Leadership vacuum hurting fragile Napoli as Rudi Garcia nears the end
Rudi Garcia insisted that all he wanted to do was “to make our supporters happy”. “It’s been too long since we won a game at home,” he told Italy’s Sky Sport as his Napoli team prepared to kick off against Empoli. “That’s extra motivation for us. We want to do everything we can.”
Those might have been his final remarks as manager of the Partenopei. Napoli lost 1-0 and the club’s owner, Aurelio De Laurentiis, imposed a press silence at full-time. He was understood to be exploring his options to replace Garcia on Monday, a decision that some fans might celebrate even more enthusiastically than a win.
The Frenchman’s appointment this summer was a perplexing one to begin. Napoli had just won their first Serie A title in 33 years, and most people expected them to either name a proven winner or an up-and-coming young coach to succeed Luciano Spalletti. Instead, they went with one whose only major silverware was claimed at Marseille more than a decade ago.
De Laurentiis further undermined the appointment by acknowledging in interviews that Garcia was not his first choice. “I interviewed Thiago Motta,” he said last month. “But he didn’t want to risk taking the place of a manager who achieved everything [Spalletti] achieved. I called Luis Enrique, but luckily for us he went to France instead – look at the results he’s getting.”
There were, according to De Laurentiis, “many others”. To hear him talk was to wonder if Napoli had settled on Garcia almost by chance. The only criteria clearly stated by De Laurentiis at the time was that he wanted a manager comfortable working with a 4-3-3.
For the first time this season, Garcia abandoned that formation on Sunday, trying out a new 4-2-3-1. The idea was to find a shape that would allow him to deploy Giacomo Raspadori behind Giovanni Simeone in the centre of the attack – spreading the goalscoring burden for a team that has had to do without the injured Victor Osimhen since the middle of last month.
More confounding was the decision to leave Khvicha Kvaratskhelia out of his starting XI. “Dropped is an ugly word,” he said in his pre-game interview. “This is just a way for Kvicha to catch his breath and he will make the difference in the second half.”
He almost did. Kvaratskhelia re