He had the face of an angel but he was a warrior ... and all he cared about was football
How Conte’s obsession for success began as a little boy kicking his ball in churchyard
THEY still play football in the playground adjoining Santa Rosa Church. It is one of the extra-curricular activities which helps to motivate the children of that district of Lecce to attend their lessons.
Father Damiano Madaro, priest of the church, surveys the astroturf pitch and recalls what it looked like some 40 years ago, when their most famous parishioner played here.
‘It was concrete and gravel then,’ he says. ‘But, yes, boys still play here. Only after Mass though, not during. Or after catechism classes on Saturdays.’
Once, Antonio Conte did the same. His family lived a five-minute walk away in the centre of Lecce. The huddle of streets and apartment blocks have little room for football and, as such, the five-a-side pitch at the church must have been a godsend for a football-obsessed boy.
Keeping the occasional eye on the kickabouts in which Conte played, according to Father Madaro, was his predecessor, Father Salvatore De Giorgi. As it happens, the young Conte in the playground and the middle-aged priest in the church were both on a trajectory which would take them way beyond Lecce’s backstreets.
Conte, after a sparkling playing career with Lecce and Juventus, which saw him win Serie A five times and the Champions League, is on the verge of winning the Premier League title at the first time of asking, adding to the three Serie A titles won as Juventus coach.
And Father Giorgi? He is now Cardinal Giorgi in The Vatican.
‘I spent a lot of time playing football outside the church,’ said Conte last year. ‘We would go to Mass and then we’d be given a ball to play outside.’ And it is here in the historic town of Lecce, deep in southern Italy, that Conte’s football career was shaped.
‘Antonio was boring!’ says Francesco Moriero, still a friend ever since being a teenage team-mate at Lecce, then later for Italy, and playing against him for Inter Milan, having forged his own successful career.
‘He didn’t smoke, didn’t go out. He studied. No discos, no going out. He would only talk about football, have his dinner and then go to bed. When we were travelling all he talked about was football – how you have to move to receive the ball, tactics, every day, all the time. Even as a 16-year-old. We were a group of friends every day together, during training, after training. Antonio was a good student. He studied hard. We didn’t concentrate quite as much at school.’
Lecce is a beautiful city, quite different from the industrial port city of Bari which dominates the southeast region of Puglia. Narrow picturesque streets dating back hundreds of years and elegant Baroque architecture have seen it dubbed the ‘Florence of the south’.
Moriero is sitting in the town centre with another former team-mate and Conte’s teenage co-conspirator, Alessandro Morello. Giuseppe Cartisano, now 74, is also here.
He was Conte’s youth team coach at Lecce, then Serie A stalwarts, though now the club are struggling i n the third tier of Italian football. The former Lecce team doctor, Giuseppe Palia, is the fourth man sitting in the square, enjoying espressos in spring sunshine, but wrapped up against the bitter wind, for which the region is famed. The quartet are recalling memories of the Premier League’s coach of the moment. Morello first met Conte when they were both eight years old. Both played for Juventina, a youth team run by Conte’s father, Cosmino.
Conte once recalled: ‘My father was the owner, coach, kit man and everything else. He did all the jobs. In that period, my father was very tough – especially with me. He wouldn’t shout at the other kids. He would just shout at me and the other players would ask me why. My team-mates would say: “You haven’t made a mistake. Why always you?” It was because I was his son.’
Both players impressed: Conte in midfield, Morello on the wing. Both were asked for trials at Lecce. Both were deemed good enough, yet there was a problem. Cosmino demanded a fee. He wasn’t letting his best players, even his son, join the local professional club without appropriate compensation for Juventina. Finally a price was fixed: Conte Jnr and Morello would move for eight new footballs for Juventina. Conte recalled: ‘And three of them were flat! But they were expensive footballs and they also threw in 200,000 lire, which (then) was about £100.’
It helped that Cartisano knew Conte’s father well. His relationships with all the local youth teams meant that at one point a Lecce team with eight players schooled by Cartisano challenged at the top end of Serie A for UEFA Cup qualification.
‘But people all talked about Antonio,’ Cartisano says. ‘We organised trials for young players but I didn’t need to see Antonio. It was obvious he was a good player. I told his father when Antonio was 11 that I was sure he could become a professional. He became a star because he was a man who wanted to improve. He wanted to speak with coaches, wanted explanations...’
Conte, Morello and Moriero were in the same youth team. ‘We are brothers,’ says Moriero. ‘We were together for eight years from 11 until 19.’ They know Conte better than most.
‘His face makes him seem like he’s a good boy,’ says Moriero, smiling. ‘But on the field he was a warrior. It is his nature. His quality is to pass on his own characteristics to his players. He wants his players to be warriors, too.’
Conte was, though, something of a perfect student. ‘When we would go to play teams like Palermo, it would take 10 to 12 hours on the bus,’ recalls Cartisano. ‘Antonio would study his books for school!’
At 16, all three were promoted to Lecce’s first-team squad for preseason training, four weeks where
contact with the outside world was almost cut off.
‘During the pre-season I had a girlfriend, who is now my wife,’ says Moriero. ‘I wanted to write love letters to her but I got Antonio to write as he was better in Italian.’
The teenagers normally spoke the local dialect, Salentino, but Moriero considered Italian more fitting for a declaration of love.
Their opening day with the first team was inauspicious, however. Moriero recalls: ‘We didn’t wake up until about 11am. There was no one around. But there was a ping-pong table in the training centre. So the three of us started playing pingpong. That’s when the coach came in shouting: “What are you doing here? Training has started! Get out!” So we had to rush out to training without our shoes. And we did all running that morning without shoes.’
While all three would play for Lecce, Conte was the first to leave in 1991 aged 22 – to the mighty Juve.
‘This was the Juventus of Giovanni Trapattoni, so everyone in Lecce was proud of him,’ says Moriero. ‘At the beginning he felt he didn’t have very good technique so asked Trapattoni to stay with him after training to improve. It was difficult to be around big players, but he worked very hard to improve himself.’
So hard, in fact, that eventually he would become the captain of a team dominated by some of the world’s greatest players.
It was at the Turin club that Conte met another formative figure. Giorgio Perinetti, now 66 and sporting director at Venezia, but then on the Juventus technical staff.
‘Antonio was the captain of the team and I immediately understood that he was the leader of the club,’ recalls Perinetti. ‘He played with players like Zinedine Zidane, Edgar Davids and Didier Deschamps. But you immediately understood the leader in the midfield was Antonio Conte.
‘That’s why I always thought he would be a great coach. He had a great character. His leadership was clear. And coaches like Carlo Ancelotti and Marcelo Lippi would ask him to transmit their ideas to the players on the field because they trusted him. And because for him, it was easy to do that.’
Conte would thank Perinetti later for the chances he gave him in his coaching career. Conte’s first job at Arezzo in Serie B had hardly been encouraging. He was sacked by October, then reinstated after Christmas and though he oversaw an improvement, his team were still relegated at the end of the season.
But Perinetti, who was sporting director at Serie B Bari and had just dismissed a coach, saw something in him.
‘We were in a difficult situation and had just lost the derby against Lecce,’ says Perinetti. ‘I thought about Conte. So I spoke with my president, Vincenzo Matarrese, and told him we had two choices. Take a coach with experience to stay up, or do something radical and innovative, choose a young coach.
‘Matarrese had some doubts. He thought Antonio was too young, and also he’s from Lecce. There is a big rivalry between Lecce and Bari. And he had failed at Arezzo. I had to convince the president.’
Perinetti believed that if he could get Matarrese and Conte together, the president would be convinced. A seafood lunch was arranged in Polignano a Mare, a coastal town halfway between Lecce and Bari. Lobster, Conte’s favourite dish, was ordered.
‘And after an hour, Antonio was the new coach of Bari,’ recalls Perinetti. It would be Conte’s first coaching success. He spent two seasons at Bari, taking them from relegation fodder to Serie B champions in 2009. Yet there is also an obstinacy about Conte and having reached Serie A, he walked out.
‘He asked us to have the signings and the team ready for pre-season,’ said Perinetti. ‘The board said: “No we’ll give you a good team but we need all summer to achieve that”. For this reason he decided to change. When he wants to reach a goal, he doesn’t bend to anyone because he’s totally concentrated on what he wants.’
Conte left to coach Atalanta but, with the team struggling, resigned in January 2010 amid fan protests. That was when Perinetti picked him up again and set him on a trajectory that has been ever upward.
He recalls: ‘Antonio left Atalanta and I had left Bari for Siena. I was called by the main sponsor to re-launch the team and take them back to Serie A. And I called Antonio again. I was convinced of his quality. I called him for the same reasons I had called him at Bari. So I gave him the opportunity again to show his quality, even though usually it’s not easy as a young manager to come back [after a failure].’
If it sounds something of a risk of Perinetti’s part, he disagrees. ‘It was hard to convince the presidents of clubs but I was always convinced he would be a great coach,’ adds Perinetti. Siena finished second and were promoted and Conte’s reputation was in the ascendant again. So much so that the next call was one he couldn’t turn down and one which even Perinetti couldn’t oppose.
‘Juventus called me,’ says Perinetti. ‘I spoke with Andrea Agnelli (Juve’s owner) and encouraged him to take him because I knew that the choice was the right one and that he would do a great job.’
Perinetti, who remains in touch with his protégé and whose daughter is good friends with Conte’s wife, Elisabetta, was equally convinced he would succeed at Chelsea, reviving such stars as Eden Hazard.
‘Antonio’s work ethic is so strong and at Chelsea, because they’re not in the Champions League, he is able to work all week with team on the match,’ he explains.
‘That’s when he is great. Leonardo Bonucci (the Juventus and Italy defender) says that when you play a match coached by Antonio, when match-day comes, you feel like you’ve already played this game. He prepares so well that you feel you know everything.
‘The key to his success in Italy was that he brought a new style, playing with intensity and pressing the ball. That’s an international tactic but here in Italy the rhythm was very slow.
‘In Italy it was easy to win titles. And he had great coaches. He was coached by Ancelotti, Lippi, Trapattoni and Arrigo Sacchi for the national team. From Trapattoni he probably took the Juventus mentality of making sure you win. From Lippi he takes the ability to manage the team best.’
Back in Lecce, there is no doubt about the status.
‘He is the best coach in the world at the moment!’ says his friend Moriero. They may even agree in the Vatican. Certainly, in the battle of Premier League coaching heavyweights, the relative outsider has this season turned out to be the best of them all.