same in Europe, and minus a Europa League Final defeat with Inter Milan against Sevilla and a quarter-finals run back in 2012/13 with Juventus, he has been frankly anonymous.
On his European underachievements, Conte argued, “People live by clichés. As soon as someone starts saying something on television, everyone else starts copying it.”
For some, this is why the 56-year-old cannot be considered truly elite. His limitations in Europe are puzzling, yet the trend continues. Critics say it is because when he picks up teams and wins titles, they only have that to focus on. To Conte, the league titles, of which he is famed, will always be his biggest priority.
The Opus in Naples
Taking a Napoli side that finished 10th two years ago and turning them into a league winner, of which they had no right to be, is truly his finest work.
Star striker Victor Oshimen left in the summer of his arrival, and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia traded Naples for Paris, joining PSG halfway through the season.
With a familiar and highly successful three at the back formation, it was through part necessity and part innovation that he would change his tactical setup. The additions of Romelu Lukaku, who saw Conte as the one coach in his career who had understood him with such clear-sightedness, Billy Gilmour and Scott McTominay prompted Napoli to play a 4-2-3-1 before turning to a 4-3-3.
Reuniting with Lukaku, Conte transformed the Belgian as he finished Serie A’s top assister. Turning Scott McTominay into the box-crashing midfielder he always vowed to be in England was another masterstroke, with the Scotsman receiving the league’s MVP award.
It is somewhat reductive and lazy to label the 3-4-3 of his Chelsea stint as the style he is wedded to; this is not the case whatsoever.
Antonio Conte is an adaptive coach tactically, whose fiery genius possesses certain non-negotiables of hard work, discipline and responsibility.
You will see certain characteristics of a Conte side throughout his career through defensive stability, midfield control and rapid transitions. But he is now using a back 4 at Napoli and has added Kevin De Bruyne and Rasmus Højlund to his ranks to go on the charge for the title again.
With further digs at the board throughout his title-winning campaign, the shock of winning the league with that Napoli side is less surprising than his completing the season working under Aurelio De Laurentiis, Napoli’s President.
Napoli were edging towards the Serie A title – their fourth in their history – as Conte offered extraordinary comments about being unable to do certain things in Naples. He added that the miracles he was working weren’t being credited in the media.. There was a wide expectation that Conte wouldn’t be at Napoli this season, but here we are. The famed cycle of Conte is showcased in this Naples microcosm, mainly the reason fans laud his success, but often find it difficult to truly love him.
Fighting fire with fire at Napoli has never really been the optimal algorithm, but this one is working right now, and Conte is looking to do something he hasn’t achieved since his Juventus days: winning Serie A in consecutive seasons.
Always Being a Winner
Antonio Conte will always be a winner because he knows no different and will not accept any different.
“I try to avoid all mistakes,” Conte said. “I try to prepare my players and put them in the best condition to play the game. If you discover a problem during the game, it is too late.”
He is the only manager in the history of Serie A to win the league with three different clubs, and has five titles to his name as of today.
Hiring Conte is succumbing to a trail of destruction, but accepting the success you’re almost guaranteed to receive. His view is bow down or miss out. Give him the money and the players he needs to succeed, and if you can’t, he will simply walk away until the next damsel in distress.
His reputation is still intact despite such public bust-ups and severe lack of fairytale endings because he’s an extreme personality. Give him a club that finished in mid-table and watch them surge to the best team in the land.
Antonio Conte is obsessed with winning, mad about the details and relentless in pursuing the tools to arm him for glory.
In an era of siege mentality managers who are slowly fading away, Antonio Conte burns nearly every time, but he’ll win you a league title while he’s at it.
