This was written when it was thought United would sack OGS for Conte
If Manchester United do reluctantly conclude that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is no longer the coach to deliver the club’s objectives, it would be surprising for their board to pass on the chance to replace him with Antonio Conte.
The notion that United would only turn to the 52-year-old because he is the best candidate available sells him ridiculously short, though. Conte has to be in the conversation whenever a job like this comes up, no matter who is and isn’t on the market. He is an obvious upgrade on the incumbent and as close to a guarantee of success as you’ll find in the game. United would no longer look like the odd ones out among Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea when it comes to coaching pedigree.
This is a man who has made United look silly for years.
When Paul Pogba left Old Trafford to join Juventus in the summer of 2012, not only did Conte play the teenager regularly, he settled on a position that got the best out of him and turned the young midfielder into a star. United paid €105 million (£89 million) four years later to re-sign a player they let go to Turin for a pittance.
After joining Inter Milan in 2019, Conte took Ashley Young, Alexis Sanchez and Romelu Lukaku off United’s hands and turned them into Serie A champions this past May. Lukaku became the face of Serie A, dethroning Cristiano Ronaldo as the division’s Most Valuable Player, and when Conte walked out on Inter following that title triumph, the striker decided it was time for him to go too. Chelsea then paid €115 million (£97 million), in a COVID-impacted market, for the Belgian in August — four years after their then-manager Conte requested that they buy him back from Everton and saw him go to Old Trafford instead.
How many other coaches have turned United discards into players worth that kind of money — allowing two different clubs to make record profits on transfers?
Typecast as a big spender, Conte cut his teeth earning Serie A promotions with Bari (2008-09) and Siena (2010-11), neither of whom have been back in the top flight since. And when he got the Juventus job in 2011, they hadn’t won anything since the Calciopoli scandal five years earlier which saw them demoted to the second tier.
The Old Lady no longer appealed to star players. Antonio Di Natale turned them down. Robin van Persie was shown around the city and given a tour of Juventus’ training ground in the summer Conte arrived. He moved from Woolwich to Manchester United instead. What defined Juventus at that time was the outstanding business they did either for free or for buttons — Andrea Pirlo, Pogba, Fernando Llorente. People forget, but the most expensive signing they made in the three years Conte spent breaking records at the Allianz Stadium was the €18 million they paid Udinese in 2012 for Kwadwo Asamoah.
His next club job, at Chelsea, was a bit different. Marcos Alonso did not set fans’ pulses racing when he was signed, judged as he was on his time as a youngster at Bolton Wanderers and Sunderland rather than the potential Conte saw in him as he blossomed at Fiorentina. The club brought 2012 Champions League final hero David Luiz — a centre-back still defined by Gary Neville likening his style of play to being “controlled by a 10-year-old in the crowd on a PlayStation” — back from two years with Paris Saint-Germain on deadline day that first summer.
Alonso remains at the club today, curling in free kicks. Luiz was a revelation and has arguably never played to a higher standard than he did in Conte’s 2016-17 debut season, not even when he helped the club to that epic triumph over Bayern in Munich.
The swings Conte has produced in his first year at a club are jaw-dropping.
At Juventus, it was 24 points — from seventh in predecessor Luigi Del Neri’s sole season to Scudetto winners and an undefeated season with Alessandro Matri and Mirko Vucinic up front, compared with Diego Milito at Inter and Zlatan Ibrahimovic at AC Milan. At Chelsea, it was 43 points — from 10th under Jose Mourinho and interim manager Guus Hiddink to Premier League champions, 30 wins in 38 matches and an FA Cup final appearance.
Not enough is made of that achievement.
Jurgen Klopp was almost a year into the job at Liverpool when Conte landed in England. The German had a bigger rebuild on his hands, it’s true. Mourinho and Pep Guardiola meanwhile were appointed by United and City that same summer of 2016. And Conte beat the Manchester duo and Klopp too, winning the league by seven points.
United were trounced 4-0 at Stamford Bridge on an October day when Mourinho got in Conte’s ear and told him: “You don’t celebrate like that.” City got done home and away, the 3-1 at the Etihad in early December leaving no one in any doubt as to where the title was heading, as a 13-game winning streak from October to January broke the back of the competition.
Manchester United’s net spend that season was almost €140 million. Manchester City’s was even higher, at close to €180 million. Chelsea’s paled in comparison at €23.8 million, after the sales of Mohamed Salah, Oscar and the rest.
People say Conte inherited a team that won the league in 2014-15 and added 2015-16 title winner N’Golo Kante to it. But had United not just won the FA Cup in Louis van Gaal’s final game? Didn’t they re-sign Pogba in that off-season? Hadn’t City been 2013-14 champions with Vincent Kompany, David Silva, Fernandinho and company? Hadn’t Ferran Soriano and Txiki Begiristain been laying the groundwork for Guardiola already a year before his appointment when predecessor Manuel Pellegrini got to work with summer 2015 buys Kevin De Bruyne and Raheem Sterling?
No matter how specific Guardiola’s style is, and let’s not forget one of his great attributes is the adaptability he has shown in winning titles in Spain, Germany and England, no one had ever won the Premier League playing three at the back before. Yet that’s what Conte did, as he pivoted away from 4-2-4 after back-to-back defeats to Liverpool and Woolwich in the September. In his first experience in a new country, he delivered the league amid competition from the coaches who most people held up to be the very best of this Premier League era.
Frankly, it came as a surprise when he didn’t win Serie A in his 2019-20 debut season at Inter. In mitigation, Conte was having to knock down the house he’d built at Juventus. They were on their way to a ninth title in a row. The mentality he had helped ingrain in his old club endured. The know-how he imparted was hard-wired.
Look at Chelsea, too. Yes, Thomas Tuchel is doing a phenomenal job, but how much was the immediate impact he made at the Bridge when appointed back in January facilitated by players such as Cesar Azpilicueta, Antonio Rudiger, Kante and Alonso already being familiar with a similar system to the one they had played in there for Conte? He leaves teams in a better state than he found them, of that there can be no doubt.
After leading Inter to their first Scudetto in more than a decade, the owners and directors, players and fans didn’t want him to go.
That should give pause for thought.
This icon of Juventus crossed the divide and earned acceptance from even the most die-hard Inter supporters, who thanked him and sang his name after ending a drought that had lasted since the treble under Mourinho in 2009-10. He walked away though, unconvinced the club’s benefactors could match his ambition now owner Suning needed to cut back, with its business interests hit by the pandemic — not to mention the crises affecting other scions of the Chinese economy.
It’s a reminder only one big club has ever sacked him, and even on that occasion Conte even won a claim for wrongful dismissal against Chelsea last year — a claim Judge Andrew Glennie concluded to be “well-founded”.
Italy players cried when he left for the Premier League after two years in charge of the national team at the end of the 2016 European Championship. Conte later claimed the bond between them had become so strong he wouldn’t have broken it had he not already signed for Chelsea.
At Juventus, he had resigned at the beginning of the 2013-14 pre-season to take the Italy job and to this day Giorgio Chiellini, Leonardo Bonucci, Gianluigi Buffon and Pirlo believe they could have persuaded him to stay had they not still been on holiday following the World Cup in Brazil.
By leaving the club in the lurch after promising to see out the final year of his contract that May, Conte’s relationship with president Andrea Agnelli deteriorated. Juventus had less time to source a replacement than if he had quit at the end of the previous season two months earlier, the new campaign was a matter of weeks away and while successor Max Allegri turned out to be a big success, the new man’s past at AC Milan meant he was greeted by fans pelting the team bus with eggs.
Time has not been a healer, with Conte appearing to flip Agnelli the middle finger after a feisty exchange during last season’s Coppa Italia tie between Juventus and Inter.
At Chelsea, he was downbeat and sullen in his second, final season. They invested almost €200 million that summer. But Lukaku ended up at United instead of the Bridge, Olivier Giroud came in from Woolwich as cover for the injured Alvaro Morata that winter and with the exception of Rudiger, no one signed in either of those two windows is still at the club. City, incidentally, doubled down on Guardiola, ploughing another €315 million into their team.
It didn’t excuse the champions finishing fifth but neither was it, to use Conte’s phrase, a “Mourinho season”, in which the situation became so toxic Chelsea had to intervene and change manager in the December. Conte ended his Chelsea reign by beating Manchester United in the FA Cup final.
He has never lost a dressing room. There have been fall-outs — as was the case with some of the Brazilian players at Chelsea — but he handled John Terry’s final year as well as he did Alessandro Del Piero’s at Juventus, which was far from easy considering Agnelli took the decision not to hand the legendary captain a new contract so he could finish his career in Turin.
Much has been made of the text Conte sent to Diego Costa, but the striker already looked on his way out of the club six months earlier, amid reports of one of those eye-opening offers the Chinese Super League made then. Cesc Fabregas, for one, succeeded in changing Conte’s mind about him and though it was hard at times, he credits the serial winner with affecting a change he didn’t think possible at that stage of his career.
This is Conte.
When Bonucci spoke to The Athletic earlier this month, he revealed his ambition to become a coach started while working under him.
“I’ve been jotting things down in a notebook for years now — ever since I played for Conte. He was such an important coach for me,” Bonucci said, “He changed my career. It’s the mentality he gave me and Juventus too, the football knowledge he passed on.” One former collaborator says you come out of working with Conte tired but with a far deeper understanding of the game.
Conte does not suffer fools, this much we know. To him, attitude and application is everything.
Interviewed by Thierry Henry while at Chelsea, Conte said: “I always talk about education and respect. I demand this. 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.”
At Juventus, Reto Ziegler didn’t finish training camp. Felipe Melo and Amauri lasted two days. At Inter, he wasted no time in instructing the club to sell 2018-19 top scorer Mauro Icardi, who had been stripped of the captaincy by predecessor Luciano Spalletti after his wife and agent Wanda Nara kept critiquing the team’s performances on late-night sports shows. Radja Nainggolan’s love of a night out meant he was gone too. This was a guy Inter had paid Roma €38 million for a year earlier.
A player’s fame or Twitter following means nothing to Conte. What he’s done in the past, forget it. It’s why Mario Balotelli got one call-up to his Italy squads, the benefit of the doubt, and that was it. “Conte’s strength is the reset,” Chiellini writes in his autobiography. It’s in creating a winning culture, a “little war machine”.
Everyone has to be all-in.
It was Mattia Destro’s wedding day when Conte called him up to his first Italy squad. He wished him and the missus all the best but the day after the ceremony, he was expected at training.
At Juventus, Conte wanted to make their title rivals “spit blood”. To do that, they had to be tougher than the rest. Chiellini recalls walking out for training one day to tell Conte he still hadn’t recovered from a knock he’d picked up at the weekend. He couldn’t work out that day. Without looking at Chiellini, Conte handed him a bib.
“Every trainer has a different way of coaching, but with Antonio, we really learned how to go into the red zone,” Lukaku explained. Which isn’t to say he’s some outdated drill sergeant of a manager. Playing for Conte is exhausting but it is also enriching.
Bonucci won’t be the only player to have worked under him who goes on to become a coach. Lengthy video sessions and shadow-play exercises of 11 players vs none leave no stone unturned. Antonio Candreva has spoken about the confidence that comes with always knowing that, in a Conte team, you have several solutions to any situation.
Arguably the great testament to Conte’s coaching came with Italy at those Euros five years ago (above).
It was perhaps the worst generation of players the Azzurri had sent to a tournament since the 1950 World Cup. In the quarter-final against Germany, he had Stefano Sturaro, Marco Parolo and Emanuele Giaccherini in midfield. And yet after beating Belgium to top the group and knocking out back-to-back European champions Spain, they took the world champions to penalties only for Simone Zaza and Graziano Pelle to hit two of the silliest spot kicks you’ll ever see.
“It was a shame we ended up on the wrong side of the draw,” Chiellini said. “I honestly didn’t think we’d get that far. But we became the best team at the Euros, the best block, without 23 world-class players, but 23 people in perfect symbiosis.”
For all the attention his back three gets, it’s telling that Chiellini highlights how “another quality of Conte’s is getting the best out of strikers”. It isn’t just a case of running through the goals Carlos Tevez (21), Costa (22) and Lukaku (34 and 30) scored over a single season under him, it’s how he makes them dovetail with a partner and synchronise with the rest of the team. Lukaku’s touch improved after hours spent in front of a machine firing footballs at him. The new diet Conte’s nutritionist Matteo Pincella recommended he adopt — the legendary shirataki noodles — also made Lukaku sharper.
Conte knows how to extract the maximum. He thinks of everything. Reflecting again on Gary Neville’s comment about David Luiz, it at times feels like the Italian is the one controlling his team with a joystick.
The patterns of play are obvious. The movements are meticulously choreographed. You know a Conte team when you see it. Three at the back, a deep-lying playmaker — Pirlo, Fabregas, Marcelo Brozovic — runners from midfield who’ll go close to double figures for goals — Arturo Vidal, Claudio Marchisio, Nicolo Barella — flying wing-backs — Achraf Hakimi, Stephane Lichtsteiner, Alonso — and great strike partnerships — Llorente and Tevez, Pelle and Eder, Lautaro Martinez and Lukaku.
“He engages you like no one else. Antonio manages to create parallel worlds,” Chiellini says.
Worlds in which football becomes your life.
Players start going out for team dinners, or on holiday together. They eat, sleep and breathe football to the extent that their private and professional lives blur. Team-mates feel responsible for one another.
As recently as this Wednesday, Inter back-up centre-back Danilo D’Ambrosio scored, in his first start of the season in an away win at Empoli. He ran over to the bench and dedicated it to Denzel Dumfries, his Dutch team-mate who had given away a late penalty at the weekend that allowed Juventus to escape from the Derby d’Italia at San Siro with a draw. “It’s the strength within the group that gets us results,” D’Ambrosio said. “It’s about thinking in terms of ‘we’ not ‘me’. Conte drilled this concept into us and (successor) Simone Inzaghi’s now carrying it on.”
A testament to that spirit was the reaction to Lautaro and Conte getting into a slanging match on the sidelines in May, when the Argentinian substitute was himself substituted late on with Inter 2-1 up against Roma. Next day, after Inter won 3-1, Conte and the team organised a pretend boxing match with the manager in one corner and Lautaro in the other.
“Day by day, in five years of working together at Juventus and with the national team, I got to know everything about Antonio,” Chiellini said. “All his strengths and weakness and time taught me to love the weaknesses almost as much as his strengths. What’s Conte’s biggest weakness? He’s a football addict. He lives for it, 24 hours a day. Not everyone can handle it, himself included.
“He never switches off, and sometimes he needs to.”
Whether it’s United or somebody else, Conte will challenge his next employers to be better. He will point out what they are missing, on the pitch and off it. He will tell the club if they lack structure and have been too slow to act in the transfer market.
In the end, he could not completely alter Inter’s DNA. “Crazy” is an accepted part of their identity and while Conte denies crossing a pre-match anthem that acknowledges as much off the playlist at San Siro, it did disappear.
Nevertheless, he changed Inter enough for them to win.
The gossip and the drama leaking from the training ground and dressing room diminished and the main non-football headlines were either about his frustrations at reforming the culture at the club or the owners’ financial struggles. Conte succeeded where others failed in making Inter “credible” again. As their chief executive Giuseppe Marotta said, Conte was Inter’s star player.
The perception of him as too emotional should be considered a false problem when you think about United.
For a club run by commercial guys who should take all emotion out of decision making, they appointed fan-favourite former player Solskjaer to succeed the sacked Mourinho in 2018 on emotion and re-signed Cristiano Ronaldo after 12 years away this summer on emotion.
Investing money in the team has hardly been a problem at Old Trafford over the last decade, so you wouldn’t necessarily hear Conte repeating the line from his final year at Juventus when he likened their attempts to compete at the sharp end of the Champions League to walking into a €100-a-head restaurant with only €10 in your pocket.
Where United might be excused for hesitating before appointing Conte is a problem of their own making.
Over Ronaldo’s three years at Juventus, the players subconsciously started playing for him rather than for the team. The same is already beginning to happen at United.
Coaches have to compromise, submitting their big idea to a big name. As Inter’s D’Ambrosio alluded to the other night, Conte’s ethos is rooted in we, not me. How can United ever be a collective when the team is at the service of a supreme individual? When two hours of video analysis, and then another two hours of shadow work, 11 vs none, even in the pouring rain, will become the order of the day.
Other than that, the squad is compatible with Conte, even if the depth at centre-back presents a problem.
He knows Nemanja Matic from the 2016-17 title season at Chelsea. Edinson Cavani is 35 in February but runs his socks off. Conte integrated wide players including Eden Hazard, Pedro and Willian at Chelsea, so using Jadon Sancho and Mason Greenwood won’t be an issue. How he adapted to get mid-season buy Christian Eriksen into his Inter team foreshadows how he might approach Bruno Fernandes.
Incidentally, Fernandes, Ronaldo and Diogo Dalot have all played in Italy and know what methodology to expect even if, as Pogba knows, Conte’s is as intense from a physical and mental perspective as anything they may have come across in their careers.
The decision rests with United’s top brass.
If Solskjaer turns things around for them, perfect. If not, it isn’t really a question of whether they could do worse than hiring Conte. It’s whether they could do better.
And, realistically speaking, the answer is no.
