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Manager Antonio Conte
- Thread starter Fattynomates
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We were offered him on loan with a view to buy and the common rumour was that Poch turned him down..... We didn't bite so he went to Leicester instead.
The same time-frame we had a sniff of Madison, but again Poch was apparently on his "mentality must be perfect" kick..... The underlying vibe was pretty much De Jong or nothing (and De Jong was set on Barca already). All the chatter at the time was about Poch turning numerous players down and him leaving money on the table instead; which led to us signing no-one.
.........Of course, the popular retroactive narrative quickly became Levy wouldn't buy any players during 18-19.... And a thousand internet cunt-offs were spawned.
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Generally; not at all... Your pining for Bruno has worn extremely thin though.
If you hadn't noticed; I wasn't the only one to react to your post this way..... Food for thought, mate.
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Lots of (the more clueless IMO) posters here seem to freak out when players point on a football pitch for some reason.
Haha.
Bye bye Dele
Pray for Ndombele
*nabbed from the other place.
theathletic.com
After the Tottenham squad had spoken to their colleagues at Chelseaabout what to expect from Antonio Conte as head coach, some felt a degree of trepidation.
This is perhaps understandable. After all, they would have been told about the ferocious work ethic, the instructions during training that are so relentless he has to constantly suck throat lozenges and the volcanic temper that can erupt when things are not going his way.
Most who have worked with Conte have a story or two to tell. Andrea Pirlo remembers his habit for chucking bottles across the dressing room (he regretted his station in the corner of the room that was invariably right in the line of fire), Eden Hazard joked that he was blessed to be a winger as it meant having Conte screaming in his ear for only half the game, and Giorgio Chiellini said players were “not tired — dead” after his training sessions.
Tiemoue Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Sometimes I get the feeling I have to make even more effort in training than I do in a match. That’s the level of intensity he demands every day in what we do.”
But the Spurs players were also told that if you embrace Conte’s methods then the rewards are huge. Which is why those such as Harry Kane, desperate to finally win some silverware, are so enthused by Conte’s appointment.
Not that his frenzied, sometimes maniacal energy is for everyone. There will be some at Spurs who will go the way of many of his players at Chelsea. Burnt out by and fed up with Conte’s uncompromising demands and constant appetite for conflict. So much so that it is believed several players would have pushed for a move in 2018 if Conte hadn’t been sacked.
“He is so demanding, it’s almost psychopathic,” says one source in Italy. “He seems crazy at times.”
After speaking to those at Chelsea and getting a sense of how Conte operates, the Spurs players should have taken a deep breath and prepared themselves. For the meticulous physical and tactical training, the dietary requirements that will see goji berries and shirataki “miracle” noodles added to their diets and the half-time rages when things are not going to plan.
But they will also be working with a head coach who likes to foster a team spirit and camaraderie, and demands that his squad become a tight-knit group.
This is what it’s like to play for Antonio Conte…
Conte’s work ethic is legendary, and he expects similar from his players. In his first press conference at Chelsea, he used the word “work”, or one of its derivatives, 32 times in a little under an hour, including one response where he insisted he was “a worker who likes to work”.
After news of his move to Tottenham began to circulate earlier this week, social media was abuzz with quotes of his celebrating the value of work. One of the most famous comes from an interview with Thierry Henry while at Chelsea: “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.”
Tottenham’s players, if they embrace Conte’s work ethic, will be imbued with a similar dedication. “He never stops working,” Hazard told the Guardian in 2016, with Chelsea en route to the title. “Whether we win or lose, it doesn’t matter. He works, so we work. Work, work, work. And we all know that in football, and all sports really, you have to work so hard to reach the summit.”
The point is that working with Conte comes down to how much sacrifice players are willing to put in to reach their goals. As Hazard put it: “If someone had told us before the season that if we did everything Conte asked of us we’d have a chance to become champions again, we’d all have signed up.”
Spurs’ players will, first of all, see Conte’s indefatigability during training sessions, which are physically and mentally extremely demanding. Many of the Tottenham squad felt physically undercooked playing for Jose Mourinho last season, and after a brief uptick following Nuno Espirito Santo’s arrival in the summer, have remained less fit than most of their rivals.
They can expect big changes under Conte, who often talks about how his players will have “to suffer”. Training under him is intense — and will be even more so with the confirmation that Giampiero Ventrone, whose nickname is The Marine, will be one of Conte’s fitness coaches. Ventrone was on Marcelo Lippi’s staff at Juventus when Conte was a player, and helped push the players to three straight Champions League finals between 1996 and 1998. Spurs players should prepare to be beasted on his watch.
Away from Ventrone, there are lots of sprinting and physical exercises under Conte. He does not put so much of an emphasis on gym work — he wants his players to be lean so his players can run more, rather than bulk up. He will try to slim them down and get them to peak fitness, similar to how Mauricio Pochettino used to.
“When he arrived at Juventus in 2011, there was some scepticism,” says a source in Italy. “But he made an instant impression. The players said they nearly threw up in his first sessions because they were so much harder than his predecessors.”
One of those players was the legendary defender Chiellini, who said in 2018: “It is not only in the match with Conte. It is all day, every training session. He is like a police sergeant.
“When you finish training, you are dead. Not tired — dead. You can do it only because you believe in what he does. We had 40 days in France and it was like entering another world. You are 100 per cent with him. He creates an atmosphere, everyone gives energy to each other. For sure he is one of the very best.”
The former Spurs striker Fernando Llorente, who also worked under Conte at Juve, said in 2013: “The physical work is outrageous. We did very special strength work with machines I knew nothing about, explosive exercises. The workouts are more demanding than what I have done in my career so far. It has taken me a lot to adapt to the workload. It’s brutal.”
Fabio Quagliarella, his striker at Juventus, described Conte’s training sessions as “back-breaking”. Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Here we run a lot. I’ve run an awful lot since I arrived.”
Pre-season is massively important to Conte, and it’s a shame that Spurs have missed out on that this year. During Conte’s first pre-season at Chelsea, the players were pushed extremely hard and felt as though they had never been drilled like that before. Working in intense American heat, the players were left feeling exhausted — but the benefits were obvious and so they quickly bought into what Conte was asking of them.
They felt fitter than pretty much every team they played and scored several late goals. In Conte’s first eight Premier League matches, Chelsea scored six goals in the 80th minute or later. Hazard especially benefited, developing far greater muscle definition and looking as fit as he ever had. How Conte turned around Hazard’s fortunes after a difficult season the previous year bodes well for the Italian working with Kane, who has not looked at his sharpest this season.
As with most areas of Conte’s management, his punishing regimens are not for everyone. Take Danny Drinkwater, who Conte pushed hard to sign in 2017. In his first game since joining, Chelsea played against Drinkwater’s former club Leicester City, but Conte was informed that the midfielder was way short of match fitness after an injury from the previous campaign had disrupted pre-season. Conte’s response was to double down straight away with intense sessions to try and get Drinkwater into shape.
It backfired. Drinkwater picked up a calf injury within days that ruled him out for six weeks, which turned out to be the first of several fitness issues that season. Drinkwater’s Chelsea career has failed for all sorts of reasons, but there was a feeling that his first season was badly mishandled.
To get his players into the best physical shape, Conte also places a big emphasis on diet and nutrition. He likes to hang up bits of paper around the training ground, and often this will include dietary instructions. Goji berries, which have long been used in medicine to support immunity to illness and infection, and Rhodiola rosea supplements, which studies show can reduce physical and mental fatigue, are favourites of his.
Journalist and author Alessandro Alciato explained in his 2015 book Metodo Conte how Conte would set up tables at breakfast during his time as Italy manager with individual food groups (one for protein, one for fats, one for carbohydrates, and another for tea, cappuccino and fruit juice).
The players had never experienced anything like this. Then they would look up to see those bits of paper Conte likes to leave around. Messages included mantras like: “Diet can make the difference between victory and defeat” and “FUNDAMENTAL: Start the day with a good breakfast. If breakfast is inadequate, your glycogen reserves may run close to empty.”
At Chelsea, Conte was just as hands-on, and completely changed the players’ diet — introducing more protein through chicken and salads, and less carb-heavy foods like pasta. He did compromise on this, though, when some of his players said they felt their energy levels weren’t high enough going into games. Conte also banned his players from having pizza, fizzy drinks, tomato ketchup and brown sauce. Black rice and low-calorie shirataki noodles were introduced instead, and the expectation at Spurs is that the diet will be tightly controlled and move back towards how it was under Pochettino.
To ensure he understands how his methods are working, Conte is big on screenings and physical assessments of players to gauge their body fat and weight. He does this alongside his team of nutritionists and, if needs be, puts players on strict diets.
This was the case with Romelu Lukaku after he joined Inter. Conte thought Lukaku was too heavy for what he was demanding of him, and promptly oversaw a programme that led to the striker losing three kilograms. Lukaku’s prescribed diet included lean meats like chicken and turkey and lots of vegetables, with fried food and mozzarella off-limits. Carlos Tevez, who puts Conte at the same level as Sir Alex Ferguson, was given a plan to help him lose six kilograms when he returned from pre-season overweight in 2013.
We don’t know if any of the Spurs players will be subjected to a similar regimen, but what tends to happen is that most of Conte’s players shed weight because of the general dietary rules and intensity of the training sessions. Again, this is more Pochettino and less Mourinho, who gave the Tottenham players more leeway when it came to what they ate.
Conte is far more of a control freak in this regard. At Chelsea, he even asked the owner of the Italian restaurant Gola, which he and some players frequented, to send him pictures of what his players were eating.
No dietary detail is too small for Conte, and if he approaches his new job like he has previous ones, then the Spurs players can expect their head coach to compile lists with scores for their weight, fat percentage and how they have performed in physical tests. These are marked green for good, yellow for OK and red for bad. Anyone scoring badly can expect pretty blunt advice about what they need to do to improve.
Ensuring his players are in peak physical condition is critical to Conte, but so is ensuring his tactical messages are received crystal clear. The idea is that through constant repetitions, they become automatic.
Conte’s preferred formations are a 3-4-3 (as seen at Chelsea) or a 3-5-2. But he started his career using a 4-2-4 based on the ideas of Eugenio Fascetti, whose Lecce side of the 1980s employed the system. In possession, Conte’s teams still tend to move into a 4-2-4 system, with the wing-backs moved high, the outside centre-backs pushed wide and deep like full-backs, and the defensive midfielder dropping in alongside the central centre-back.
To be able to successfully play Conte’s system requires painstaking preparation on the training ground. Conte is known for constantly stopping sessions to get his message across. At Chelsea, training was often very stop-start as Conte would remind players if they had wandered even marginally out of position. He’s hands-on and if players are not in the right place he will come and physically drag them to where he thinks they should be. Some of his players have felt as though he’s playing a PlayStation, getting them to move precisely where he tells them. For others, it has seemed as though they’re being brainwashed through constant repetitions.
The general message from the more experienced players at Chelsea at the time was that he was the “most demanding” of the club’s recent managers.
Conte’s frequent exhortations at Cobham meant he would be constantly sucking Ambrosoli al Miele lozenges in training and on the touchline because his throat was always raw from all the shouting. Conte already sounded a touch hoarse as he addressed the media on Thursday night following the Europa Conference League win over Vitesse. “My wife tells me my voice is more attractive like this, more sensual,” he said in November 2016 with his Chelsea team in the middle of a 13-match winning run. “But I prefer to have my normal voice.”
Conte is similarly vocal during matches, prompting that Hazard joke about being relieved to only have to listen to his head coach for half of the match. “There are times he’s screaming at you to do this or that, telling you to concentrate and work, and you’re thinking: ‘Hold on, we’re 4-0 up with five minutes to play. Easy, boss. Calm down…’. But that’s the way he is,” Hazard said a few months into Conte’s Chelsea reign.
As well as receiving these constant instructions on the pitch, Chelsea’s players did far more tactical work than they had been used to previously. At times, they wanted to have more fun, do more ball work. But that sensational winning run convinced everyone of the merits of Conte’s methods. “Everyone feels one step ahead of where we were last year (under Mourinho),” Nemanja Matic said in November 2016.
One of Conte’s favourite ways to imprint his tactical messages is to play an 11-v-11 game and map out their movements. Another exercise he regularly employs is setting up an 11-v-0 scenario and making the players repeat the same moves for 45 minutes — “Until he sees that they’re working and that we’re starting to feel sick,” Pirlo wrote in his 2014 autobiography. “And that’s why we still win when it’s 11 against 11.”
Some Spurs players will be given individual drills to improve on a particular area of their game — as was the case for Lukaku when Conte took over at Inter. In the Belgian’s case, Conte would make Lukaku stand with his back to goal and ask the rugged 6ft 4in centre-back Andrea Ranocchia to go hard at him again and again. Every time Lukaku lost the ball, they would start the drill again. This went on for three months — constant repetitions until Conte was satisfied Lukaku was at the level he needed to be.
Conte is willing to compromise on some things and at Chelsea, he reduced the video sessions he made his players sit through. In Italy, it’s typical for video sessions to last 15-30 minutes, but with the national team, Conte’s sessions sometimes lasted an hour. He quickly realised at Chelsea that his players were finding the sessions too much and so he scaled them right back.
Conte will do whatever it takes to get across his tactical message — sometimes running through movements with his players with the large Subbuteo board he keeps in his office.
For someone with such precise ideas about pretty much every aspect of his coaching, it’s unsurprising that Conte is known to erupt when things don’t go to plan.
He has a fierce temper and it is standard practice for him to chuck around any loose objects during half-time. Pirlo described his corner of the dressing room as “the most dangerous spot in the whole of Turin… especially at half-time”.
“He’s never happy,” Pirlo said of a man he described as “like a bear with a sore head”. “There’s always some small detail that’s not quite right in his mind. He can see in advance what might happen in the 45 minutes to come.
“He’s obsessed over every last detail, exploiting it to his advantage. He is allergic to error.
“Even when we’re winning, Conte comes in and hurls against the wall, and thus my little corner, anything he can lay his hands on… almost always full bottles of water. Fizzy water. Very fizzy water.”
Chiellini wrote in his autobiography: “Conte’s natural element is fire: I’ve lost count of the whiteboards that have been thrown around the dressing room at half-time. No one ever got hit by one in the heat of the moment. But if he finds an object in his path, he’ll throw it, kick it, he goes berserk. Then, when the game’s over, he lets the situation cool off, as almost everyone does.”
But Conte tends not to say much after matches, especially if his team have lost.
Shortly before he left Juventus, there was a famous incident before the team’s final game of the season against Cagliari. Juventus were on 99 points and long since crowned champions, but Conte was obsessed with becoming the first team to break the 100-point barrier in Serie A.
Conte was leading a video analysis session on the eve of the game when he was interrupted by the club captain Gianluigi Buffon. Along with the club’s CEO Giuseppe Marotta, Buffon entered the room and raised the topic of bonuses owed to the squad for winning the title.
Conte lost it, screaming at Buffon: “I’ve had it with the lot of you. Get out! I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Buffon tried to respond, but Conte shot back: “Shut up. You’re the captain, Gigi, and you don’t understand a fucking thing.” Conte is then said to have muttered “shame on you” as the squad left the room.
Interviewed for the book Metodo Conte, a philosophical Buffon said he bore no ill will towards Conte for the incident. He suggested it was a motivational tactic to keep Juve’s focus on the 100-point mark, and added: “It’s the kind of thing I might have done. If it served his purpose, it’s fine by me.”
Juventus ended up beating Cagliari 3-0 to finish with 102 points.
At Chelsea, the game in which Conte is said to have been most animated was the famous defeat away at Woolwich that prompted the switch to a back three and that 13-match winning streak. Chelsea were 3-0 down at half-time, and such was Conte’s ranting and raving there were genuine fears he might resign there and then. The club’s owner Roman Abramovich was at the training ground for three days after that defeat, underlining how seismic it felt at the time.
Conte admits he was extremely angry after that game and that it was a difficult defeat to accept. He channelled that fury brilliantly to turn his team around, but a variant of that rage is present after most defeats.
Even pre-season losses can infuriate Conte. One journalist remembers being promised a one-on-one interview with him after a pre-season game against Inter in Singapore in the summer of 2017. Chelsea lost the game 2-1 and it was clear that Conte was furious, struggling to say anything positive and unable to shake off the anger at losing the game. The interview was eventually cut short with barely a grunt of acknowledgement as Conte walked angrily onto the bus to leave the stadium.
But alongside Conte’s red mists is the rousing rhetoric. The Tottenham squad have already had an insight into his charisma after he gave a stirring speech upon meeting the players on Tuesday afternoon. Conte told the group he would help them win again, but that they had to give absolutely everything for him, and that he would always be there for them as long as they gave their all in training and matches.
For close observers of Conte’s career, it brought back memories of his rallying cry upon taking over at Juventus a decade ago. “He got at our pride,” midfielder Claudio Marchisio said last year. “He told us: ‘You’ve been seventh for two years. You’ve been awful for two years. From now, on you either get your head down or get out’. He pushed us to earn it on the pitch.“
Pirlo recalls Conte telling the players: “Every single person here has performed badly over the last few seasons. We need to do whatever it takes to pull ourselves up and start being Juve again. Turning around this ship is not a polite request, it’s an order, a moral obligation. You guys need to do only one thing and it’s pretty simple: follow me.”
In his next job as Italy head coach, Conte gathered the players in his first squad and said: “I will call up only those players who deserve it. Remember that I don’t need to explain myself to anyone.”
Before even taking over at Chelsea, Conte met with Hazard and explained how he would help him rediscover his best form. “He spoke to me about the difficult season I’d had, and what he expected of me,” Hazard said in 2016. “I’d not scored many goals last season, but he saw me as a goalscorer. He spoke a bit about the system he wanted to play, the 3-4-3 or even one with two attackers up front. His passion and enthusiasm were obvious even then.”
Camaraderie and team spirit are important to Conte. When he met with the Spurs players on Tuesday, he pushed the importance of togetherness and said they had to enjoy themselves again after a rough start to the season.
There’s hope among the Spurs squad that Conte’s arrival will see a return to the Pochettino days when team meals and other bonding activities helped to maintain a good team spirit. Monthly group meals were a staple of Conte’s time at Chelsea, especially in his first season when they weren’t in Europe, and it was something he replicated at Inter. Conte also ingratiated himself with the players at Stamford Bridge by singing his initiation song with gusto, sending them into hysterics. Few who were there can forget the sight of Conte standing on a chair in the middle of a room in Minneapolis belting out the Neapolitan favourite Malafemmena.
Conte did not want his Chelsea players to be completely consumed by their work, so would allow them a beer after a game — but there were rules. “One. Not a lot. And, after you finish the game, you must drink it quickly, not an hour after the end.” At Stamford Bridge, Conte would also buy Prosecco for his staff at Christmas and take the press pack out for an occasional pint at the Old Plough, close to the club’s training ground.
Creating a good atmosphere where the whole squad feels like a family is very important to Conte. And now that his English is far better than when he joined Chelsea five years ago, it should be easier for him to get across these messages. Communication matters to Conte — at Inter, Lukaku spoke Italian upon joining and was accepted more quickly by the group. Christian Eriksen, by contrast, did not and it took him longer to settle.
Conte’s desire for the whole group to stay as one can sometimes be taken to extremes. At Juventus, for instance, midfielder Arturo Vidal was notorious for going out and partying, but Conte thought it would be better to punish the whole team, not just Vidal. He would tell the team that everyone would be put through an especially physical session, with lots of running, expecting Vidal to be revealed as being a little worse for wear. “The problem is Arturo is made out of iron,” Marchisio said in 2020. “A few kilometres into the run we were all gasping for breath and begging for mercy while he kept running at the front of the group, chatting as if he were at the bar.”
Those runs were a bonding experience for the squad and did nothing to harm the relationship between Vidal and Conte, who, as hard-running central midfielders, were kindred spirits on the pitch. “If I had to go to war, I’d take Conte with me,” Vidal once said and Conte has said the same about the Chilean.
Man-management has been an issue with this Tottenham squad, most recently with Nuno creating the sense of a two-tiered group by leaving behind his preferred Premier League team for the Europa Conference trip to Vitesse.
Generally — though not always, as we’ll see later — man-management has been a skill of Conte’s. At Chelsea, he was able to win over the wantaway Matic in 2016 and get the best out of him. Conte is known more for the use of stick than carrot but on this occasion went for the latter and, recognising that Matic felt unappreciated and unwanted, said in July 2016: “Matic is a very important player for my idea of football.
“He knows this and I’m delighted by his attitude and behaviour. I know with work he can become a fantastic midfielder, one of the best in the world. He is not for sale.”
Matic ended up leaving the following summer, but extracting one last season was an important factor in Chelsea winning the title.
Conte’s greatest diplomatic feat was managing the transition of John Terry from “captain, leader, legend” to warming the bench. This could have been a very awkward situation, and one only has to remember how toxic things became at Chelsea when Rafael Benitez dropped Terry in 2013. But Conte was able to keep Terry onside by frequently stressing how important he was in the dressing room, and how valuable it was to have those leadership skills in the building even if he wasn’t starting games. Conte has continued to speak well of Terry since leaving Chelsea, and the feelings of goodwill are reciprocated.
“In that last year under Conte at Chelsea, I was lucky because I had a really good relationship with him,” Terry said during an Instagram Live last year.
“I started the season, and then he changed formation. I got injured, and he had a really honest conversation with me and said we were going to play three at the back. He didn’t think I suited three at the back.”
At Inter in May, Conte masterfully diffused the tension between himself and Lautaro Martinez after the striker had reacted angrily to being substituted by challenging him to a boxing match during training. Conte’s response to Martinez’s initial petulance was typically to berate him, even though Inter had already won the Serie A title and the match against Roma was essentially meaningless.
Above all, Conte’s squads must be a meritocracy. And this will be appreciated by the Spurs squad in the wake of Nuno’s Arnhem decision when it felt as though there was little fringe players could do to get in the team. If a player doesn’t perform in training, they simply won’t be selected. This happened to Michy Batshuayi on a couple of occasions at Chelsea, when Conte decided that he wasn’t following instructions properly and so was replaced by Hazard as a false nine.
Likewise, if Conte feels a player is deserving of criticism, he will deliver it without hesitation — no matter how established the player is. Even Inter’s talisman Lukaku was given a severe dressing-down in front of his team-mates after a substandard performance against Slavia Prague in the Champions League in September 2019.
“I played really badly, and Conte told me I was trash in front of the entire team,” Lukaku told Sky Sports in January.
“He tells you to your face if you’re right or wrong, he said he would substitute me after five minutes if it happened again.
Pirlo is another in the Conte disciple camp, and his autobiography is littered with fulsome praise for his compatriot. “I consider myself fortunate: I know Antonio Conte,” Pirlo said. “When Conte speaks, his words assault you. They crash through the doors of your mind, often quite violently, and settle deep within you. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve found myself saying: ‘Hell, Conte said something spot-on today’.”
Lukaku has spoken in similarly gushing terms. “The mister is a mentor,” he said in September 2020. “He’s like a father who understands me really well. Playing for him is like a dream come true.”
When Conte left Inter at the end of last season, Lukaku posted a heartfelt message on Instagram that included the words: “I will keep your principles for the rest of my career (physical preparation, mental and just the drive to win…) it was a pleasure to play for you! Thank you for all that you did. I owe you a lot.”
Italy’s legendary centre-back Leonardo Bonucci told The Athletic earlier this year that: “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. He changed my career. It’s the mentality he gave me and Juventus too, the football knowledge he passed on.”
Conte’s abrasive management style is not for everyone. He is not exactly warm and friendly to players who are struggling and because he is so dedicated, he can struggle to understand why anyone else would have anything in their life outside of football. He is not the most sympathetic when it comes to personal issues.
And not every player reacts as well as Lukaku to being hung out to dry in front of their team-mates.
“There’s a reason he has not stayed more than a couple of years in a job,” says a source in Italy. “He has such a divisive character and a bad temper, eventually his relationship with the board deteriorates, as well as sometimes with his players.”
Chelsea is a good case study, where the huge excitement and buzz of the first season gave way to a pretty miserable second.
And even in that first season, there was some collateral damage. Mikel John Obi, for instance, is still angry at Conte for the way he was frozen out of the team. Mikel told The Athleticearlier this year that Conte informed him that if he played for Nigeria at the Olympic Games in Rio he would not be part of his plans at Chelsea.
Mikel was not dissuaded and helped his country win a bronze medal in Brazil. Mikel never played for Chelsea again after a decade of service.
“This guy who has just walked in the door for five minutes is telling me I had to choose,” Mikel said. “He was saying, ‘If you do that, you won’t be a part of this team’. I spoke to the club and told them that I wanted to go. The club respected me because of what I had done for them and how long I’d been there. So off I went and I felt punished for that. I came back and I didn’t make the squad. I was never in the squad on match days again.
“The funny thing is, just before the January window was going to start, he came up to me and said, ‘I want a meeting with you’. This was after making me train on my own for months, treating a player who had been at Chelsea for a long time like this!
“When he tried to meet with me he was like, ‘Let’s try and make up, I will need you in the team, let’s squash this, blah, blah, blah!’. I was like, ‘Are you joking?! Are you naffing serious?!’. He knew I wanted out. I stood up and walked out of the room. You can’t disrespect a human being like that.”
But during that first season, Mikel was generally a lone dissenting voice. Even Diego Costa, who clashed with Conte during training and was dropped for a game against Leicester in January 2017, generally got on well with the head coach. That confrontation came after Chinese side Tianjin Quanjian had made a huge bid to sign Costa, who it was known wanted to leave England. Sources at the time claimed Conte shouted “go to China” during the heated argument.
It was more evidence of Conte not taking a backward step no matter who he was dealing with. After all, Costa was the Premier League’s leading goalscorer at the time with 14 goals and was known for his combustible personality. But Conte had no issue with confronting and then dropping one of the team’s most important players.
Costa ultimately left Chelsea for Atletico Madrid eight months later after a drawn-out transfer saga that included Conte texting the striker to say he wasn’t in his plans. Much was made of that message, but those close to the situation say that, although Chelsea were annoyed with Conte for weakening their bargaining position, there was an almost unanimous agreement that it was in everyone’s interests for Costa to leave.
Chelsea’s hierarchy were less impressed with Conte’s frequent complaints to the board about that summer’s transfers (a window that saw Bakayoko, Drinkwater, Alvaro Morata, Antonio Rudiger, Davide Zappacosta, Ethan Ampadu and Willy Caballero brought in). The tension was increasingly apparent and filtered down to the players and contributed to what was a pretty disastrous 2017-18 season.
Conte was angry at Chelsea missing out on signing Lukaku from Everton and then seeing Spurs pip them to the signing of Llorente. His mood wasn’t helped when the indications from Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Virgil van Dijk’s camps were that both were minded to join Liverpool — partly because they found Klopp more likeable and upbeat but also because they were also more enthused by his style of play and had concerns over how long Conte would be at Chelsea.
The season that followed should act as a warning for him and the Tottenham players of the downside of his volatility. The arguments with the board over transfers was one thing, but it was the conflicts with the players that really derailed Chelsea’s season.
Tensions first spilt over following an embarrassing 3-0 defeat at Roma in October when Conte spotted Kenedy yawning during a team meeting. Furious, he unleashed a tirade at the 21-year-old for his lack of professionalism, which prompted David Luiz to intervene and defend his compatriot. David Luiz barely played again that season and was pretty much completely bombed out having been a key player in the title-winning campaign. His compatriot Willian was similarly peripheral in 2017-18, leading to the midfielder covering Conte’s face with emojis when he posted a picture on Instagram of the team celebrating their FA Cup win at the end of the season.
Willian later unconvincingly blamed the image on his young daughter playing with his phone.
Conte irked his players in other ways that season. Some were frustrated by him asking them to stay in a hotel together the night before games when they would rather have been at home.
Others felt they were being worked too hard, and that Conte wasn’t making allowances for the fact that, unlike the previous season, they were having to juggle domestic with European commitments. This came to a head after a humiliating 4-1 defeat at Watford in February 2018 when the players made clear their frustrations and requested extra time off. Conte agreed and gave them three days to recover after admitting they had played “with fear” at Vicarage Road.
He also denied that he had been demanding too much of his players and suggested they had actually been “working a lot less”.
As the season concluded, many at Chelsea had completely lost patience with Conte. They felt he was permanently seeking trouble and conflict, and by the end, he had rubbed most of the players up the wrong way. It was a shame, given how strong the bond had been the previous season.
After Chelsea ended their season by winning the FA Cup, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois explained how draining it had been for the players having so much uncertainty surrounding their head coach’s future amid his frequent disagreements with the club’s board.
“I don’t think it is a question for the players (whether it was a distraction), it is a question for the board,” he said. “I think we trained very well with him.
“You can not have him one more year and then not know if he will go away the next year or not. You need some clarity so that everyone knows what way the club is going forward. It is what we lacked this season. There were always rumours about everyone and it is not easy then to defend the title, with all the criticism.
“There was a negative spirit sometimes and then it’s hard to raise yourselves.”
Conte wasn’t sacked until after the start of pre-season in July 2018, much to the shock of some of the Chelsea players who were at the World Cup and couldn’t believe he was still in the job.
Conte’s time at Chelsea should not be dominated by memories of how it ended — there were many extreme highs in there as well and it ranks as an exception in his career given how devoted other dressing rooms were to him. When Conte resigned from Juventus, Chiellini said: “Me, Leo (Bonucci) Andrea (Pirlo) and Gigi (Buffon) would not have let him go.” When his underdog Italy side lost the Euro 2016 quarter-final on penalties, the entire team broke down in tears.
Barely able to control the waves of emotion running through him, Andrea Barzagli wept as he said: “In the future, no one will remember this national team that gave its all. There was a desire carry on together.” The next day, Conte cried too and confessed that if he had not already agreed to join Chelsea he would have stayed, so tight was the bond he struck with his players.
Inter fought to keep him and were successful at the end of his first season after a crisis summit at Villa Bellini. Once he delivered the league title, an achievement chief executive Marotta called a “work of art”, the board tried to retain him again. Conte was Inter’s “top player” who was worth every penny. “It’s better to sign one player less in the transfer market and appoint a great coach.”
Inter desperately wanted him to lead the club’s title defence and be the manager who earned them a second star to commemorate a 20th scudetto. But Conte was not for turning and agreed a severance package. “These last two years have been hard and tiring but we won and all the hard work paid off,” Inter goalkeeper Samir Handanovic said. “You were hard but fair. I learned from you as a player and as a captain. You were the one who always raised the bar and put the right pressure on everyone. You were the one who made the difference. Thank you, coach, and thank you to your staff, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work and win with you.
Nevertheless, it’s understandable why some of the Spurs squad might have felt a touch nervous hearing from their Chelsea colleagues about the Italian’s time at Stamford Bridge.
It all ties back to the fact that Conte’s high-energy approach is not for everyone — at Chelsea and wherever he’s been. Some players tire of hearing the same phrases, like “Be ready to suffer”, ad nauseam. Others find that, even though they know he’s a great coach, they tire of his demands eventually.
“Not everyone can handle the intensity, himself included,” Chiellini wrote in his autobiography. “He never switches off and sometimes he needs to. He can get tired too.
“In the beginning with Antonio you give your all, but staying with it on a mental level is hard, harder than from a physical perspective because Conte trains you so hard that in the end, you become a war machine.
“Everything with Antonio is always pushed to the max: if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t get on with him.”
Ultimately, Conte’s success at Tottenham will come down to how much his players are willing to sacrifice themselves and commit to the head coach’s methods. Do this and the rewards are substantial.
That’s what it’s like playing for Antonio Conte
Bye bye Dele
Pray for Ndombele
*nabbed from the other place.
‘You either improve or you die’ – What it’s like to play for Antonio Conte
Players who worked under Conte explain what it's like to play for the brilliant and sometimes maddening new Spurs manager
theathletic.com
After the Tottenham squad had spoken to their colleagues at Chelseaabout what to expect from Antonio Conte as head coach, some felt a degree of trepidation.
This is perhaps understandable. After all, they would have been told about the ferocious work ethic, the instructions during training that are so relentless he has to constantly suck throat lozenges and the volcanic temper that can erupt when things are not going his way.
Most who have worked with Conte have a story or two to tell. Andrea Pirlo remembers his habit for chucking bottles across the dressing room (he regretted his station in the corner of the room that was invariably right in the line of fire), Eden Hazard joked that he was blessed to be a winger as it meant having Conte screaming in his ear for only half the game, and Giorgio Chiellini said players were “not tired — dead” after his training sessions.
Tiemoue Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Sometimes I get the feeling I have to make even more effort in training than I do in a match. That’s the level of intensity he demands every day in what we do.”
But the Spurs players were also told that if you embrace Conte’s methods then the rewards are huge. Which is why those such as Harry Kane, desperate to finally win some silverware, are so enthused by Conte’s appointment.
Not that his frenzied, sometimes maniacal energy is for everyone. There will be some at Spurs who will go the way of many of his players at Chelsea. Burnt out by and fed up with Conte’s uncompromising demands and constant appetite for conflict. So much so that it is believed several players would have pushed for a move in 2018 if Conte hadn’t been sacked.
“He is so demanding, it’s almost psychopathic,” says one source in Italy. “He seems crazy at times.”
After speaking to those at Chelsea and getting a sense of how Conte operates, the Spurs players should have taken a deep breath and prepared themselves. For the meticulous physical and tactical training, the dietary requirements that will see goji berries and shirataki “miracle” noodles added to their diets and the half-time rages when things are not going to plan.
But they will also be working with a head coach who likes to foster a team spirit and camaraderie, and demands that his squad become a tight-knit group.
This is what it’s like to play for Antonio Conte…
Conte’s work ethic is legendary, and he expects similar from his players. In his first press conference at Chelsea, he used the word “work”, or one of its derivatives, 32 times in a little under an hour, including one response where he insisted he was “a worker who likes to work”.
After news of his move to Tottenham began to circulate earlier this week, social media was abuzz with quotes of his celebrating the value of work. One of the most famous comes from an interview with Thierry Henry while at Chelsea: “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.”
Tottenham’s players, if they embrace Conte’s work ethic, will be imbued with a similar dedication. “He never stops working,” Hazard told the Guardian in 2016, with Chelsea en route to the title. “Whether we win or lose, it doesn’t matter. He works, so we work. Work, work, work. And we all know that in football, and all sports really, you have to work so hard to reach the summit.”
The point is that working with Conte comes down to how much sacrifice players are willing to put in to reach their goals. As Hazard put it: “If someone had told us before the season that if we did everything Conte asked of us we’d have a chance to become champions again, we’d all have signed up.”
Spurs’ players will, first of all, see Conte’s indefatigability during training sessions, which are physically and mentally extremely demanding. Many of the Tottenham squad felt physically undercooked playing for Jose Mourinho last season, and after a brief uptick following Nuno Espirito Santo’s arrival in the summer, have remained less fit than most of their rivals.
They can expect big changes under Conte, who often talks about how his players will have “to suffer”. Training under him is intense — and will be even more so with the confirmation that Giampiero Ventrone, whose nickname is The Marine, will be one of Conte’s fitness coaches. Ventrone was on Marcelo Lippi’s staff at Juventus when Conte was a player, and helped push the players to three straight Champions League finals between 1996 and 1998. Spurs players should prepare to be beasted on his watch.
Away from Ventrone, there are lots of sprinting and physical exercises under Conte. He does not put so much of an emphasis on gym work — he wants his players to be lean so his players can run more, rather than bulk up. He will try to slim them down and get them to peak fitness, similar to how Mauricio Pochettino used to.
“When he arrived at Juventus in 2011, there was some scepticism,” says a source in Italy. “But he made an instant impression. The players said they nearly threw up in his first sessions because they were so much harder than his predecessors.”
One of those players was the legendary defender Chiellini, who said in 2018: “It is not only in the match with Conte. It is all day, every training session. He is like a police sergeant.
“When you finish training, you are dead. Not tired — dead. You can do it only because you believe in what he does. We had 40 days in France and it was like entering another world. You are 100 per cent with him. He creates an atmosphere, everyone gives energy to each other. For sure he is one of the very best.”
The former Spurs striker Fernando Llorente, who also worked under Conte at Juve, said in 2013: “The physical work is outrageous. We did very special strength work with machines I knew nothing about, explosive exercises. The workouts are more demanding than what I have done in my career so far. It has taken me a lot to adapt to the workload. It’s brutal.”
Fabio Quagliarella, his striker at Juventus, described Conte’s training sessions as “back-breaking”. Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Here we run a lot. I’ve run an awful lot since I arrived.”
Pre-season is massively important to Conte, and it’s a shame that Spurs have missed out on that this year. During Conte’s first pre-season at Chelsea, the players were pushed extremely hard and felt as though they had never been drilled like that before. Working in intense American heat, the players were left feeling exhausted — but the benefits were obvious and so they quickly bought into what Conte was asking of them.
They felt fitter than pretty much every team they played and scored several late goals. In Conte’s first eight Premier League matches, Chelsea scored six goals in the 80th minute or later. Hazard especially benefited, developing far greater muscle definition and looking as fit as he ever had. How Conte turned around Hazard’s fortunes after a difficult season the previous year bodes well for the Italian working with Kane, who has not looked at his sharpest this season.
As with most areas of Conte’s management, his punishing regimens are not for everyone. Take Danny Drinkwater, who Conte pushed hard to sign in 2017. In his first game since joining, Chelsea played against Drinkwater’s former club Leicester City, but Conte was informed that the midfielder was way short of match fitness after an injury from the previous campaign had disrupted pre-season. Conte’s response was to double down straight away with intense sessions to try and get Drinkwater into shape.
It backfired. Drinkwater picked up a calf injury within days that ruled him out for six weeks, which turned out to be the first of several fitness issues that season. Drinkwater’s Chelsea career has failed for all sorts of reasons, but there was a feeling that his first season was badly mishandled.
To get his players into the best physical shape, Conte also places a big emphasis on diet and nutrition. He likes to hang up bits of paper around the training ground, and often this will include dietary instructions. Goji berries, which have long been used in medicine to support immunity to illness and infection, and Rhodiola rosea supplements, which studies show can reduce physical and mental fatigue, are favourites of his.
Journalist and author Alessandro Alciato explained in his 2015 book Metodo Conte how Conte would set up tables at breakfast during his time as Italy manager with individual food groups (one for protein, one for fats, one for carbohydrates, and another for tea, cappuccino and fruit juice).
The players had never experienced anything like this. Then they would look up to see those bits of paper Conte likes to leave around. Messages included mantras like: “Diet can make the difference between victory and defeat” and “FUNDAMENTAL: Start the day with a good breakfast. If breakfast is inadequate, your glycogen reserves may run close to empty.”
At Chelsea, Conte was just as hands-on, and completely changed the players’ diet — introducing more protein through chicken and salads, and less carb-heavy foods like pasta. He did compromise on this, though, when some of his players said they felt their energy levels weren’t high enough going into games. Conte also banned his players from having pizza, fizzy drinks, tomato ketchup and brown sauce. Black rice and low-calorie shirataki noodles were introduced instead, and the expectation at Spurs is that the diet will be tightly controlled and move back towards how it was under Pochettino.
To ensure he understands how his methods are working, Conte is big on screenings and physical assessments of players to gauge their body fat and weight. He does this alongside his team of nutritionists and, if needs be, puts players on strict diets.
This was the case with Romelu Lukaku after he joined Inter. Conte thought Lukaku was too heavy for what he was demanding of him, and promptly oversaw a programme that led to the striker losing three kilograms. Lukaku’s prescribed diet included lean meats like chicken and turkey and lots of vegetables, with fried food and mozzarella off-limits. Carlos Tevez, who puts Conte at the same level as Sir Alex Ferguson, was given a plan to help him lose six kilograms when he returned from pre-season overweight in 2013.
We don’t know if any of the Spurs players will be subjected to a similar regimen, but what tends to happen is that most of Conte’s players shed weight because of the general dietary rules and intensity of the training sessions. Again, this is more Pochettino and less Mourinho, who gave the Tottenham players more leeway when it came to what they ate.
Conte is far more of a control freak in this regard. At Chelsea, he even asked the owner of the Italian restaurant Gola, which he and some players frequented, to send him pictures of what his players were eating.
No dietary detail is too small for Conte, and if he approaches his new job like he has previous ones, then the Spurs players can expect their head coach to compile lists with scores for their weight, fat percentage and how they have performed in physical tests. These are marked green for good, yellow for OK and red for bad. Anyone scoring badly can expect pretty blunt advice about what they need to do to improve.
Ensuring his players are in peak physical condition is critical to Conte, but so is ensuring his tactical messages are received crystal clear. The idea is that through constant repetitions, they become automatic.
Conte’s preferred formations are a 3-4-3 (as seen at Chelsea) or a 3-5-2. But he started his career using a 4-2-4 based on the ideas of Eugenio Fascetti, whose Lecce side of the 1980s employed the system. In possession, Conte’s teams still tend to move into a 4-2-4 system, with the wing-backs moved high, the outside centre-backs pushed wide and deep like full-backs, and the defensive midfielder dropping in alongside the central centre-back.
To be able to successfully play Conte’s system requires painstaking preparation on the training ground. Conte is known for constantly stopping sessions to get his message across. At Chelsea, training was often very stop-start as Conte would remind players if they had wandered even marginally out of position. He’s hands-on and if players are not in the right place he will come and physically drag them to where he thinks they should be. Some of his players have felt as though he’s playing a PlayStation, getting them to move precisely where he tells them. For others, it has seemed as though they’re being brainwashed through constant repetitions.
The general message from the more experienced players at Chelsea at the time was that he was the “most demanding” of the club’s recent managers.
Conte’s frequent exhortations at Cobham meant he would be constantly sucking Ambrosoli al Miele lozenges in training and on the touchline because his throat was always raw from all the shouting. Conte already sounded a touch hoarse as he addressed the media on Thursday night following the Europa Conference League win over Vitesse. “My wife tells me my voice is more attractive like this, more sensual,” he said in November 2016 with his Chelsea team in the middle of a 13-match winning run. “But I prefer to have my normal voice.”
Conte is similarly vocal during matches, prompting that Hazard joke about being relieved to only have to listen to his head coach for half of the match. “There are times he’s screaming at you to do this or that, telling you to concentrate and work, and you’re thinking: ‘Hold on, we’re 4-0 up with five minutes to play. Easy, boss. Calm down…’. But that’s the way he is,” Hazard said a few months into Conte’s Chelsea reign.
As well as receiving these constant instructions on the pitch, Chelsea’s players did far more tactical work than they had been used to previously. At times, they wanted to have more fun, do more ball work. But that sensational winning run convinced everyone of the merits of Conte’s methods. “Everyone feels one step ahead of where we were last year (under Mourinho),” Nemanja Matic said in November 2016.
One of Conte’s favourite ways to imprint his tactical messages is to play an 11-v-11 game and map out their movements. Another exercise he regularly employs is setting up an 11-v-0 scenario and making the players repeat the same moves for 45 minutes — “Until he sees that they’re working and that we’re starting to feel sick,” Pirlo wrote in his 2014 autobiography. “And that’s why we still win when it’s 11 against 11.”
Some Spurs players will be given individual drills to improve on a particular area of their game — as was the case for Lukaku when Conte took over at Inter. In the Belgian’s case, Conte would make Lukaku stand with his back to goal and ask the rugged 6ft 4in centre-back Andrea Ranocchia to go hard at him again and again. Every time Lukaku lost the ball, they would start the drill again. This went on for three months — constant repetitions until Conte was satisfied Lukaku was at the level he needed to be.
Conte is willing to compromise on some things and at Chelsea, he reduced the video sessions he made his players sit through. In Italy, it’s typical for video sessions to last 15-30 minutes, but with the national team, Conte’s sessions sometimes lasted an hour. He quickly realised at Chelsea that his players were finding the sessions too much and so he scaled them right back.
Conte will do whatever it takes to get across his tactical message — sometimes running through movements with his players with the large Subbuteo board he keeps in his office.
For someone with such precise ideas about pretty much every aspect of his coaching, it’s unsurprising that Conte is known to erupt when things don’t go to plan.
He has a fierce temper and it is standard practice for him to chuck around any loose objects during half-time. Pirlo described his corner of the dressing room as “the most dangerous spot in the whole of Turin… especially at half-time”.
“He’s never happy,” Pirlo said of a man he described as “like a bear with a sore head”. “There’s always some small detail that’s not quite right in his mind. He can see in advance what might happen in the 45 minutes to come.
“He’s obsessed over every last detail, exploiting it to his advantage. He is allergic to error.
“Even when we’re winning, Conte comes in and hurls against the wall, and thus my little corner, anything he can lay his hands on… almost always full bottles of water. Fizzy water. Very fizzy water.”
Chiellini wrote in his autobiography: “Conte’s natural element is fire: I’ve lost count of the whiteboards that have been thrown around the dressing room at half-time. No one ever got hit by one in the heat of the moment. But if he finds an object in his path, he’ll throw it, kick it, he goes berserk. Then, when the game’s over, he lets the situation cool off, as almost everyone does.”
But Conte tends not to say much after matches, especially if his team have lost.
Shortly before he left Juventus, there was a famous incident before the team’s final game of the season against Cagliari. Juventus were on 99 points and long since crowned champions, but Conte was obsessed with becoming the first team to break the 100-point barrier in Serie A.
Conte was leading a video analysis session on the eve of the game when he was interrupted by the club captain Gianluigi Buffon. Along with the club’s CEO Giuseppe Marotta, Buffon entered the room and raised the topic of bonuses owed to the squad for winning the title.
Conte lost it, screaming at Buffon: “I’ve had it with the lot of you. Get out! I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Buffon tried to respond, but Conte shot back: “Shut up. You’re the captain, Gigi, and you don’t understand a fucking thing.” Conte is then said to have muttered “shame on you” as the squad left the room.
Interviewed for the book Metodo Conte, a philosophical Buffon said he bore no ill will towards Conte for the incident. He suggested it was a motivational tactic to keep Juve’s focus on the 100-point mark, and added: “It’s the kind of thing I might have done. If it served his purpose, it’s fine by me.”
Juventus ended up beating Cagliari 3-0 to finish with 102 points.
At Chelsea, the game in which Conte is said to have been most animated was the famous defeat away at Woolwich that prompted the switch to a back three and that 13-match winning streak. Chelsea were 3-0 down at half-time, and such was Conte’s ranting and raving there were genuine fears he might resign there and then. The club’s owner Roman Abramovich was at the training ground for three days after that defeat, underlining how seismic it felt at the time.
Conte admits he was extremely angry after that game and that it was a difficult defeat to accept. He channelled that fury brilliantly to turn his team around, but a variant of that rage is present after most defeats.
Even pre-season losses can infuriate Conte. One journalist remembers being promised a one-on-one interview with him after a pre-season game against Inter in Singapore in the summer of 2017. Chelsea lost the game 2-1 and it was clear that Conte was furious, struggling to say anything positive and unable to shake off the anger at losing the game. The interview was eventually cut short with barely a grunt of acknowledgement as Conte walked angrily onto the bus to leave the stadium.
But alongside Conte’s red mists is the rousing rhetoric. The Tottenham squad have already had an insight into his charisma after he gave a stirring speech upon meeting the players on Tuesday afternoon. Conte told the group he would help them win again, but that they had to give absolutely everything for him, and that he would always be there for them as long as they gave their all in training and matches.
For close observers of Conte’s career, it brought back memories of his rallying cry upon taking over at Juventus a decade ago. “He got at our pride,” midfielder Claudio Marchisio said last year. “He told us: ‘You’ve been seventh for two years. You’ve been awful for two years. From now, on you either get your head down or get out’. He pushed us to earn it on the pitch.“
Pirlo recalls Conte telling the players: “Every single person here has performed badly over the last few seasons. We need to do whatever it takes to pull ourselves up and start being Juve again. Turning around this ship is not a polite request, it’s an order, a moral obligation. You guys need to do only one thing and it’s pretty simple: follow me.”
In his next job as Italy head coach, Conte gathered the players in his first squad and said: “I will call up only those players who deserve it. Remember that I don’t need to explain myself to anyone.”
Before even taking over at Chelsea, Conte met with Hazard and explained how he would help him rediscover his best form. “He spoke to me about the difficult season I’d had, and what he expected of me,” Hazard said in 2016. “I’d not scored many goals last season, but he saw me as a goalscorer. He spoke a bit about the system he wanted to play, the 3-4-3 or even one with two attackers up front. His passion and enthusiasm were obvious even then.”
Camaraderie and team spirit are important to Conte. When he met with the Spurs players on Tuesday, he pushed the importance of togetherness and said they had to enjoy themselves again after a rough start to the season.
There’s hope among the Spurs squad that Conte’s arrival will see a return to the Pochettino days when team meals and other bonding activities helped to maintain a good team spirit. Monthly group meals were a staple of Conte’s time at Chelsea, especially in his first season when they weren’t in Europe, and it was something he replicated at Inter. Conte also ingratiated himself with the players at Stamford Bridge by singing his initiation song with gusto, sending them into hysterics. Few who were there can forget the sight of Conte standing on a chair in the middle of a room in Minneapolis belting out the Neapolitan favourite Malafemmena.
Conte did not want his Chelsea players to be completely consumed by their work, so would allow them a beer after a game — but there were rules. “One. Not a lot. And, after you finish the game, you must drink it quickly, not an hour after the end.” At Stamford Bridge, Conte would also buy Prosecco for his staff at Christmas and take the press pack out for an occasional pint at the Old Plough, close to the club’s training ground.
Creating a good atmosphere where the whole squad feels like a family is very important to Conte. And now that his English is far better than when he joined Chelsea five years ago, it should be easier for him to get across these messages. Communication matters to Conte — at Inter, Lukaku spoke Italian upon joining and was accepted more quickly by the group. Christian Eriksen, by contrast, did not and it took him longer to settle.
Conte’s desire for the whole group to stay as one can sometimes be taken to extremes. At Juventus, for instance, midfielder Arturo Vidal was notorious for going out and partying, but Conte thought it would be better to punish the whole team, not just Vidal. He would tell the team that everyone would be put through an especially physical session, with lots of running, expecting Vidal to be revealed as being a little worse for wear. “The problem is Arturo is made out of iron,” Marchisio said in 2020. “A few kilometres into the run we were all gasping for breath and begging for mercy while he kept running at the front of the group, chatting as if he were at the bar.”
Those runs were a bonding experience for the squad and did nothing to harm the relationship between Vidal and Conte, who, as hard-running central midfielders, were kindred spirits on the pitch. “If I had to go to war, I’d take Conte with me,” Vidal once said and Conte has said the same about the Chilean.
Man-management has been an issue with this Tottenham squad, most recently with Nuno creating the sense of a two-tiered group by leaving behind his preferred Premier League team for the Europa Conference trip to Vitesse.
Generally — though not always, as we’ll see later — man-management has been a skill of Conte’s. At Chelsea, he was able to win over the wantaway Matic in 2016 and get the best out of him. Conte is known more for the use of stick than carrot but on this occasion went for the latter and, recognising that Matic felt unappreciated and unwanted, said in July 2016: “Matic is a very important player for my idea of football.
“He knows this and I’m delighted by his attitude and behaviour. I know with work he can become a fantastic midfielder, one of the best in the world. He is not for sale.”
Matic ended up leaving the following summer, but extracting one last season was an important factor in Chelsea winning the title.
Conte’s greatest diplomatic feat was managing the transition of John Terry from “captain, leader, legend” to warming the bench. This could have been a very awkward situation, and one only has to remember how toxic things became at Chelsea when Rafael Benitez dropped Terry in 2013. But Conte was able to keep Terry onside by frequently stressing how important he was in the dressing room, and how valuable it was to have those leadership skills in the building even if he wasn’t starting games. Conte has continued to speak well of Terry since leaving Chelsea, and the feelings of goodwill are reciprocated.
“In that last year under Conte at Chelsea, I was lucky because I had a really good relationship with him,” Terry said during an Instagram Live last year.
“I started the season, and then he changed formation. I got injured, and he had a really honest conversation with me and said we were going to play three at the back. He didn’t think I suited three at the back.”
At Inter in May, Conte masterfully diffused the tension between himself and Lautaro Martinez after the striker had reacted angrily to being substituted by challenging him to a boxing match during training. Conte’s response to Martinez’s initial petulance was typically to berate him, even though Inter had already won the Serie A title and the match against Roma was essentially meaningless.
Above all, Conte’s squads must be a meritocracy. And this will be appreciated by the Spurs squad in the wake of Nuno’s Arnhem decision when it felt as though there was little fringe players could do to get in the team. If a player doesn’t perform in training, they simply won’t be selected. This happened to Michy Batshuayi on a couple of occasions at Chelsea, when Conte decided that he wasn’t following instructions properly and so was replaced by Hazard as a false nine.
Likewise, if Conte feels a player is deserving of criticism, he will deliver it without hesitation — no matter how established the player is. Even Inter’s talisman Lukaku was given a severe dressing-down in front of his team-mates after a substandard performance against Slavia Prague in the Champions League in September 2019.
“I played really badly, and Conte told me I was trash in front of the entire team,” Lukaku told Sky Sports in January.
“He tells you to your face if you’re right or wrong, he said he would substitute me after five minutes if it happened again.
Pirlo is another in the Conte disciple camp, and his autobiography is littered with fulsome praise for his compatriot. “I consider myself fortunate: I know Antonio Conte,” Pirlo said. “When Conte speaks, his words assault you. They crash through the doors of your mind, often quite violently, and settle deep within you. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve found myself saying: ‘Hell, Conte said something spot-on today’.”
Lukaku has spoken in similarly gushing terms. “The mister is a mentor,” he said in September 2020. “He’s like a father who understands me really well. Playing for him is like a dream come true.”
When Conte left Inter at the end of last season, Lukaku posted a heartfelt message on Instagram that included the words: “I will keep your principles for the rest of my career (physical preparation, mental and just the drive to win…) it was a pleasure to play for you! Thank you for all that you did. I owe you a lot.”
Italy’s legendary centre-back Leonardo Bonucci told The Athletic earlier this year that: “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. He changed my career. It’s the mentality he gave me and Juventus too, the football knowledge he passed on.”
Conte’s abrasive management style is not for everyone. He is not exactly warm and friendly to players who are struggling and because he is so dedicated, he can struggle to understand why anyone else would have anything in their life outside of football. He is not the most sympathetic when it comes to personal issues.
And not every player reacts as well as Lukaku to being hung out to dry in front of their team-mates.
“There’s a reason he has not stayed more than a couple of years in a job,” says a source in Italy. “He has such a divisive character and a bad temper, eventually his relationship with the board deteriorates, as well as sometimes with his players.”
Chelsea is a good case study, where the huge excitement and buzz of the first season gave way to a pretty miserable second.
And even in that first season, there was some collateral damage. Mikel John Obi, for instance, is still angry at Conte for the way he was frozen out of the team. Mikel told The Athleticearlier this year that Conte informed him that if he played for Nigeria at the Olympic Games in Rio he would not be part of his plans at Chelsea.
Mikel was not dissuaded and helped his country win a bronze medal in Brazil. Mikel never played for Chelsea again after a decade of service.
“This guy who has just walked in the door for five minutes is telling me I had to choose,” Mikel said. “He was saying, ‘If you do that, you won’t be a part of this team’. I spoke to the club and told them that I wanted to go. The club respected me because of what I had done for them and how long I’d been there. So off I went and I felt punished for that. I came back and I didn’t make the squad. I was never in the squad on match days again.
“The funny thing is, just before the January window was going to start, he came up to me and said, ‘I want a meeting with you’. This was after making me train on my own for months, treating a player who had been at Chelsea for a long time like this!
“When he tried to meet with me he was like, ‘Let’s try and make up, I will need you in the team, let’s squash this, blah, blah, blah!’. I was like, ‘Are you joking?! Are you naffing serious?!’. He knew I wanted out. I stood up and walked out of the room. You can’t disrespect a human being like that.”
But during that first season, Mikel was generally a lone dissenting voice. Even Diego Costa, who clashed with Conte during training and was dropped for a game against Leicester in January 2017, generally got on well with the head coach. That confrontation came after Chinese side Tianjin Quanjian had made a huge bid to sign Costa, who it was known wanted to leave England. Sources at the time claimed Conte shouted “go to China” during the heated argument.
It was more evidence of Conte not taking a backward step no matter who he was dealing with. After all, Costa was the Premier League’s leading goalscorer at the time with 14 goals and was known for his combustible personality. But Conte had no issue with confronting and then dropping one of the team’s most important players.
Costa ultimately left Chelsea for Atletico Madrid eight months later after a drawn-out transfer saga that included Conte texting the striker to say he wasn’t in his plans. Much was made of that message, but those close to the situation say that, although Chelsea were annoyed with Conte for weakening their bargaining position, there was an almost unanimous agreement that it was in everyone’s interests for Costa to leave.
Chelsea’s hierarchy were less impressed with Conte’s frequent complaints to the board about that summer’s transfers (a window that saw Bakayoko, Drinkwater, Alvaro Morata, Antonio Rudiger, Davide Zappacosta, Ethan Ampadu and Willy Caballero brought in). The tension was increasingly apparent and filtered down to the players and contributed to what was a pretty disastrous 2017-18 season.
Conte was angry at Chelsea missing out on signing Lukaku from Everton and then seeing Spurs pip them to the signing of Llorente. His mood wasn’t helped when the indications from Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Virgil van Dijk’s camps were that both were minded to join Liverpool — partly because they found Klopp more likeable and upbeat but also because they were also more enthused by his style of play and had concerns over how long Conte would be at Chelsea.
The season that followed should act as a warning for him and the Tottenham players of the downside of his volatility. The arguments with the board over transfers was one thing, but it was the conflicts with the players that really derailed Chelsea’s season.
Tensions first spilt over following an embarrassing 3-0 defeat at Roma in October when Conte spotted Kenedy yawning during a team meeting. Furious, he unleashed a tirade at the 21-year-old for his lack of professionalism, which prompted David Luiz to intervene and defend his compatriot. David Luiz barely played again that season and was pretty much completely bombed out having been a key player in the title-winning campaign. His compatriot Willian was similarly peripheral in 2017-18, leading to the midfielder covering Conte’s face with emojis when he posted a picture on Instagram of the team celebrating their FA Cup win at the end of the season.
Willian later unconvincingly blamed the image on his young daughter playing with his phone.
Conte irked his players in other ways that season. Some were frustrated by him asking them to stay in a hotel together the night before games when they would rather have been at home.
Others felt they were being worked too hard, and that Conte wasn’t making allowances for the fact that, unlike the previous season, they were having to juggle domestic with European commitments. This came to a head after a humiliating 4-1 defeat at Watford in February 2018 when the players made clear their frustrations and requested extra time off. Conte agreed and gave them three days to recover after admitting they had played “with fear” at Vicarage Road.
He also denied that he had been demanding too much of his players and suggested they had actually been “working a lot less”.
As the season concluded, many at Chelsea had completely lost patience with Conte. They felt he was permanently seeking trouble and conflict, and by the end, he had rubbed most of the players up the wrong way. It was a shame, given how strong the bond had been the previous season.
After Chelsea ended their season by winning the FA Cup, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois explained how draining it had been for the players having so much uncertainty surrounding their head coach’s future amid his frequent disagreements with the club’s board.
“I don’t think it is a question for the players (whether it was a distraction), it is a question for the board,” he said. “I think we trained very well with him.
“You can not have him one more year and then not know if he will go away the next year or not. You need some clarity so that everyone knows what way the club is going forward. It is what we lacked this season. There were always rumours about everyone and it is not easy then to defend the title, with all the criticism.
“There was a negative spirit sometimes and then it’s hard to raise yourselves.”
Conte wasn’t sacked until after the start of pre-season in July 2018, much to the shock of some of the Chelsea players who were at the World Cup and couldn’t believe he was still in the job.
Conte’s time at Chelsea should not be dominated by memories of how it ended — there were many extreme highs in there as well and it ranks as an exception in his career given how devoted other dressing rooms were to him. When Conte resigned from Juventus, Chiellini said: “Me, Leo (Bonucci) Andrea (Pirlo) and Gigi (Buffon) would not have let him go.” When his underdog Italy side lost the Euro 2016 quarter-final on penalties, the entire team broke down in tears.
Barely able to control the waves of emotion running through him, Andrea Barzagli wept as he said: “In the future, no one will remember this national team that gave its all. There was a desire carry on together.” The next day, Conte cried too and confessed that if he had not already agreed to join Chelsea he would have stayed, so tight was the bond he struck with his players.
Inter fought to keep him and were successful at the end of his first season after a crisis summit at Villa Bellini. Once he delivered the league title, an achievement chief executive Marotta called a “work of art”, the board tried to retain him again. Conte was Inter’s “top player” who was worth every penny. “It’s better to sign one player less in the transfer market and appoint a great coach.”
Inter desperately wanted him to lead the club’s title defence and be the manager who earned them a second star to commemorate a 20th scudetto. But Conte was not for turning and agreed a severance package. “These last two years have been hard and tiring but we won and all the hard work paid off,” Inter goalkeeper Samir Handanovic said. “You were hard but fair. I learned from you as a player and as a captain. You were the one who always raised the bar and put the right pressure on everyone. You were the one who made the difference. Thank you, coach, and thank you to your staff, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work and win with you.
Nevertheless, it’s understandable why some of the Spurs squad might have felt a touch nervous hearing from their Chelsea colleagues about the Italian’s time at Stamford Bridge.
It all ties back to the fact that Conte’s high-energy approach is not for everyone — at Chelsea and wherever he’s been. Some players tire of hearing the same phrases, like “Be ready to suffer”, ad nauseam. Others find that, even though they know he’s a great coach, they tire of his demands eventually.
“Not everyone can handle the intensity, himself included,” Chiellini wrote in his autobiography. “He never switches off and sometimes he needs to. He can get tired too.
“In the beginning with Antonio you give your all, but staying with it on a mental level is hard, harder than from a physical perspective because Conte trains you so hard that in the end, you become a war machine.
“Everything with Antonio is always pushed to the max: if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t get on with him.”
Ultimately, Conte’s success at Tottenham will come down to how much his players are willing to sacrifice themselves and commit to the head coach’s methods. Do this and the rewards are substantial.
That’s what it’s like playing for Antonio Conte
You still have n’t answered my question.
Are you a professional or just talking out of your ass?
“In the beginning with Antonio you give your all, but staying with it on a mental level is hard, harder than from a physical perspective because Conte trains you so hard that in the end, you become a war machine."
*Chills*
Everyone should read this
*Chills*
Everyone should read this
Haha.
Bye bye Dele
Pray for Ndombele
*nabbed from the other place.
‘You either improve or you die’ – What it’s like to play for Antonio Conte
Players who worked under Conte explain what it's like to play for the brilliant and sometimes maddening new Spurs manager
After the Tottenham squad had spoken to their colleagues at Chelseaabout what to expect from Antonio Conte as head coach, some felt a degree of trepidation.
This is perhaps understandable. After all, they would have been told about the ferocious work ethic, the instructions during training that are so relentless he has to constantly suck throat lozenges and the volcanic temper that can erupt when things are not going his way.
Most who have worked with Conte have a story or two to tell. Andrea Pirlo remembers his habit for chucking bottles across the dressing room (he regretted his station in the corner of the room that was invariably right in the line of fire), Eden Hazard joked that he was blessed to be a winger as it meant having Conte screaming in his ear for only half the game, and Giorgio Chiellini said players were “not tired — dead” after his training sessions.
Tiemoue Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Sometimes I get the feeling I have to make even more effort in training than I do in a match. That’s the level of intensity he demands every day in what we do.”
But the Spurs players were also told that if you embrace Conte’s methods then the rewards are huge. Which is why those such as Harry Kane, desperate to finally win some silverware, are so enthused by Conte’s appointment.
Not that his frenzied, sometimes maniacal energy is for everyone. There will be some at Spurs who will go the way of many of his players at Chelsea. Burnt out by and fed up with Conte’s uncompromising demands and constant appetite for conflict. So much so that it is believed several players would have pushed for a move in 2018 if Conte hadn’t been sacked.
“He is so demanding, it’s almost psychopathic,” says one source in Italy. “He seems crazy at times.”
After speaking to those at Chelsea and getting a sense of how Conte operates, the Spurs players should have taken a deep breath and prepared themselves. For the meticulous physical and tactical training, the dietary requirements that will see goji berries and shirataki “miracle” noodles added to their diets and the half-time rages when things are not going to plan.
But they will also be working with a head coach who likes to foster a team spirit and camaraderie, and demands that his squad become a tight-knit group.
This is what it’s like to play for Antonio Conte…
Conte’s work ethic is legendary, and he expects similar from his players. In his first press conference at Chelsea, he used the word “work”, or one of its derivatives, 32 times in a little under an hour, including one response where he insisted he was “a worker who likes to work”.
After news of his move to Tottenham began to circulate earlier this week, social media was abuzz with quotes of his celebrating the value of work. One of the most famous comes from an interview with Thierry Henry while at Chelsea: “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.”
Tottenham’s players, if they embrace Conte’s work ethic, will be imbued with a similar dedication. “He never stops working,” Hazard told the Guardian in 2016, with Chelsea en route to the title. “Whether we win or lose, it doesn’t matter. He works, so we work. Work, work, work. And we all know that in football, and all sports really, you have to work so hard to reach the summit.”
The point is that working with Conte comes down to how much sacrifice players are willing to put in to reach their goals. As Hazard put it: “If someone had told us before the season that if we did everything Conte asked of us we’d have a chance to become champions again, we’d all have signed up.”
Spurs’ players will, first of all, see Conte’s indefatigability during training sessions, which are physically and mentally extremely demanding. Many of the Tottenham squad felt physically undercooked playing for Jose Mourinho last season, and after a brief uptick following Nuno Espirito Santo’s arrival in the summer, have remained less fit than most of their rivals.
They can expect big changes under Conte, who often talks about how his players will have “to suffer”. Training under him is intense — and will be even more so with the confirmation that Giampiero Ventrone, whose nickname is The Marine, will be one of Conte’s fitness coaches. Ventrone was on Marcelo Lippi’s staff at Juventus when Conte was a player, and helped push the players to three straight Champions League finals between 1996 and 1998. Spurs players should prepare to be beasted on his watch.
Away from Ventrone, there are lots of sprinting and physical exercises under Conte. He does not put so much of an emphasis on gym work — he wants his players to be lean so his players can run more, rather than bulk up. He will try to slim them down and get them to peak fitness, similar to how Mauricio Pochettino used to.
“When he arrived at Juventus in 2011, there was some scepticism,” says a source in Italy. “But he made an instant impression. The players said they nearly threw up in his first sessions because they were so much harder than his predecessors.”
One of those players was the legendary defender Chiellini, who said in 2018: “It is not only in the match with Conte. It is all day, every training session. He is like a police sergeant.
“When you finish training, you are dead. Not tired — dead. You can do it only because you believe in what he does. We had 40 days in France and it was like entering another world. You are 100 per cent with him. He creates an atmosphere, everyone gives energy to each other. For sure he is one of the very best.”
The former Spurs striker Fernando Llorente, who also worked under Conte at Juve, said in 2013: “The physical work is outrageous. We did very special strength work with machines I knew nothing about, explosive exercises. The workouts are more demanding than what I have done in my career so far. It has taken me a lot to adapt to the workload. It’s brutal.”
Fabio Quagliarella, his striker at Juventus, described Conte’s training sessions as “back-breaking”. Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Here we run a lot. I’ve run an awful lot since I arrived.”
Pre-season is massively important to Conte, and it’s a shame that Spurs have missed out on that this year. During Conte’s first pre-season at Chelsea, the players were pushed extremely hard and felt as though they had never been drilled like that before. Working in intense American heat, the players were left feeling exhausted — but the benefits were obvious and so they quickly bought into what Conte was asking of them.
They felt fitter than pretty much every team they played and scored several late goals. In Conte’s first eight Premier League matches, Chelsea scored six goals in the 80th minute or later. Hazard especially benefited, developing far greater muscle definition and looking as fit as he ever had. How Conte turned around Hazard’s fortunes after a difficult season the previous year bodes well for the Italian working with Kane, who has not looked at his sharpest this season.
As with most areas of Conte’s management, his punishing regimens are not for everyone. Take Danny Drinkwater, who Conte pushed hard to sign in 2017. In his first game since joining, Chelsea played against Drinkwater’s former club Leicester City, but Conte was informed that the midfielder was way short of match fitness after an injury from the previous campaign had disrupted pre-season. Conte’s response was to double down straight away with intense sessions to try and get Drinkwater into shape.
It backfired. Drinkwater picked up a calf injury within days that ruled him out for six weeks, which turned out to be the first of several fitness issues that season. Drinkwater’s Chelsea career has failed for all sorts of reasons, but there was a feeling that his first season was badly mishandled.
To get his players into the best physical shape, Conte also places a big emphasis on diet and nutrition. He likes to hang up bits of paper around the training ground, and often this will include dietary instructions. Goji berries, which have long been used in medicine to support immunity to illness and infection, and Rhodiola rosea supplements, which studies show can reduce physical and mental fatigue, are favourites of his.
Journalist and author Alessandro Alciato explained in his 2015 book Metodo Conte how Conte would set up tables at breakfast during his time as Italy manager with individual food groups (one for protein, one for fats, one for carbohydrates, and another for tea, cappuccino and fruit juice).
The players had never experienced anything like this. Then they would look up to see those bits of paper Conte likes to leave around. Messages included mantras like: “Diet can make the difference between victory and defeat” and “FUNDAMENTAL: Start the day with a good breakfast. If breakfast is inadequate, your glycogen reserves may run close to empty.”
At Chelsea, Conte was just as hands-on, and completely changed the players’ diet — introducing more protein through chicken and salads, and less carb-heavy foods like pasta. He did compromise on this, though, when some of his players said they felt their energy levels weren’t high enough going into games. Conte also banned his players from having pizza, fizzy drinks, tomato ketchup and brown sauce. Black rice and low-calorie shirataki noodles were introduced instead, and the expectation at Spurs is that the diet will be tightly controlled and move back towards how it was under Pochettino.
To ensure he understands how his methods are working, Conte is big on screenings and physical assessments of players to gauge their body fat and weight. He does this alongside his team of nutritionists and, if needs be, puts players on strict diets.
This was the case with Romelu Lukaku after he joined Inter. Conte thought Lukaku was too heavy for what he was demanding of him, and promptly oversaw a programme that led to the striker losing three kilograms. Lukaku’s prescribed diet included lean meats like chicken and turkey and lots of vegetables, with fried food and mozzarella off-limits. Carlos Tevez, who puts Conte at the same level as Sir Alex Ferguson, was given a plan to help him lose six kilograms when he returned from pre-season overweight in 2013.
We don’t know if any of the Spurs players will be subjected to a similar regimen, but what tends to happen is that most of Conte’s players shed weight because of the general dietary rules and intensity of the training sessions. Again, this is more Pochettino and less Mourinho, who gave the Tottenham players more leeway when it came to what they ate.
Conte is far more of a control freak in this regard. At Chelsea, he even asked the owner of the Italian restaurant Gola, which he and some players frequented, to send him pictures of what his players were eating.
No dietary detail is too small for Conte, and if he approaches his new job like he has previous ones, then the Spurs players can expect their head coach to compile lists with scores for their weight, fat percentage and how they have performed in physical tests. These are marked green for good, yellow for OK and red for bad. Anyone scoring badly can expect pretty blunt advice about what they need to do to improve.
Ensuring his players are in peak physical condition is critical to Conte, but so is ensuring his tactical messages are received crystal clear. The idea is that through constant repetitions, they become automatic.
Conte’s preferred formations are a 3-4-3 (as seen at Chelsea) or a 3-5-2. But he started his career using a 4-2-4 based on the ideas of Eugenio Fascetti, whose Lecce side of the 1980s employed the system. In possession, Conte’s teams still tend to move into a 4-2-4 system, with the wing-backs moved high, the outside centre-backs pushed wide and deep like full-backs, and the defensive midfielder dropping in alongside the central centre-back.
To be able to successfully play Conte’s system requires painstaking preparation on the training ground. Conte is known for constantly stopping sessions to get his message across. At Chelsea, training was often very stop-start as Conte would remind players if they had wandered even marginally out of position. He’s hands-on and if players are not in the right place he will come and physically drag them to where he thinks they should be. Some of his players have felt as though he’s playing a PlayStation, getting them to move precisely where he tells them. For others, it has seemed as though they’re being brainwashed through constant repetitions.
The general message from the more experienced players at Chelsea at the time was that he was the “most demanding” of the club’s recent managers.
Conte’s frequent exhortations at Cobham meant he would be constantly sucking Ambrosoli al Miele lozenges in training and on the touchline because his throat was always raw from all the shouting. Conte already sounded a touch hoarse as he addressed the media on Thursday night following the Europa Conference League win over Vitesse. “My wife tells me my voice is more attractive like this, more sensual,” he said in November 2016 with his Chelsea team in the middle of a 13-match winning run. “But I prefer to have my normal voice.”
Conte is similarly vocal during matches, prompting that Hazard joke about being relieved to only have to listen to his head coach for half of the match. “There are times he’s screaming at you to do this or that, telling you to concentrate and work, and you’re thinking: ‘Hold on, we’re 4-0 up with five minutes to play. Easy, boss. Calm down…’. But that’s the way he is,” Hazard said a few months into Conte’s Chelsea reign.
As well as receiving these constant instructions on the pitch, Chelsea’s players did far more tactical work than they had been used to previously. At times, they wanted to have more fun, do more ball work. But that sensational winning run convinced everyone of the merits of Conte’s methods. “Everyone feels one step ahead of where we were last year (under Mourinho),” Nemanja Matic said in November 2016.
One of Conte’s favourite ways to imprint his tactical messages is to play an 11-v-11 game and map out their movements. Another exercise he regularly employs is setting up an 11-v-0 scenario and making the players repeat the same moves for 45 minutes — “Until he sees that they’re working and that we’re starting to feel sick,” Pirlo wrote in his 2014 autobiography. “And that’s why we still win when it’s 11 against 11.”
Some Spurs players will be given individual drills to improve on a particular area of their game — as was the case for Lukaku when Conte took over at Inter. In the Belgian’s case, Conte would make Lukaku stand with his back to goal and ask the rugged 6ft 4in centre-back Andrea Ranocchia to go hard at him again and again. Every time Lukaku lost the ball, they would start the drill again. This went on for three months — constant repetitions until Conte was satisfied Lukaku was at the level he needed to be.
Conte is willing to compromise on some things and at Chelsea, he reduced the video sessions he made his players sit through. In Italy, it’s typical for video sessions to last 15-30 minutes, but with the national team, Conte’s sessions sometimes lasted an hour. He quickly realised at Chelsea that his players were finding the sessions too much and so he scaled them right back.
Conte will do whatever it takes to get across his tactical message — sometimes running through movements with his players with the large Subbuteo board he keeps in his office.
For someone with such precise ideas about pretty much every aspect of his coaching, it’s unsurprising that Conte is known to erupt when things don’t go to plan.
He has a fierce temper and it is standard practice for him to chuck around any loose objects during half-time. Pirlo described his corner of the dressing room as “the most dangerous spot in the whole of Turin… especially at half-time”.
“He’s never happy,” Pirlo said of a man he described as “like a bear with a sore head”. “There’s always some small detail that’s not quite right in his mind. He can see in advance what might happen in the 45 minutes to come.
“He’s obsessed over every last detail, exploiting it to his advantage. He is allergic to error.
“Even when we’re winning, Conte comes in and hurls against the wall, and thus my little corner, anything he can lay his hands on… almost always full bottles of water. Fizzy water. Very fizzy water.”
Chiellini wrote in his autobiography: “Conte’s natural element is fire: I’ve lost count of the whiteboards that have been thrown around the dressing room at half-time. No one ever got hit by one in the heat of the moment. But if he finds an object in his path, he’ll throw it, kick it, he goes berserk. Then, when the game’s over, he lets the situation cool off, as almost everyone does.”
But Conte tends not to say much after matches, especially if his team have lost.
Shortly before he left Juventus, there was a famous incident before the team’s final game of the season against Cagliari. Juventus were on 99 points and long since crowned champions, but Conte was obsessed with becoming the first team to break the 100-point barrier in Serie A.
Conte was leading a video analysis session on the eve of the game when he was interrupted by the club captain Gianluigi Buffon. Along with the club’s CEO Giuseppe Marotta, Buffon entered the room and raised the topic of bonuses owed to the squad for winning the title.
Conte lost it, screaming at Buffon: “I’ve had it with the lot of you. Get out! I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Buffon tried to respond, but Conte shot back: “Shut up. You’re the captain, Gigi, and you don’t understand a fucking thing.” Conte is then said to have muttered “shame on you” as the squad left the room.
Interviewed for the book Metodo Conte, a philosophical Buffon said he bore no ill will towards Conte for the incident. He suggested it was a motivational tactic to keep Juve’s focus on the 100-point mark, and added: “It’s the kind of thing I might have done. If it served his purpose, it’s fine by me.”
Juventus ended up beating Cagliari 3-0 to finish with 102 points.
At Chelsea, the game in which Conte is said to have been most animated was the famous defeat away at Woolwich that prompted the switch to a back three and that 13-match winning streak. Chelsea were 3-0 down at half-time, and such was Conte’s ranting and raving there were genuine fears he might resign there and then. The club’s owner Roman Abramovich was at the training ground for three days after that defeat, underlining how seismic it felt at the time.
Conte admits he was extremely angry after that game and that it was a difficult defeat to accept. He channelled that fury brilliantly to turn his team around, but a variant of that rage is present after most defeats.
Even pre-season losses can infuriate Conte. One journalist remembers being promised a one-on-one interview with him after a pre-season game against Inter in Singapore in the summer of 2017. Chelsea lost the game 2-1 and it was clear that Conte was furious, struggling to say anything positive and unable to shake off the anger at losing the game. The interview was eventually cut short with barely a grunt of acknowledgement as Conte walked angrily onto the bus to leave the stadium.
But alongside Conte’s red mists is the rousing rhetoric. The Tottenham squad have already had an insight into his charisma after he gave a stirring speech upon meeting the players on Tuesday afternoon. Conte told the group he would help them win again, but that they had to give absolutely everything for him, and that he would always be there for them as long as they gave their all in training and matches.
For close observers of Conte’s career, it brought back memories of his rallying cry upon taking over at Juventus a decade ago. “He got at our pride,” midfielder Claudio Marchisio said last year. “He told us: ‘You’ve been seventh for two years. You’ve been awful for two years. From now, on you either get your head down or get out’. He pushed us to earn it on the pitch.“
Pirlo recalls Conte telling the players: “Every single person here has performed badly over the last few seasons. We need to do whatever it takes to pull ourselves up and start being Juve again. Turning around this ship is not a polite request, it’s an order, a moral obligation. You guys need to do only one thing and it’s pretty simple: follow me.”
In his next job as Italy head coach, Conte gathered the players in his first squad and said: “I will call up only those players who deserve it. Remember that I don’t need to explain myself to anyone.”
Before even taking over at Chelsea, Conte met with Hazard and explained how he would help him rediscover his best form. “He spoke to me about the difficult season I’d had, and what he expected of me,” Hazard said in 2016. “I’d not scored many goals last season, but he saw me as a goalscorer. He spoke a bit about the system he wanted to play, the 3-4-3 or even one with two attackers up front. His passion and enthusiasm were obvious even then.”
Camaraderie and team spirit are important to Conte. When he met with the Spurs players on Tuesday, he pushed the importance of togetherness and said they had to enjoy themselves again after a rough start to the season.
There’s hope among the Spurs squad that Conte’s arrival will see a return to the Pochettino days when team meals and other bonding activities helped to maintain a good team spirit. Monthly group meals were a staple of Conte’s time at Chelsea, especially in his first season when they weren’t in Europe, and it was something he replicated at Inter. Conte also ingratiated himself with the players at Stamford Bridge by singing his initiation song with gusto, sending them into hysterics. Few who were there can forget the sight of Conte standing on a chair in the middle of a room in Minneapolis belting out the Neapolitan favourite Malafemmena.
Conte did not want his Chelsea players to be completely consumed by their work, so would allow them a beer after a game — but there were rules. “One. Not a lot. And, after you finish the game, you must drink it quickly, not an hour after the end.” At Stamford Bridge, Conte would also buy Prosecco for his staff at Christmas and take the press pack out for an occasional pint at the Old Plough, close to the club’s training ground.
Creating a good atmosphere where the whole squad feels like a family is very important to Conte. And now that his English is far better than when he joined Chelsea five years ago, it should be easier for him to get across these messages. Communication matters to Conte — at Inter, Lukaku spoke Italian upon joining and was accepted more quickly by the group. Christian Eriksen, by contrast, did not and it took him longer to settle.
Conte’s desire for the whole group to stay as one can sometimes be taken to extremes. At Juventus, for instance, midfielder Arturo Vidal was notorious for going out and partying, but Conte thought it would be better to punish the whole team, not just Vidal. He would tell the team that everyone would be put through an especially physical session, with lots of running, expecting Vidal to be revealed as being a little worse for wear. “The problem is Arturo is made out of iron,” Marchisio said in 2020. “A few kilometres into the run we were all gasping for breath and begging for mercy while he kept running at the front of the group, chatting as if he were at the bar.”
Those runs were a bonding experience for the squad and did nothing to harm the relationship between Vidal and Conte, who, as hard-running central midfielders, were kindred spirits on the pitch. “If I had to go to war, I’d take Conte with me,” Vidal once said and Conte has said the same about the Chilean.
Man-management has been an issue with this Tottenham squad, most recently with Nuno creating the sense of a two-tiered group by leaving behind his preferred Premier League team for the Europa Conference trip to Vitesse.
Generally — though not always, as we’ll see later — man-management has been a skill of Conte’s. At Chelsea, he was able to win over the wantaway Matic in 2016 and get the best out of him. Conte is known more for the use of stick than carrot but on this occasion went for the latter and, recognising that Matic felt unappreciated and unwanted, said in July 2016: “Matic is a very important player for my idea of football.
“He knows this and I’m delighted by his attitude and behaviour. I know with work he can become a fantastic midfielder, one of the best in the world. He is not for sale.”
Matic ended up leaving the following summer, but extracting one last season was an important factor in Chelsea winning the title.
Conte’s greatest diplomatic feat was managing the transition of John Terry from “captain, leader, legend” to warming the bench. This could have been a very awkward situation, and one only has to remember how toxic things became at Chelsea when Rafael Benitez dropped Terry in 2013. But Conte was able to keep Terry onside by frequently stressing how important he was in the dressing room, and how valuable it was to have those leadership skills in the building even if he wasn’t starting games. Conte has continued to speak well of Terry since leaving Chelsea, and the feelings of goodwill are reciprocated.
“In that last year under Conte at Chelsea, I was lucky because I had a really good relationship with him,” Terry said during an Instagram Live last year.
“I started the season, and then he changed formation. I got injured, and he had a really honest conversation with me and said we were going to play three at the back. He didn’t think I suited three at the back.”
At Inter in May, Conte masterfully diffused the tension between himself and Lautaro Martinez after the striker had reacted angrily to being substituted by challenging him to a boxing match during training. Conte’s response to Martinez’s initial petulance was typically to berate him, even though Inter had already won the Serie A title and the match against Roma was essentially meaningless.
Above all, Conte’s squads must be a meritocracy. And this will be appreciated by the Spurs squad in the wake of Nuno’s Arnhem decision when it felt as though there was little fringe players could do to get in the team. If a player doesn’t perform in training, they simply won’t be selected. This happened to Michy Batshuayi on a couple of occasions at Chelsea, when Conte decided that he wasn’t following instructions properly and so was replaced by Hazard as a false nine.
Likewise, if Conte feels a player is deserving of criticism, he will deliver it without hesitation — no matter how established the player is. Even Inter’s talisman Lukaku was given a severe dressing-down in front of his team-mates after a substandard performance against Slavia Prague in the Champions League in September 2019.
“I played really badly, and Conte told me I was trash in front of the entire team,” Lukaku told Sky Sports in January.
“He tells you to your face if you’re right or wrong, he said he would substitute me after five minutes if it happened again.
Pirlo is another in the Conte disciple camp, and his autobiography is littered with fulsome praise for his compatriot. “I consider myself fortunate: I know Antonio Conte,” Pirlo said. “When Conte speaks, his words assault you. They crash through the doors of your mind, often quite violently, and settle deep within you. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve found myself saying: ‘Hell, Conte said something spot-on today’.”
Lukaku has spoken in similarly gushing terms. “The mister is a mentor,” he said in September 2020. “He’s like a father who understands me really well. Playing for him is like a dream come true.”
When Conte left Inter at the end of last season, Lukaku posted a heartfelt message on Instagram that included the words: “I will keep your principles for the rest of my career (physical preparation, mental and just the drive to win…) it was a pleasure to play for you! Thank you for all that you did. I owe you a lot.”
Italy’s legendary centre-back Leonardo Bonucci told The Athletic earlier this year that: “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. He changed my career. It’s the mentality he gave me and Juventus too, the football knowledge he passed on.”
Conte’s abrasive management style is not for everyone. He is not exactly warm and friendly to players who are struggling and because he is so dedicated, he can struggle to understand why anyone else would have anything in their life outside of football. He is not the most sympathetic when it comes to personal issues.
And not every player reacts as well as Lukaku to being hung out to dry in front of their team-mates.
“There’s a reason he has not stayed more than a couple of years in a job,” says a source in Italy. “He has such a divisive character and a bad temper, eventually his relationship with the board deteriorates, as well as sometimes with his players.”
Chelsea is a good case study, where the huge excitement and buzz of the first season gave way to a pretty miserable second.
And even in that first season, there was some collateral damage. Mikel John Obi, for instance, is still angry at Conte for the way he was frozen out of the team. Mikel told The Athleticearlier this year that Conte informed him that if he played for Nigeria at the Olympic Games in Rio he would not be part of his plans at Chelsea.
Mikel was not dissuaded and helped his country win a bronze medal in Brazil. Mikel never played for Chelsea again after a decade of service.
“This guy who has just walked in the door for five minutes is telling me I had to choose,” Mikel said. “He was saying, ‘If you do that, you won’t be a part of this team’. I spoke to the club and told them that I wanted to go. The club respected me because of what I had done for them and how long I’d been there. So off I went and I felt punished for that. I came back and I didn’t make the squad. I was never in the squad on match days again.
“The funny thing is, just before the January window was going to start, he came up to me and said, ‘I want a meeting with you’. This was after making me train on my own for months, treating a player who had been at Chelsea for a long time like this!
“When he tried to meet with me he was like, ‘Let’s try and make up, I will need you in the team, let’s squash this, blah, blah, blah!’. I was like, ‘Are you joking?! Are you naffing serious?!’. He knew I wanted out. I stood up and walked out of the room. You can’t disrespect a human being like that.”
But during that first season, Mikel was generally a lone dissenting voice. Even Diego Costa, who clashed with Conte during training and was dropped for a game against Leicester in January 2017, generally got on well with the head coach. That confrontation came after Chinese side Tianjin Quanjian had made a huge bid to sign Costa, who it was known wanted to leave England. Sources at the time claimed Conte shouted “go to China” during the heated argument.
It was more evidence of Conte not taking a backward step no matter who he was dealing with. After all, Costa was the Premier League’s leading goalscorer at the time with 14 goals and was known for his combustible personality. But Conte had no issue with confronting and then dropping one of the team’s most important players.
Costa ultimately left Chelsea for Atletico Madrid eight months later after a drawn-out transfer saga that included Conte texting the striker to say he wasn’t in his plans. Much was made of that message, but those close to the situation say that, although Chelsea were annoyed with Conte for weakening their bargaining position, there was an almost unanimous agreement that it was in everyone’s interests for Costa to leave.
Chelsea’s hierarchy were less impressed with Conte’s frequent complaints to the board about that summer’s transfers (a window that saw Bakayoko, Drinkwater, Alvaro Morata, Antonio Rudiger, Davide Zappacosta, Ethan Ampadu and Willy Caballero brought in). The tension was increasingly apparent and filtered down to the players and contributed to what was a pretty disastrous 2017-18 season.
Conte was angry at Chelsea missing out on signing Lukaku from Everton and then seeing Spurs pip them to the signing of Llorente. His mood wasn’t helped when the indications from Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Virgil van Dijk’s camps were that both were minded to join Liverpool — partly because they found Klopp more likeable and upbeat but also because they were also more enthused by his style of play and had concerns over how long Conte would be at Chelsea.
The season that followed should act as a warning for him and the Tottenham players of the downside of his volatility. The arguments with the board over transfers was one thing, but it was the conflicts with the players that really derailed Chelsea’s season.
Tensions first spilt over following an embarrassing 3-0 defeat at Roma in October when Conte spotted Kenedy yawning during a team meeting. Furious, he unleashed a tirade at the 21-year-old for his lack of professionalism, which prompted David Luiz to intervene and defend his compatriot. David Luiz barely played again that season and was pretty much completely bombed out having been a key player in the title-winning campaign. His compatriot Willian was similarly peripheral in 2017-18, leading to the midfielder covering Conte’s face with emojis when he posted a picture on Instagram of the team celebrating their FA Cup win at the end of the season.
Willian later unconvincingly blamed the image on his young daughter playing with his phone.
Conte irked his players in other ways that season. Some were frustrated by him asking them to stay in a hotel together the night before games when they would rather have been at home.
Others felt they were being worked too hard, and that Conte wasn’t making allowances for the fact that, unlike the previous season, they were having to juggle domestic with European commitments. This came to a head after a humiliating 4-1 defeat at Watford in February 2018 when the players made clear their frustrations and requested extra time off. Conte agreed and gave them three days to recover after admitting they had played “with fear” at Vicarage Road.
He also denied that he had been demanding too much of his players and suggested they had actually been “working a lot less”.
As the season concluded, many at Chelsea had completely lost patience with Conte. They felt he was permanently seeking trouble and conflict, and by the end, he had rubbed most of the players up the wrong way. It was a shame, given how strong the bond had been the previous season.
After Chelsea ended their season by winning the FA Cup, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois explained how draining it had been for the players having so much uncertainty surrounding their head coach’s future amid his frequent disagreements with the club’s board.
“I don’t think it is a question for the players (whether it was a distraction), it is a question for the board,” he said. “I think we trained very well with him.
“You can not have him one more year and then not know if he will go away the next year or not. You need some clarity so that everyone knows what way the club is going forward. It is what we lacked this season. There were always rumours about everyone and it is not easy then to defend the title, with all the criticism.
“There was a negative spirit sometimes and then it’s hard to raise yourselves.”
Conte wasn’t sacked until after the start of pre-season in July 2018, much to the shock of some of the Chelsea players who were at the World Cup and couldn’t believe he was still in the job.
Conte’s time at Chelsea should not be dominated by memories of how it ended — there were many extreme highs in there as well and it ranks as an exception in his career given how devoted other dressing rooms were to him. When Conte resigned from Juventus, Chiellini said: “Me, Leo (Bonucci) Andrea (Pirlo) and Gigi (Buffon) would not have let him go.” When his underdog Italy side lost the Euro 2016 quarter-final on penalties, the entire team broke down in tears.
Barely able to control the waves of emotion running through him, Andrea Barzagli wept as he said: “In the future, no one will remember this national team that gave its all. There was a desire carry on together.” The next day, Conte cried too and confessed that if he had not already agreed to join Chelsea he would have stayed, so tight was the bond he struck with his players.
Inter fought to keep him and were successful at the end of his first season after a crisis summit at Villa Bellini. Once he delivered the league title, an achievement chief executive Marotta called a “work of art”, the board tried to retain him again. Conte was Inter’s “top player” who was worth every penny. “It’s better to sign one player less in the transfer market and appoint a great coach.”
Inter desperately wanted him to lead the club’s title defence and be the manager who earned them a second star to commemorate a 20th scudetto. But Conte was not for turning and agreed a severance package. “These last two years have been hard and tiring but we won and all the hard work paid off,” Inter goalkeeper Samir Handanovic said. “You were hard but fair. I learned from you as a player and as a captain. You were the one who always raised the bar and put the right pressure on everyone. You were the one who made the difference. Thank you, coach, and thank you to your staff, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work and win with you.
Nevertheless, it’s understandable why some of the Spurs squad might have felt a touch nervous hearing from their Chelsea colleagues about the Italian’s time at Stamford Bridge.
It all ties back to the fact that Conte’s high-energy approach is not for everyone — at Chelsea and wherever he’s been. Some players tire of hearing the same phrases, like “Be ready to suffer”, ad nauseam. Others find that, even though they know he’s a great coach, they tire of his demands eventually.
“Not everyone can handle the intensity, himself included,” Chiellini wrote in his autobiography. “He never switches off and sometimes he needs to. He can get tired too.
“In the beginning with Antonio you give your all, but staying with it on a mental level is hard, harder than from a physical perspective because Conte trains you so hard that in the end, you become a war machine.
“Everything with Antonio is always pushed to the max: if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t get on with him.”
Ultimately, Conte’s success at Tottenham will come down to how much his players are willing to sacrifice themselves and commit to the head coach’s methods. Do this and the rewards are substantial.
That’s what it’s like playing for Antonio Conte
“To ensure he understands how his methods are working, Conte is big on screenings and physical assessments of players to gauge their body fat and weight. He does this alongside his team of nutritionists and, if needs be, puts players on strict diets.Haha.
Bye bye Dele
Pray for Ndombele
*nabbed from the other place.
‘You either improve or you die’ – What it’s like to play for Antonio Conte
Players who worked under Conte explain what it's like to play for the brilliant and sometimes maddening new Spurs manager
After the Tottenham squad had spoken to their colleagues at Chelseaabout what to expect from Antonio Conte as head coach, some felt a degree of trepidation.
This is perhaps understandable. After all, they would have been told about the ferocious work ethic, the instructions during training that are so relentless he has to constantly suck throat lozenges and the volcanic temper that can erupt when things are not going his way.
Most who have worked with Conte have a story or two to tell. Andrea Pirlo remembers his habit for chucking bottles across the dressing room (he regretted his station in the corner of the room that was invariably right in the line of fire), Eden Hazard joked that he was blessed to be a winger as it meant having Conte screaming in his ear for only half the game, and Giorgio Chiellini said players were “not tired — dead” after his training sessions.
Tiemoue Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Sometimes I get the feeling I have to make even more effort in training than I do in a match. That’s the level of intensity he demands every day in what we do.”
But the Spurs players were also told that if you embrace Conte’s methods then the rewards are huge. Which is why those such as Harry Kane, desperate to finally win some silverware, are so enthused by Conte’s appointment.
Not that his frenzied, sometimes maniacal energy is for everyone. There will be some at Spurs who will go the way of many of his players at Chelsea. Burnt out by and fed up with Conte’s uncompromising demands and constant appetite for conflict. So much so that it is believed several players would have pushed for a move in 2018 if Conte hadn’t been sacked.
“He is so demanding, it’s almost psychopathic,” says one source in Italy. “He seems crazy at times.”
After speaking to those at Chelsea and getting a sense of how Conte operates, the Spurs players should have taken a deep breath and prepared themselves. For the meticulous physical and tactical training, the dietary requirements that will see goji berries and shirataki “miracle” noodles added to their diets and the half-time rages when things are not going to plan.
But they will also be working with a head coach who likes to foster a team spirit and camaraderie, and demands that his squad become a tight-knit group.
This is what it’s like to play for Antonio Conte…
Conte’s work ethic is legendary, and he expects similar from his players. In his first press conference at Chelsea, he used the word “work”, or one of its derivatives, 32 times in a little under an hour, including one response where he insisted he was “a worker who likes to work”.
After news of his move to Tottenham began to circulate earlier this week, social media was abuzz with quotes of his celebrating the value of work. One of the most famous comes from an interview with Thierry Henry while at Chelsea: “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.”
Tottenham’s players, if they embrace Conte’s work ethic, will be imbued with a similar dedication. “He never stops working,” Hazard told the Guardian in 2016, with Chelsea en route to the title. “Whether we win or lose, it doesn’t matter. He works, so we work. Work, work, work. And we all know that in football, and all sports really, you have to work so hard to reach the summit.”
The point is that working with Conte comes down to how much sacrifice players are willing to put in to reach their goals. As Hazard put it: “If someone had told us before the season that if we did everything Conte asked of us we’d have a chance to become champions again, we’d all have signed up.”
Spurs’ players will, first of all, see Conte’s indefatigability during training sessions, which are physically and mentally extremely demanding. Many of the Tottenham squad felt physically undercooked playing for Jose Mourinho last season, and after a brief uptick following Nuno Espirito Santo’s arrival in the summer, have remained less fit than most of their rivals.
They can expect big changes under Conte, who often talks about how his players will have “to suffer”. Training under him is intense — and will be even more so with the confirmation that Giampiero Ventrone, whose nickname is The Marine, will be one of Conte’s fitness coaches. Ventrone was on Marcelo Lippi’s staff at Juventus when Conte was a player, and helped push the players to three straight Champions League finals between 1996 and 1998. Spurs players should prepare to be beasted on his watch.
Away from Ventrone, there are lots of sprinting and physical exercises under Conte. He does not put so much of an emphasis on gym work — he wants his players to be lean so his players can run more, rather than bulk up. He will try to slim them down and get them to peak fitness, similar to how Mauricio Pochettino used to.
“When he arrived at Juventus in 2011, there was some scepticism,” says a source in Italy. “But he made an instant impression. The players said they nearly threw up in his first sessions because they were so much harder than his predecessors.”
One of those players was the legendary defender Chiellini, who said in 2018: “It is not only in the match with Conte. It is all day, every training session. He is like a police sergeant.
“When you finish training, you are dead. Not tired — dead. You can do it only because you believe in what he does. We had 40 days in France and it was like entering another world. You are 100 per cent with him. He creates an atmosphere, everyone gives energy to each other. For sure he is one of the very best.”
The former Spurs striker Fernando Llorente, who also worked under Conte at Juve, said in 2013: “The physical work is outrageous. We did very special strength work with machines I knew nothing about, explosive exercises. The workouts are more demanding than what I have done in my career so far. It has taken me a lot to adapt to the workload. It’s brutal.”
Fabio Quagliarella, his striker at Juventus, described Conte’s training sessions as “back-breaking”. Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Here we run a lot. I’ve run an awful lot since I arrived.”
Pre-season is massively important to Conte, and it’s a shame that Spurs have missed out on that this year. During Conte’s first pre-season at Chelsea, the players were pushed extremely hard and felt as though they had never been drilled like that before. Working in intense American heat, the players were left feeling exhausted — but the benefits were obvious and so they quickly bought into what Conte was asking of them.
They felt fitter than pretty much every team they played and scored several late goals. In Conte’s first eight Premier League matches, Chelsea scored six goals in the 80th minute or later. Hazard especially benefited, developing far greater muscle definition and looking as fit as he ever had. How Conte turned around Hazard’s fortunes after a difficult season the previous year bodes well for the Italian working with Kane, who has not looked at his sharpest this season.
As with most areas of Conte’s management, his punishing regimens are not for everyone. Take Danny Drinkwater, who Conte pushed hard to sign in 2017. In his first game since joining, Chelsea played against Drinkwater’s former club Leicester City, but Conte was informed that the midfielder was way short of match fitness after an injury from the previous campaign had disrupted pre-season. Conte’s response was to double down straight away with intense sessions to try and get Drinkwater into shape.
It backfired. Drinkwater picked up a calf injury within days that ruled him out for six weeks, which turned out to be the first of several fitness issues that season. Drinkwater’s Chelsea career has failed for all sorts of reasons, but there was a feeling that his first season was badly mishandled.
To get his players into the best physical shape, Conte also places a big emphasis on diet and nutrition. He likes to hang up bits of paper around the training ground, and often this will include dietary instructions. Goji berries, which have long been used in medicine to support immunity to illness and infection, and Rhodiola rosea supplements, which studies show can reduce physical and mental fatigue, are favourites of his.
Journalist and author Alessandro Alciato explained in his 2015 book Metodo Conte how Conte would set up tables at breakfast during his time as Italy manager with individual food groups (one for protein, one for fats, one for carbohydrates, and another for tea, cappuccino and fruit juice).
The players had never experienced anything like this. Then they would look up to see those bits of paper Conte likes to leave around. Messages included mantras like: “Diet can make the difference between victory and defeat” and “FUNDAMENTAL: Start the day with a good breakfast. If breakfast is inadequate, your glycogen reserves may run close to empty.”
At Chelsea, Conte was just as hands-on, and completely changed the players’ diet — introducing more protein through chicken and salads, and less carb-heavy foods like pasta. He did compromise on this, though, when some of his players said they felt their energy levels weren’t high enough going into games. Conte also banned his players from having pizza, fizzy drinks, tomato ketchup and brown sauce. Black rice and low-calorie shirataki noodles were introduced instead, and the expectation at Spurs is that the diet will be tightly controlled and move back towards how it was under Pochettino.
To ensure he understands how his methods are working, Conte is big on screenings and physical assessments of players to gauge their body fat and weight. He does this alongside his team of nutritionists and, if needs be, puts players on strict diets.
This was the case with Romelu Lukaku after he joined Inter. Conte thought Lukaku was too heavy for what he was demanding of him, and promptly oversaw a programme that led to the striker losing three kilograms. Lukaku’s prescribed diet included lean meats like chicken and turkey and lots of vegetables, with fried food and mozzarella off-limits. Carlos Tevez, who puts Conte at the same level as Sir Alex Ferguson, was given a plan to help him lose six kilograms when he returned from pre-season overweight in 2013.
We don’t know if any of the Spurs players will be subjected to a similar regimen, but what tends to happen is that most of Conte’s players shed weight because of the general dietary rules and intensity of the training sessions. Again, this is more Pochettino and less Mourinho, who gave the Tottenham players more leeway when it came to what they ate.
Conte is far more of a control freak in this regard. At Chelsea, he even asked the owner of the Italian restaurant Gola, which he and some players frequented, to send him pictures of what his players were eating.
No dietary detail is too small for Conte, and if he approaches his new job like he has previous ones, then the Spurs players can expect their head coach to compile lists with scores for their weight, fat percentage and how they have performed in physical tests. These are marked green for good, yellow for OK and red for bad. Anyone scoring badly can expect pretty blunt advice about what they need to do to improve.
Ensuring his players are in peak physical condition is critical to Conte, but so is ensuring his tactical messages are received crystal clear. The idea is that through constant repetitions, they become automatic.
Conte’s preferred formations are a 3-4-3 (as seen at Chelsea) or a 3-5-2. But he started his career using a 4-2-4 based on the ideas of Eugenio Fascetti, whose Lecce side of the 1980s employed the system. In possession, Conte’s teams still tend to move into a 4-2-4 system, with the wing-backs moved high, the outside centre-backs pushed wide and deep like full-backs, and the defensive midfielder dropping in alongside the central centre-back.
To be able to successfully play Conte’s system requires painstaking preparation on the training ground. Conte is known for constantly stopping sessions to get his message across. At Chelsea, training was often very stop-start as Conte would remind players if they had wandered even marginally out of position. He’s hands-on and if players are not in the right place he will come and physically drag them to where he thinks they should be. Some of his players have felt as though he’s playing a PlayStation, getting them to move precisely where he tells them. For others, it has seemed as though they’re being brainwashed through constant repetitions.
The general message from the more experienced players at Chelsea at the time was that he was the “most demanding” of the club’s recent managers.
Conte’s frequent exhortations at Cobham meant he would be constantly sucking Ambrosoli al Miele lozenges in training and on the touchline because his throat was always raw from all the shouting. Conte already sounded a touch hoarse as he addressed the media on Thursday night following the Europa Conference League win over Vitesse. “My wife tells me my voice is more attractive like this, more sensual,” he said in November 2016 with his Chelsea team in the middle of a 13-match winning run. “But I prefer to have my normal voice.”
Conte is similarly vocal during matches, prompting that Hazard joke about being relieved to only have to listen to his head coach for half of the match. “There are times he’s screaming at you to do this or that, telling you to concentrate and work, and you’re thinking: ‘Hold on, we’re 4-0 up with five minutes to play. Easy, boss. Calm down…’. But that’s the way he is,” Hazard said a few months into Conte’s Chelsea reign.
As well as receiving these constant instructions on the pitch, Chelsea’s players did far more tactical work than they had been used to previously. At times, they wanted to have more fun, do more ball work. But that sensational winning run convinced everyone of the merits of Conte’s methods. “Everyone feels one step ahead of where we were last year (under Mourinho),” Nemanja Matic said in November 2016.
One of Conte’s favourite ways to imprint his tactical messages is to play an 11-v-11 game and map out their movements. Another exercise he regularly employs is setting up an 11-v-0 scenario and making the players repeat the same moves for 45 minutes — “Until he sees that they’re working and that we’re starting to feel sick,” Pirlo wrote in his 2014 autobiography. “And that’s why we still win when it’s 11 against 11.”
Some Spurs players will be given individual drills to improve on a particular area of their game — as was the case for Lukaku when Conte took over at Inter. In the Belgian’s case, Conte would make Lukaku stand with his back to goal and ask the rugged 6ft 4in centre-back Andrea Ranocchia to go hard at him again and again. Every time Lukaku lost the ball, they would start the drill again. This went on for three months — constant repetitions until Conte was satisfied Lukaku was at the level he needed to be.
Conte is willing to compromise on some things and at Chelsea, he reduced the video sessions he made his players sit through. In Italy, it’s typical for video sessions to last 15-30 minutes, but with the national team, Conte’s sessions sometimes lasted an hour. He quickly realised at Chelsea that his players were finding the sessions too much and so he scaled them right back.
Conte will do whatever it takes to get across his tactical message — sometimes running through movements with his players with the large Subbuteo board he keeps in his office.
For someone with such precise ideas about pretty much every aspect of his coaching, it’s unsurprising that Conte is known to erupt when things don’t go to plan.
He has a fierce temper and it is standard practice for him to chuck around any loose objects during half-time. Pirlo described his corner of the dressing room as “the most dangerous spot in the whole of Turin… especially at half-time”.
“He’s never happy,” Pirlo said of a man he described as “like a bear with a sore head”. “There’s always some small detail that’s not quite right in his mind. He can see in advance what might happen in the 45 minutes to come.
“He’s obsessed over every last detail, exploiting it to his advantage. He is allergic to error.
“Even when we’re winning, Conte comes in and hurls against the wall, and thus my little corner, anything he can lay his hands on… almost always full bottles of water. Fizzy water. Very fizzy water.”
Chiellini wrote in his autobiography: “Conte’s natural element is fire: I’ve lost count of the whiteboards that have been thrown around the dressing room at half-time. No one ever got hit by one in the heat of the moment. But if he finds an object in his path, he’ll throw it, kick it, he goes berserk. Then, when the game’s over, he lets the situation cool off, as almost everyone does.”
But Conte tends not to say much after matches, especially if his team have lost.
Shortly before he left Juventus, there was a famous incident before the team’s final game of the season against Cagliari. Juventus were on 99 points and long since crowned champions, but Conte was obsessed with becoming the first team to break the 100-point barrier in Serie A.
Conte was leading a video analysis session on the eve of the game when he was interrupted by the club captain Gianluigi Buffon. Along with the club’s CEO Giuseppe Marotta, Buffon entered the room and raised the topic of bonuses owed to the squad for winning the title.
Conte lost it, screaming at Buffon: “I’ve had it with the lot of you. Get out! I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Buffon tried to respond, but Conte shot back: “Shut up. You’re the captain, Gigi, and you don’t understand a fucking thing.” Conte is then said to have muttered “shame on you” as the squad left the room.
Interviewed for the book Metodo Conte, a philosophical Buffon said he bore no ill will towards Conte for the incident. He suggested it was a motivational tactic to keep Juve’s focus on the 100-point mark, and added: “It’s the kind of thing I might have done. If it served his purpose, it’s fine by me.”
Juventus ended up beating Cagliari 3-0 to finish with 102 points.
At Chelsea, the game in which Conte is said to have been most animated was the famous defeat away at Woolwich that prompted the switch to a back three and that 13-match winning streak. Chelsea were 3-0 down at half-time, and such was Conte’s ranting and raving there were genuine fears he might resign there and then. The club’s owner Roman Abramovich was at the training ground for three days after that defeat, underlining how seismic it felt at the time.
Conte admits he was extremely angry after that game and that it was a difficult defeat to accept. He channelled that fury brilliantly to turn his team around, but a variant of that rage is present after most defeats.
Even pre-season losses can infuriate Conte. One journalist remembers being promised a one-on-one interview with him after a pre-season game against Inter in Singapore in the summer of 2017. Chelsea lost the game 2-1 and it was clear that Conte was furious, struggling to say anything positive and unable to shake off the anger at losing the game. The interview was eventually cut short with barely a grunt of acknowledgement as Conte walked angrily onto the bus to leave the stadium.
But alongside Conte’s red mists is the rousing rhetoric. The Tottenham squad have already had an insight into his charisma after he gave a stirring speech upon meeting the players on Tuesday afternoon. Conte told the group he would help them win again, but that they had to give absolutely everything for him, and that he would always be there for them as long as they gave their all in training and matches.
For close observers of Conte’s career, it brought back memories of his rallying cry upon taking over at Juventus a decade ago. “He got at our pride,” midfielder Claudio Marchisio said last year. “He told us: ‘You’ve been seventh for two years. You’ve been awful for two years. From now, on you either get your head down or get out’. He pushed us to earn it on the pitch.“
Pirlo recalls Conte telling the players: “Every single person here has performed badly over the last few seasons. We need to do whatever it takes to pull ourselves up and start being Juve again. Turning around this ship is not a polite request, it’s an order, a moral obligation. You guys need to do only one thing and it’s pretty simple: follow me.”
In his next job as Italy head coach, Conte gathered the players in his first squad and said: “I will call up only those players who deserve it. Remember that I don’t need to explain myself to anyone.”
Before even taking over at Chelsea, Conte met with Hazard and explained how he would help him rediscover his best form. “He spoke to me about the difficult season I’d had, and what he expected of me,” Hazard said in 2016. “I’d not scored many goals last season, but he saw me as a goalscorer. He spoke a bit about the system he wanted to play, the 3-4-3 or even one with two attackers up front. His passion and enthusiasm were obvious even then.”
Camaraderie and team spirit are important to Conte. When he met with the Spurs players on Tuesday, he pushed the importance of togetherness and said they had to enjoy themselves again after a rough start to the season.
There’s hope among the Spurs squad that Conte’s arrival will see a return to the Pochettino days when team meals and other bonding activities helped to maintain a good team spirit. Monthly group meals were a staple of Conte’s time at Chelsea, especially in his first season when they weren’t in Europe, and it was something he replicated at Inter. Conte also ingratiated himself with the players at Stamford Bridge by singing his initiation song with gusto, sending them into hysterics. Few who were there can forget the sight of Conte standing on a chair in the middle of a room in Minneapolis belting out the Neapolitan favourite Malafemmena.
Conte did not want his Chelsea players to be completely consumed by their work, so would allow them a beer after a game — but there were rules. “One. Not a lot. And, after you finish the game, you must drink it quickly, not an hour after the end.” At Stamford Bridge, Conte would also buy Prosecco for his staff at Christmas and take the press pack out for an occasional pint at the Old Plough, close to the club’s training ground.
Creating a good atmosphere where the whole squad feels like a family is very important to Conte. And now that his English is far better than when he joined Chelsea five years ago, it should be easier for him to get across these messages. Communication matters to Conte — at Inter, Lukaku spoke Italian upon joining and was accepted more quickly by the group. Christian Eriksen, by contrast, did not and it took him longer to settle.
Conte’s desire for the whole group to stay as one can sometimes be taken to extremes. At Juventus, for instance, midfielder Arturo Vidal was notorious for going out and partying, but Conte thought it would be better to punish the whole team, not just Vidal. He would tell the team that everyone would be put through an especially physical session, with lots of running, expecting Vidal to be revealed as being a little worse for wear. “The problem is Arturo is made out of iron,” Marchisio said in 2020. “A few kilometres into the run we were all gasping for breath and begging for mercy while he kept running at the front of the group, chatting as if he were at the bar.”
Those runs were a bonding experience for the squad and did nothing to harm the relationship between Vidal and Conte, who, as hard-running central midfielders, were kindred spirits on the pitch. “If I had to go to war, I’d take Conte with me,” Vidal once said and Conte has said the same about the Chilean.
Man-management has been an issue with this Tottenham squad, most recently with Nuno creating the sense of a two-tiered group by leaving behind his preferred Premier League team for the Europa Conference trip to Vitesse.
Generally — though not always, as we’ll see later — man-management has been a skill of Conte’s. At Chelsea, he was able to win over the wantaway Matic in 2016 and get the best out of him. Conte is known more for the use of stick than carrot but on this occasion went for the latter and, recognising that Matic felt unappreciated and unwanted, said in July 2016: “Matic is a very important player for my idea of football.
“He knows this and I’m delighted by his attitude and behaviour. I know with work he can become a fantastic midfielder, one of the best in the world. He is not for sale.”
Matic ended up leaving the following summer, but extracting one last season was an important factor in Chelsea winning the title.
Conte’s greatest diplomatic feat was managing the transition of John Terry from “captain, leader, legend” to warming the bench. This could have been a very awkward situation, and one only has to remember how toxic things became at Chelsea when Rafael Benitez dropped Terry in 2013. But Conte was able to keep Terry onside by frequently stressing how important he was in the dressing room, and how valuable it was to have those leadership skills in the building even if he wasn’t starting games. Conte has continued to speak well of Terry since leaving Chelsea, and the feelings of goodwill are reciprocated.
“In that last year under Conte at Chelsea, I was lucky because I had a really good relationship with him,” Terry said during an Instagram Live last year.
“I started the season, and then he changed formation. I got injured, and he had a really honest conversation with me and said we were going to play three at the back. He didn’t think I suited three at the back.”
At Inter in May, Conte masterfully diffused the tension between himself and Lautaro Martinez after the striker had reacted angrily to being substituted by challenging him to a boxing match during training. Conte’s response to Martinez’s initial petulance was typically to berate him, even though Inter had already won the Serie A title and the match against Roma was essentially meaningless.
Above all, Conte’s squads must be a meritocracy. And this will be appreciated by the Spurs squad in the wake of Nuno’s Arnhem decision when it felt as though there was little fringe players could do to get in the team. If a player doesn’t perform in training, they simply won’t be selected. This happened to Michy Batshuayi on a couple of occasions at Chelsea, when Conte decided that he wasn’t following instructions properly and so was replaced by Hazard as a false nine.
Likewise, if Conte feels a player is deserving of criticism, he will deliver it without hesitation — no matter how established the player is. Even Inter’s talisman Lukaku was given a severe dressing-down in front of his team-mates after a substandard performance against Slavia Prague in the Champions League in September 2019.
“I played really badly, and Conte told me I was trash in front of the entire team,” Lukaku told Sky Sports in January.
“He tells you to your face if you’re right or wrong, he said he would substitute me after five minutes if it happened again.
Pirlo is another in the Conte disciple camp, and his autobiography is littered with fulsome praise for his compatriot. “I consider myself fortunate: I know Antonio Conte,” Pirlo said. “When Conte speaks, his words assault you. They crash through the doors of your mind, often quite violently, and settle deep within you. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve found myself saying: ‘Hell, Conte said something spot-on today’.”
Lukaku has spoken in similarly gushing terms. “The mister is a mentor,” he said in September 2020. “He’s like a father who understands me really well. Playing for him is like a dream come true.”
When Conte left Inter at the end of last season, Lukaku posted a heartfelt message on Instagram that included the words: “I will keep your principles for the rest of my career (physical preparation, mental and just the drive to win…) it was a pleasure to play for you! Thank you for all that you did. I owe you a lot.”
Italy’s legendary centre-back Leonardo Bonucci told The Athletic earlier this year that: “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. He changed my career. It’s the mentality he gave me and Juventus too, the football knowledge he passed on.”
Conte’s abrasive management style is not for everyone. He is not exactly warm and friendly to players who are struggling and because he is so dedicated, he can struggle to understand why anyone else would have anything in their life outside of football. He is not the most sympathetic when it comes to personal issues.
And not every player reacts as well as Lukaku to being hung out to dry in front of their team-mates.
“There’s a reason he has not stayed more than a couple of years in a job,” says a source in Italy. “He has such a divisive character and a bad temper, eventually his relationship with the board deteriorates, as well as sometimes with his players.”
Chelsea is a good case study, where the huge excitement and buzz of the first season gave way to a pretty miserable second.
And even in that first season, there was some collateral damage. Mikel John Obi, for instance, is still angry at Conte for the way he was frozen out of the team. Mikel told The Athleticearlier this year that Conte informed him that if he played for Nigeria at the Olympic Games in Rio he would not be part of his plans at Chelsea.
Mikel was not dissuaded and helped his country win a bronze medal in Brazil. Mikel never played for Chelsea again after a decade of service.
“This guy who has just walked in the door for five minutes is telling me I had to choose,” Mikel said. “He was saying, ‘If you do that, you won’t be a part of this team’. I spoke to the club and told them that I wanted to go. The club respected me because of what I had done for them and how long I’d been there. So off I went and I felt punished for that. I came back and I didn’t make the squad. I was never in the squad on match days again.
“The funny thing is, just before the January window was going to start, he came up to me and said, ‘I want a meeting with you’. This was after making me train on my own for months, treating a player who had been at Chelsea for a long time like this!
“When he tried to meet with me he was like, ‘Let’s try and make up, I will need you in the team, let’s squash this, blah, blah, blah!’. I was like, ‘Are you joking?! Are you naffing serious?!’. He knew I wanted out. I stood up and walked out of the room. You can’t disrespect a human being like that.”
But during that first season, Mikel was generally a lone dissenting voice. Even Diego Costa, who clashed with Conte during training and was dropped for a game against Leicester in January 2017, generally got on well with the head coach. That confrontation came after Chinese side Tianjin Quanjian had made a huge bid to sign Costa, who it was known wanted to leave England. Sources at the time claimed Conte shouted “go to China” during the heated argument.
It was more evidence of Conte not taking a backward step no matter who he was dealing with. After all, Costa was the Premier League’s leading goalscorer at the time with 14 goals and was known for his combustible personality. But Conte had no issue with confronting and then dropping one of the team’s most important players.
Costa ultimately left Chelsea for Atletico Madrid eight months later after a drawn-out transfer saga that included Conte texting the striker to say he wasn’t in his plans. Much was made of that message, but those close to the situation say that, although Chelsea were annoyed with Conte for weakening their bargaining position, there was an almost unanimous agreement that it was in everyone’s interests for Costa to leave.
Chelsea’s hierarchy were less impressed with Conte’s frequent complaints to the board about that summer’s transfers (a window that saw Bakayoko, Drinkwater, Alvaro Morata, Antonio Rudiger, Davide Zappacosta, Ethan Ampadu and Willy Caballero brought in). The tension was increasingly apparent and filtered down to the players and contributed to what was a pretty disastrous 2017-18 season.
Conte was angry at Chelsea missing out on signing Lukaku from Everton and then seeing Spurs pip them to the signing of Llorente. His mood wasn’t helped when the indications from Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Virgil van Dijk’s camps were that both were minded to join Liverpool — partly because they found Klopp more likeable and upbeat but also because they were also more enthused by his style of play and had concerns over how long Conte would be at Chelsea.
The season that followed should act as a warning for him and the Tottenham players of the downside of his volatility. The arguments with the board over transfers was one thing, but it was the conflicts with the players that really derailed Chelsea’s season.
Tensions first spilt over following an embarrassing 3-0 defeat at Roma in October when Conte spotted Kenedy yawning during a team meeting. Furious, he unleashed a tirade at the 21-year-old for his lack of professionalism, which prompted David Luiz to intervene and defend his compatriot. David Luiz barely played again that season and was pretty much completely bombed out having been a key player in the title-winning campaign. His compatriot Willian was similarly peripheral in 2017-18, leading to the midfielder covering Conte’s face with emojis when he posted a picture on Instagram of the team celebrating their FA Cup win at the end of the season.
Willian later unconvincingly blamed the image on his young daughter playing with his phone.
Conte irked his players in other ways that season. Some were frustrated by him asking them to stay in a hotel together the night before games when they would rather have been at home.
Others felt they were being worked too hard, and that Conte wasn’t making allowances for the fact that, unlike the previous season, they were having to juggle domestic with European commitments. This came to a head after a humiliating 4-1 defeat at Watford in February 2018 when the players made clear their frustrations and requested extra time off. Conte agreed and gave them three days to recover after admitting they had played “with fear” at Vicarage Road.
He also denied that he had been demanding too much of his players and suggested they had actually been “working a lot less”.
As the season concluded, many at Chelsea had completely lost patience with Conte. They felt he was permanently seeking trouble and conflict, and by the end, he had rubbed most of the players up the wrong way. It was a shame, given how strong the bond had been the previous season.
After Chelsea ended their season by winning the FA Cup, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois explained how draining it had been for the players having so much uncertainty surrounding their head coach’s future amid his frequent disagreements with the club’s board.
“I don’t think it is a question for the players (whether it was a distraction), it is a question for the board,” he said. “I think we trained very well with him.
“You can not have him one more year and then not know if he will go away the next year or not. You need some clarity so that everyone knows what way the club is going forward. It is what we lacked this season. There were always rumours about everyone and it is not easy then to defend the title, with all the criticism.
“There was a negative spirit sometimes and then it’s hard to raise yourselves.”
Conte wasn’t sacked until after the start of pre-season in July 2018, much to the shock of some of the Chelsea players who were at the World Cup and couldn’t believe he was still in the job.
Conte’s time at Chelsea should not be dominated by memories of how it ended — there were many extreme highs in there as well and it ranks as an exception in his career given how devoted other dressing rooms were to him. When Conte resigned from Juventus, Chiellini said: “Me, Leo (Bonucci) Andrea (Pirlo) and Gigi (Buffon) would not have let him go.” When his underdog Italy side lost the Euro 2016 quarter-final on penalties, the entire team broke down in tears.
Barely able to control the waves of emotion running through him, Andrea Barzagli wept as he said: “In the future, no one will remember this national team that gave its all. There was a desire carry on together.” The next day, Conte cried too and confessed that if he had not already agreed to join Chelsea he would have stayed, so tight was the bond he struck with his players.
Inter fought to keep him and were successful at the end of his first season after a crisis summit at Villa Bellini. Once he delivered the league title, an achievement chief executive Marotta called a “work of art”, the board tried to retain him again. Conte was Inter’s “top player” who was worth every penny. “It’s better to sign one player less in the transfer market and appoint a great coach.”
Inter desperately wanted him to lead the club’s title defence and be the manager who earned them a second star to commemorate a 20th scudetto. But Conte was not for turning and agreed a severance package. “These last two years have been hard and tiring but we won and all the hard work paid off,” Inter goalkeeper Samir Handanovic said. “You were hard but fair. I learned from you as a player and as a captain. You were the one who always raised the bar and put the right pressure on everyone. You were the one who made the difference. Thank you, coach, and thank you to your staff, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work and win with you.
Nevertheless, it’s understandable why some of the Spurs squad might have felt a touch nervous hearing from their Chelsea colleagues about the Italian’s time at Stamford Bridge.
It all ties back to the fact that Conte’s high-energy approach is not for everyone — at Chelsea and wherever he’s been. Some players tire of hearing the same phrases, like “Be ready to suffer”, ad nauseam. Others find that, even though they know he’s a great coach, they tire of his demands eventually.
“Not everyone can handle the intensity, himself included,” Chiellini wrote in his autobiography. “He never switches off and sometimes he needs to. He can get tired too.
“In the beginning with Antonio you give your all, but staying with it on a mental level is hard, harder than from a physical perspective because Conte trains you so hard that in the end, you become a war machine.
“Everything with Antonio is always pushed to the max: if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t get on with him.”
Ultimately, Conte’s success at Tottenham will come down to how much his players are willing to sacrifice themselves and commit to the head coach’s methods. Do this and the rewards are substantial.
That’s what it’s like playing for Antonio Conte
This was the case with Romelu Lukaku after he joined Inter. Conte thought Lukaku was too heavy for what he was demanding of him, and promptly oversaw a programme that led to the striker losing three kilograms. Lukaku’s prescribed diet included lean meats like chicken and turkey and lots of vegetables, with fried food and mozzarella off-limits. Carlos Tevez, who puts Conte at the same level as Sir Alex Ferguson, was given a plan to help him lose six kilograms when he returned from pre-season overweight in 2013.”
:tanguyhuh::tanguyhuh::tanguyhuh:
That was a fucking delight to read and I want to run through a wall for this man. There are going to be a fair few of our players who don’t make it.Haha.
Bye bye Dele
Pray for Ndombele
*nabbed from the other place.
‘You either improve or you die’ – What it’s like to play for Antonio Conte
Players who worked under Conte explain what it's like to play for the brilliant and sometimes maddening new Spurs manager
After the Tottenham squad had spoken to their colleagues at Chelseaabout what to expect from Antonio Conte as head coach, some felt a degree of trepidation.
This is perhaps understandable. After all, they would have been told about the ferocious work ethic, the instructions during training that are so relentless he has to constantly suck throat lozenges and the volcanic temper that can erupt when things are not going his way.
Most who have worked with Conte have a story or two to tell. Andrea Pirlo remembers his habit for chucking bottles across the dressing room (he regretted his station in the corner of the room that was invariably right in the line of fire), Eden Hazard joked that he was blessed to be a winger as it meant having Conte screaming in his ear for only half the game, and Giorgio Chiellini said players were “not tired — dead” after his training sessions.
Tiemoue Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Sometimes I get the feeling I have to make even more effort in training than I do in a match. That’s the level of intensity he demands every day in what we do.”
But the Spurs players were also told that if you embrace Conte’s methods then the rewards are huge. Which is why those such as Harry Kane, desperate to finally win some silverware, are so enthused by Conte’s appointment.
Not that his frenzied, sometimes maniacal energy is for everyone. There will be some at Spurs who will go the way of many of his players at Chelsea. Burnt out by and fed up with Conte’s uncompromising demands and constant appetite for conflict. So much so that it is believed several players would have pushed for a move in 2018 if Conte hadn’t been sacked.
“He is so demanding, it’s almost psychopathic,” says one source in Italy. “He seems crazy at times.”
After speaking to those at Chelsea and getting a sense of how Conte operates, the Spurs players should have taken a deep breath and prepared themselves. For the meticulous physical and tactical training, the dietary requirements that will see goji berries and shirataki “miracle” noodles added to their diets and the half-time rages when things are not going to plan.
But they will also be working with a head coach who likes to foster a team spirit and camaraderie, and demands that his squad become a tight-knit group.
This is what it’s like to play for Antonio Conte…
Conte’s work ethic is legendary, and he expects similar from his players. In his first press conference at Chelsea, he used the word “work”, or one of its derivatives, 32 times in a little under an hour, including one response where he insisted he was “a worker who likes to work”.
After news of his move to Tottenham began to circulate earlier this week, social media was abuzz with quotes of his celebrating the value of work. One of the most famous comes from an interview with Thierry Henry while at Chelsea: “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.”
Tottenham’s players, if they embrace Conte’s work ethic, will be imbued with a similar dedication. “He never stops working,” Hazard told the Guardian in 2016, with Chelsea en route to the title. “Whether we win or lose, it doesn’t matter. He works, so we work. Work, work, work. And we all know that in football, and all sports really, you have to work so hard to reach the summit.”
The point is that working with Conte comes down to how much sacrifice players are willing to put in to reach their goals. As Hazard put it: “If someone had told us before the season that if we did everything Conte asked of us we’d have a chance to become champions again, we’d all have signed up.”
Spurs’ players will, first of all, see Conte’s indefatigability during training sessions, which are physically and mentally extremely demanding. Many of the Tottenham squad felt physically undercooked playing for Jose Mourinho last season, and after a brief uptick following Nuno Espirito Santo’s arrival in the summer, have remained less fit than most of their rivals.
They can expect big changes under Conte, who often talks about how his players will have “to suffer”. Training under him is intense — and will be even more so with the confirmation that Giampiero Ventrone, whose nickname is The Marine, will be one of Conte’s fitness coaches. Ventrone was on Marcelo Lippi’s staff at Juventus when Conte was a player, and helped push the players to three straight Champions League finals between 1996 and 1998. Spurs players should prepare to be beasted on his watch.
Away from Ventrone, there are lots of sprinting and physical exercises under Conte. He does not put so much of an emphasis on gym work — he wants his players to be lean so his players can run more, rather than bulk up. He will try to slim them down and get them to peak fitness, similar to how Mauricio Pochettino used to.
“When he arrived at Juventus in 2011, there was some scepticism,” says a source in Italy. “But he made an instant impression. The players said they nearly threw up in his first sessions because they were so much harder than his predecessors.”
One of those players was the legendary defender Chiellini, who said in 2018: “It is not only in the match with Conte. It is all day, every training session. He is like a police sergeant.
“When you finish training, you are dead. Not tired — dead. You can do it only because you believe in what he does. We had 40 days in France and it was like entering another world. You are 100 per cent with him. He creates an atmosphere, everyone gives energy to each other. For sure he is one of the very best.”
The former Spurs striker Fernando Llorente, who also worked under Conte at Juve, said in 2013: “The physical work is outrageous. We did very special strength work with machines I knew nothing about, explosive exercises. The workouts are more demanding than what I have done in my career so far. It has taken me a lot to adapt to the workload. It’s brutal.”
Fabio Quagliarella, his striker at Juventus, described Conte’s training sessions as “back-breaking”. Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Here we run a lot. I’ve run an awful lot since I arrived.”
Pre-season is massively important to Conte, and it’s a shame that Spurs have missed out on that this year. During Conte’s first pre-season at Chelsea, the players were pushed extremely hard and felt as though they had never been drilled like that before. Working in intense American heat, the players were left feeling exhausted — but the benefits were obvious and so they quickly bought into what Conte was asking of them.
They felt fitter than pretty much every team they played and scored several late goals. In Conte’s first eight Premier League matches, Chelsea scored six goals in the 80th minute or later. Hazard especially benefited, developing far greater muscle definition and looking as fit as he ever had. How Conte turned around Hazard’s fortunes after a difficult season the previous year bodes well for the Italian working with Kane, who has not looked at his sharpest this season.
As with most areas of Conte’s management, his punishing regimens are not for everyone. Take Danny Drinkwater, who Conte pushed hard to sign in 2017. In his first game since joining, Chelsea played against Drinkwater’s former club Leicester City, but Conte was informed that the midfielder was way short of match fitness after an injury from the previous campaign had disrupted pre-season. Conte’s response was to double down straight away with intense sessions to try and get Drinkwater into shape.
It backfired. Drinkwater picked up a calf injury within days that ruled him out for six weeks, which turned out to be the first of several fitness issues that season. Drinkwater’s Chelsea career has failed for all sorts of reasons, but there was a feeling that his first season was badly mishandled.
To get his players into the best physical shape, Conte also places a big emphasis on diet and nutrition. He likes to hang up bits of paper around the training ground, and often this will include dietary instructions. Goji berries, which have long been used in medicine to support immunity to illness and infection, and Rhodiola rosea supplements, which studies show can reduce physical and mental fatigue, are favourites of his.
Journalist and author Alessandro Alciato explained in his 2015 book Metodo Conte how Conte would set up tables at breakfast during his time as Italy manager with individual food groups (one for protein, one for fats, one for carbohydrates, and another for tea, cappuccino and fruit juice).
The players had never experienced anything like this. Then they would look up to see those bits of paper Conte likes to leave around. Messages included mantras like: “Diet can make the difference between victory and defeat” and “FUNDAMENTAL: Start the day with a good breakfast. If breakfast is inadequate, your glycogen reserves may run close to empty.”
At Chelsea, Conte was just as hands-on, and completely changed the players’ diet — introducing more protein through chicken and salads, and less carb-heavy foods like pasta. He did compromise on this, though, when some of his players said they felt their energy levels weren’t high enough going into games. Conte also banned his players from having pizza, fizzy drinks, tomato ketchup and brown sauce. Black rice and low-calorie shirataki noodles were introduced instead, and the expectation at Spurs is that the diet will be tightly controlled and move back towards how it was under Pochettino.
To ensure he understands how his methods are working, Conte is big on screenings and physical assessments of players to gauge their body fat and weight. He does this alongside his team of nutritionists and, if needs be, puts players on strict diets.
This was the case with Romelu Lukaku after he joined Inter. Conte thought Lukaku was too heavy for what he was demanding of him, and promptly oversaw a programme that led to the striker losing three kilograms. Lukaku’s prescribed diet included lean meats like chicken and turkey and lots of vegetables, with fried food and mozzarella off-limits. Carlos Tevez, who puts Conte at the same level as Sir Alex Ferguson, was given a plan to help him lose six kilograms when he returned from pre-season overweight in 2013.
We don’t know if any of the Spurs players will be subjected to a similar regimen, but what tends to happen is that most of Conte’s players shed weight because of the general dietary rules and intensity of the training sessions. Again, this is more Pochettino and less Mourinho, who gave the Tottenham players more leeway when it came to what they ate.
Conte is far more of a control freak in this regard. At Chelsea, he even asked the owner of the Italian restaurant Gola, which he and some players frequented, to send him pictures of what his players were eating.
No dietary detail is too small for Conte, and if he approaches his new job like he has previous ones, then the Spurs players can expect their head coach to compile lists with scores for their weight, fat percentage and how they have performed in physical tests. These are marked green for good, yellow for OK and red for bad. Anyone scoring badly can expect pretty blunt advice about what they need to do to improve.
Ensuring his players are in peak physical condition is critical to Conte, but so is ensuring his tactical messages are received crystal clear. The idea is that through constant repetitions, they become automatic.
Conte’s preferred formations are a 3-4-3 (as seen at Chelsea) or a 3-5-2. But he started his career using a 4-2-4 based on the ideas of Eugenio Fascetti, whose Lecce side of the 1980s employed the system. In possession, Conte’s teams still tend to move into a 4-2-4 system, with the wing-backs moved high, the outside centre-backs pushed wide and deep like full-backs, and the defensive midfielder dropping in alongside the central centre-back.
To be able to successfully play Conte’s system requires painstaking preparation on the training ground. Conte is known for constantly stopping sessions to get his message across. At Chelsea, training was often very stop-start as Conte would remind players if they had wandered even marginally out of position. He’s hands-on and if players are not in the right place he will come and physically drag them to where he thinks they should be. Some of his players have felt as though he’s playing a PlayStation, getting them to move precisely where he tells them. For others, it has seemed as though they’re being brainwashed through constant repetitions.
The general message from the more experienced players at Chelsea at the time was that he was the “most demanding” of the club’s recent managers.
Conte’s frequent exhortations at Cobham meant he would be constantly sucking Ambrosoli al Miele lozenges in training and on the touchline because his throat was always raw from all the shouting. Conte already sounded a touch hoarse as he addressed the media on Thursday night following the Europa Conference League win over Vitesse. “My wife tells me my voice is more attractive like this, more sensual,” he said in November 2016 with his Chelsea team in the middle of a 13-match winning run. “But I prefer to have my normal voice.”
Conte is similarly vocal during matches, prompting that Hazard joke about being relieved to only have to listen to his head coach for half of the match. “There are times he’s screaming at you to do this or that, telling you to concentrate and work, and you’re thinking: ‘Hold on, we’re 4-0 up with five minutes to play. Easy, boss. Calm down…’. But that’s the way he is,” Hazard said a few months into Conte’s Chelsea reign.
As well as receiving these constant instructions on the pitch, Chelsea’s players did far more tactical work than they had been used to previously. At times, they wanted to have more fun, do more ball work. But that sensational winning run convinced everyone of the merits of Conte’s methods. “Everyone feels one step ahead of where we were last year (under Mourinho),” Nemanja Matic said in November 2016.
One of Conte’s favourite ways to imprint his tactical messages is to play an 11-v-11 game and map out their movements. Another exercise he regularly employs is setting up an 11-v-0 scenario and making the players repeat the same moves for 45 minutes — “Until he sees that they’re working and that we’re starting to feel sick,” Pirlo wrote in his 2014 autobiography. “And that’s why we still win when it’s 11 against 11.”
Some Spurs players will be given individual drills to improve on a particular area of their game — as was the case for Lukaku when Conte took over at Inter. In the Belgian’s case, Conte would make Lukaku stand with his back to goal and ask the rugged 6ft 4in centre-back Andrea Ranocchia to go hard at him again and again. Every time Lukaku lost the ball, they would start the drill again. This went on for three months — constant repetitions until Conte was satisfied Lukaku was at the level he needed to be.
Conte is willing to compromise on some things and at Chelsea, he reduced the video sessions he made his players sit through. In Italy, it’s typical for video sessions to last 15-30 minutes, but with the national team, Conte’s sessions sometimes lasted an hour. He quickly realised at Chelsea that his players were finding the sessions too much and so he scaled them right back.
Conte will do whatever it takes to get across his tactical message — sometimes running through movements with his players with the large Subbuteo board he keeps in his office.
For someone with such precise ideas about pretty much every aspect of his coaching, it’s unsurprising that Conte is known to erupt when things don’t go to plan.
He has a fierce temper and it is standard practice for him to chuck around any loose objects during half-time. Pirlo described his corner of the dressing room as “the most dangerous spot in the whole of Turin… especially at half-time”.
“He’s never happy,” Pirlo said of a man he described as “like a bear with a sore head”. “There’s always some small detail that’s not quite right in his mind. He can see in advance what might happen in the 45 minutes to come.
“He’s obsessed over every last detail, exploiting it to his advantage. He is allergic to error.
“Even when we’re winning, Conte comes in and hurls against the wall, and thus my little corner, anything he can lay his hands on… almost always full bottles of water. Fizzy water. Very fizzy water.”
Chiellini wrote in his autobiography: “Conte’s natural element is fire: I’ve lost count of the whiteboards that have been thrown around the dressing room at half-time. No one ever got hit by one in the heat of the moment. But if he finds an object in his path, he’ll throw it, kick it, he goes berserk. Then, when the game’s over, he lets the situation cool off, as almost everyone does.”
But Conte tends not to say much after matches, especially if his team have lost.
Shortly before he left Juventus, there was a famous incident before the team’s final game of the season against Cagliari. Juventus were on 99 points and long since crowned champions, but Conte was obsessed with becoming the first team to break the 100-point barrier in Serie A.
Conte was leading a video analysis session on the eve of the game when he was interrupted by the club captain Gianluigi Buffon. Along with the club’s CEO Giuseppe Marotta, Buffon entered the room and raised the topic of bonuses owed to the squad for winning the title.
Conte lost it, screaming at Buffon: “I’ve had it with the lot of you. Get out! I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Buffon tried to respond, but Conte shot back: “Shut up. You’re the captain, Gigi, and you don’t understand a fucking thing.” Conte is then said to have muttered “shame on you” as the squad left the room.
Interviewed for the book Metodo Conte, a philosophical Buffon said he bore no ill will towards Conte for the incident. He suggested it was a motivational tactic to keep Juve’s focus on the 100-point mark, and added: “It’s the kind of thing I might have done. If it served his purpose, it’s fine by me.”
Juventus ended up beating Cagliari 3-0 to finish with 102 points.
At Chelsea, the game in which Conte is said to have been most animated was the famous defeat away at Woolwich that prompted the switch to a back three and that 13-match winning streak. Chelsea were 3-0 down at half-time, and such was Conte’s ranting and raving there were genuine fears he might resign there and then. The club’s owner Roman Abramovich was at the training ground for three days after that defeat, underlining how seismic it felt at the time.
Conte admits he was extremely angry after that game and that it was a difficult defeat to accept. He channelled that fury brilliantly to turn his team around, but a variant of that rage is present after most defeats.
Even pre-season losses can infuriate Conte. One journalist remembers being promised a one-on-one interview with him after a pre-season game against Inter in Singapore in the summer of 2017. Chelsea lost the game 2-1 and it was clear that Conte was furious, struggling to say anything positive and unable to shake off the anger at losing the game. The interview was eventually cut short with barely a grunt of acknowledgement as Conte walked angrily onto the bus to leave the stadium.
But alongside Conte’s red mists is the rousing rhetoric. The Tottenham squad have already had an insight into his charisma after he gave a stirring speech upon meeting the players on Tuesday afternoon. Conte told the group he would help them win again, but that they had to give absolutely everything for him, and that he would always be there for them as long as they gave their all in training and matches.
For close observers of Conte’s career, it brought back memories of his rallying cry upon taking over at Juventus a decade ago. “He got at our pride,” midfielder Claudio Marchisio said last year. “He told us: ‘You’ve been seventh for two years. You’ve been awful for two years. From now, on you either get your head down or get out’. He pushed us to earn it on the pitch.“
Pirlo recalls Conte telling the players: “Every single person here has performed badly over the last few seasons. We need to do whatever it takes to pull ourselves up and start being Juve again. Turning around this ship is not a polite request, it’s an order, a moral obligation. You guys need to do only one thing and it’s pretty simple: follow me.”
In his next job as Italy head coach, Conte gathered the players in his first squad and said: “I will call up only those players who deserve it. Remember that I don’t need to explain myself to anyone.”
Before even taking over at Chelsea, Conte met with Hazard and explained how he would help him rediscover his best form. “He spoke to me about the difficult season I’d had, and what he expected of me,” Hazard said in 2016. “I’d not scored many goals last season, but he saw me as a goalscorer. He spoke a bit about the system he wanted to play, the 3-4-3 or even one with two attackers up front. His passion and enthusiasm were obvious even then.”
Camaraderie and team spirit are important to Conte. When he met with the Spurs players on Tuesday, he pushed the importance of togetherness and said they had to enjoy themselves again after a rough start to the season.
There’s hope among the Spurs squad that Conte’s arrival will see a return to the Pochettino days when team meals and other bonding activities helped to maintain a good team spirit. Monthly group meals were a staple of Conte’s time at Chelsea, especially in his first season when they weren’t in Europe, and it was something he replicated at Inter. Conte also ingratiated himself with the players at Stamford Bridge by singing his initiation song with gusto, sending them into hysterics. Few who were there can forget the sight of Conte standing on a chair in the middle of a room in Minneapolis belting out the Neapolitan favourite Malafemmena.
Conte did not want his Chelsea players to be completely consumed by their work, so would allow them a beer after a game — but there were rules. “One. Not a lot. And, after you finish the game, you must drink it quickly, not an hour after the end.” At Stamford Bridge, Conte would also buy Prosecco for his staff at Christmas and take the press pack out for an occasional pint at the Old Plough, close to the club’s training ground.
Creating a good atmosphere where the whole squad feels like a family is very important to Conte. And now that his English is far better than when he joined Chelsea five years ago, it should be easier for him to get across these messages. Communication matters to Conte — at Inter, Lukaku spoke Italian upon joining and was accepted more quickly by the group. Christian Eriksen, by contrast, did not and it took him longer to settle.
Conte’s desire for the whole group to stay as one can sometimes be taken to extremes. At Juventus, for instance, midfielder Arturo Vidal was notorious for going out and partying, but Conte thought it would be better to punish the whole team, not just Vidal. He would tell the team that everyone would be put through an especially physical session, with lots of running, expecting Vidal to be revealed as being a little worse for wear. “The problem is Arturo is made out of iron,” Marchisio said in 2020. “A few kilometres into the run we were all gasping for breath and begging for mercy while he kept running at the front of the group, chatting as if he were at the bar.”
Those runs were a bonding experience for the squad and did nothing to harm the relationship between Vidal and Conte, who, as hard-running central midfielders, were kindred spirits on the pitch. “If I had to go to war, I’d take Conte with me,” Vidal once said and Conte has said the same about the Chilean.
Man-management has been an issue with this Tottenham squad, most recently with Nuno creating the sense of a two-tiered group by leaving behind his preferred Premier League team for the Europa Conference trip to Vitesse.
Generally — though not always, as we’ll see later — man-management has been a skill of Conte’s. At Chelsea, he was able to win over the wantaway Matic in 2016 and get the best out of him. Conte is known more for the use of stick than carrot but on this occasion went for the latter and, recognising that Matic felt unappreciated and unwanted, said in July 2016: “Matic is a very important player for my idea of football.
“He knows this and I’m delighted by his attitude and behaviour. I know with work he can become a fantastic midfielder, one of the best in the world. He is not for sale.”
Matic ended up leaving the following summer, but extracting one last season was an important factor in Chelsea winning the title.
Conte’s greatest diplomatic feat was managing the transition of John Terry from “captain, leader, legend” to warming the bench. This could have been a very awkward situation, and one only has to remember how toxic things became at Chelsea when Rafael Benitez dropped Terry in 2013. But Conte was able to keep Terry onside by frequently stressing how important he was in the dressing room, and how valuable it was to have those leadership skills in the building even if he wasn’t starting games. Conte has continued to speak well of Terry since leaving Chelsea, and the feelings of goodwill are reciprocated.
“In that last year under Conte at Chelsea, I was lucky because I had a really good relationship with him,” Terry said during an Instagram Live last year.
“I started the season, and then he changed formation. I got injured, and he had a really honest conversation with me and said we were going to play three at the back. He didn’t think I suited three at the back.”
At Inter in May, Conte masterfully diffused the tension between himself and Lautaro Martinez after the striker had reacted angrily to being substituted by challenging him to a boxing match during training. Conte’s response to Martinez’s initial petulance was typically to berate him, even though Inter had already won the Serie A title and the match against Roma was essentially meaningless.
Above all, Conte’s squads must be a meritocracy. And this will be appreciated by the Spurs squad in the wake of Nuno’s Arnhem decision when it felt as though there was little fringe players could do to get in the team. If a player doesn’t perform in training, they simply won’t be selected. This happened to Michy Batshuayi on a couple of occasions at Chelsea, when Conte decided that he wasn’t following instructions properly and so was replaced by Hazard as a false nine.
Likewise, if Conte feels a player is deserving of criticism, he will deliver it without hesitation — no matter how established the player is. Even Inter’s talisman Lukaku was given a severe dressing-down in front of his team-mates after a substandard performance against Slavia Prague in the Champions League in September 2019.
“I played really badly, and Conte told me I was trash in front of the entire team,” Lukaku told Sky Sports in January.
“He tells you to your face if you’re right or wrong, he said he would substitute me after five minutes if it happened again.
Pirlo is another in the Conte disciple camp, and his autobiography is littered with fulsome praise for his compatriot. “I consider myself fortunate: I know Antonio Conte,” Pirlo said. “When Conte speaks, his words assault you. They crash through the doors of your mind, often quite violently, and settle deep within you. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve found myself saying: ‘Hell, Conte said something spot-on today’.”
Lukaku has spoken in similarly gushing terms. “The mister is a mentor,” he said in September 2020. “He’s like a father who understands me really well. Playing for him is like a dream come true.”
When Conte left Inter at the end of last season, Lukaku posted a heartfelt message on Instagram that included the words: “I will keep your principles for the rest of my career (physical preparation, mental and just the drive to win…) it was a pleasure to play for you! Thank you for all that you did. I owe you a lot.”
Italy’s legendary centre-back Leonardo Bonucci told The Athletic earlier this year that: “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. He changed my career. It’s the mentality he gave me and Juventus too, the football knowledge he passed on.”
Conte’s abrasive management style is not for everyone. He is not exactly warm and friendly to players who are struggling and because he is so dedicated, he can struggle to understand why anyone else would have anything in their life outside of football. He is not the most sympathetic when it comes to personal issues.
And not every player reacts as well as Lukaku to being hung out to dry in front of their team-mates.
“There’s a reason he has not stayed more than a couple of years in a job,” says a source in Italy. “He has such a divisive character and a bad temper, eventually his relationship with the board deteriorates, as well as sometimes with his players.”
Chelsea is a good case study, where the huge excitement and buzz of the first season gave way to a pretty miserable second.
And even in that first season, there was some collateral damage. Mikel John Obi, for instance, is still angry at Conte for the way he was frozen out of the team. Mikel told The Athleticearlier this year that Conte informed him that if he played for Nigeria at the Olympic Games in Rio he would not be part of his plans at Chelsea.
Mikel was not dissuaded and helped his country win a bronze medal in Brazil. Mikel never played for Chelsea again after a decade of service.
“This guy who has just walked in the door for five minutes is telling me I had to choose,” Mikel said. “He was saying, ‘If you do that, you won’t be a part of this team’. I spoke to the club and told them that I wanted to go. The club respected me because of what I had done for them and how long I’d been there. So off I went and I felt punished for that. I came back and I didn’t make the squad. I was never in the squad on match days again.
“The funny thing is, just before the January window was going to start, he came up to me and said, ‘I want a meeting with you’. This was after making me train on my own for months, treating a player who had been at Chelsea for a long time like this!
“When he tried to meet with me he was like, ‘Let’s try and make up, I will need you in the team, let’s squash this, blah, blah, blah!’. I was like, ‘Are you joking?! Are you naffing serious?!’. He knew I wanted out. I stood up and walked out of the room. You can’t disrespect a human being like that.”
But during that first season, Mikel was generally a lone dissenting voice. Even Diego Costa, who clashed with Conte during training and was dropped for a game against Leicester in January 2017, generally got on well with the head coach. That confrontation came after Chinese side Tianjin Quanjian had made a huge bid to sign Costa, who it was known wanted to leave England. Sources at the time claimed Conte shouted “go to China” during the heated argument.
It was more evidence of Conte not taking a backward step no matter who he was dealing with. After all, Costa was the Premier League’s leading goalscorer at the time with 14 goals and was known for his combustible personality. But Conte had no issue with confronting and then dropping one of the team’s most important players.
Costa ultimately left Chelsea for Atletico Madrid eight months later after a drawn-out transfer saga that included Conte texting the striker to say he wasn’t in his plans. Much was made of that message, but those close to the situation say that, although Chelsea were annoyed with Conte for weakening their bargaining position, there was an almost unanimous agreement that it was in everyone’s interests for Costa to leave.
Chelsea’s hierarchy were less impressed with Conte’s frequent complaints to the board about that summer’s transfers (a window that saw Bakayoko, Drinkwater, Alvaro Morata, Antonio Rudiger, Davide Zappacosta, Ethan Ampadu and Willy Caballero brought in). The tension was increasingly apparent and filtered down to the players and contributed to what was a pretty disastrous 2017-18 season.
Conte was angry at Chelsea missing out on signing Lukaku from Everton and then seeing Spurs pip them to the signing of Llorente. His mood wasn’t helped when the indications from Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Virgil van Dijk’s camps were that both were minded to join Liverpool — partly because they found Klopp more likeable and upbeat but also because they were also more enthused by his style of play and had concerns over how long Conte would be at Chelsea.
The season that followed should act as a warning for him and the Tottenham players of the downside of his volatility. The arguments with the board over transfers was one thing, but it was the conflicts with the players that really derailed Chelsea’s season.
Tensions first spilt over following an embarrassing 3-0 defeat at Roma in October when Conte spotted Kenedy yawning during a team meeting. Furious, he unleashed a tirade at the 21-year-old for his lack of professionalism, which prompted David Luiz to intervene and defend his compatriot. David Luiz barely played again that season and was pretty much completely bombed out having been a key player in the title-winning campaign. His compatriot Willian was similarly peripheral in 2017-18, leading to the midfielder covering Conte’s face with emojis when he posted a picture on Instagram of the team celebrating their FA Cup win at the end of the season.
Willian later unconvincingly blamed the image on his young daughter playing with his phone.
Conte irked his players in other ways that season. Some were frustrated by him asking them to stay in a hotel together the night before games when they would rather have been at home.
Others felt they were being worked too hard, and that Conte wasn’t making allowances for the fact that, unlike the previous season, they were having to juggle domestic with European commitments. This came to a head after a humiliating 4-1 defeat at Watford in February 2018 when the players made clear their frustrations and requested extra time off. Conte agreed and gave them three days to recover after admitting they had played “with fear” at Vicarage Road.
He also denied that he had been demanding too much of his players and suggested they had actually been “working a lot less”.
As the season concluded, many at Chelsea had completely lost patience with Conte. They felt he was permanently seeking trouble and conflict, and by the end, he had rubbed most of the players up the wrong way. It was a shame, given how strong the bond had been the previous season.
After Chelsea ended their season by winning the FA Cup, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois explained how draining it had been for the players having so much uncertainty surrounding their head coach’s future amid his frequent disagreements with the club’s board.
“I don’t think it is a question for the players (whether it was a distraction), it is a question for the board,” he said. “I think we trained very well with him.
“You can not have him one more year and then not know if he will go away the next year or not. You need some clarity so that everyone knows what way the club is going forward. It is what we lacked this season. There were always rumours about everyone and it is not easy then to defend the title, with all the criticism.
“There was a negative spirit sometimes and then it’s hard to raise yourselves.”
Conte wasn’t sacked until after the start of pre-season in July 2018, much to the shock of some of the Chelsea players who were at the World Cup and couldn’t believe he was still in the job.
Conte’s time at Chelsea should not be dominated by memories of how it ended — there were many extreme highs in there as well and it ranks as an exception in his career given how devoted other dressing rooms were to him. When Conte resigned from Juventus, Chiellini said: “Me, Leo (Bonucci) Andrea (Pirlo) and Gigi (Buffon) would not have let him go.” When his underdog Italy side lost the Euro 2016 quarter-final on penalties, the entire team broke down in tears.
Barely able to control the waves of emotion running through him, Andrea Barzagli wept as he said: “In the future, no one will remember this national team that gave its all. There was a desire carry on together.” The next day, Conte cried too and confessed that if he had not already agreed to join Chelsea he would have stayed, so tight was the bond he struck with his players.
Inter fought to keep him and were successful at the end of his first season after a crisis summit at Villa Bellini. Once he delivered the league title, an achievement chief executive Marotta called a “work of art”, the board tried to retain him again. Conte was Inter’s “top player” who was worth every penny. “It’s better to sign one player less in the transfer market and appoint a great coach.”
Inter desperately wanted him to lead the club’s title defence and be the manager who earned them a second star to commemorate a 20th scudetto. But Conte was not for turning and agreed a severance package. “These last two years have been hard and tiring but we won and all the hard work paid off,” Inter goalkeeper Samir Handanovic said. “You were hard but fair. I learned from you as a player and as a captain. You were the one who always raised the bar and put the right pressure on everyone. You were the one who made the difference. Thank you, coach, and thank you to your staff, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work and win with you.
Nevertheless, it’s understandable why some of the Spurs squad might have felt a touch nervous hearing from their Chelsea colleagues about the Italian’s time at Stamford Bridge.
It all ties back to the fact that Conte’s high-energy approach is not for everyone — at Chelsea and wherever he’s been. Some players tire of hearing the same phrases, like “Be ready to suffer”, ad nauseam. Others find that, even though they know he’s a great coach, they tire of his demands eventually.
“Not everyone can handle the intensity, himself included,” Chiellini wrote in his autobiography. “He never switches off and sometimes he needs to. He can get tired too.
“In the beginning with Antonio you give your all, but staying with it on a mental level is hard, harder than from a physical perspective because Conte trains you so hard that in the end, you become a war machine.
“Everything with Antonio is always pushed to the max: if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t get on with him.”
Ultimately, Conte’s success at Tottenham will come down to how much his players are willing to sacrifice themselves and commit to the head coach’s methods. Do this and the rewards are substantial.
That’s what it’s like playing for Antonio Conte
It also gives me great joy that he’s going to make the players miserable until they live up to expectations. They fucking deserve it.
SO to summarise .....!!‘You either improve or you die’ – What it’s like to play for Antonio Conte
Players who worked under Conte explain what it's like to play for the brilliant and sometimes maddening new Spurs manager
After the Tottenham squad had spoken to their colleagues at Chelseaabout what to expect from Antonio Conte as head coach, some felt a degree of trepidation.
This is perhaps understandable. After all, they would have been told about the ferocious work ethic, the instructions during training that are so relentless he has to constantly suck throat lozenges and the volcanic temper that can erupt when things are not going his way.
Most who have worked with Conte have a story or two to tell. Andrea Pirlo remembers his habit for chucking bottles across the dressing room (he regretted his station in the corner of the room that was invariably right in the line of fire), Eden Hazard joked that he was blessed to be a winger as it meant having Conte screaming in his ear for only half the game, and Giorgio Chiellini said players were “not tired — dead” after his training sessions.
Tiemoue Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Sometimes I get the feeling I have to make even more effort in training than I do in a match. That’s the level of intensity he demands every day in what we do.”
But the Spurs players were also told that if you embrace Conte’s methods then the rewards are huge. Which is why those such as Harry Kane, desperate to finally win some silverware, are so enthused by Conte’s appointment.
Not that his frenzied, sometimes maniacal energy is for everyone. There will be some at Spurs who will go the way of many of his players at Chelsea. Burnt out by and fed up with Conte’s uncompromising demands and constant appetite for conflict. So much so that it is believed several players would have pushed for a move in 2018 if Conte hadn’t been sacked.
“He is so demanding, it’s almost psychopathic,” says one source in Italy. “He seems crazy at times.”
After speaking to those at Chelsea and getting a sense of how Conte operates, the Spurs players should have taken a deep breath and prepared themselves. For the meticulous physical and tactical training, the dietary requirements that will see goji berries and shirataki “miracle” noodles added to their diets and the half-time rages when things are not going to plan.
But they will also be working with a head coach who likes to foster a team spirit and camaraderie, and demands that his squad become a tight-knit group.
This is what it’s like to play for Antonio Conte…
Conte’s work ethic is legendary, and he expects similar from his players. In his first press conference at Chelsea, he used the word “work”, or one of its derivatives, 32 times in a little under an hour, including one response where he insisted he was “a worker who likes to work”.
After news of his move to Tottenham began to circulate earlier this week, social media was abuzz with quotes of his celebrating the value of work. One of the most famous comes from an interview with Thierry Henry while at Chelsea: “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.”
Tottenham’s players, if they embrace Conte’s work ethic, will be imbued with a similar dedication. “He never stops working,” Hazard told the Guardian in 2016, with Chelsea en route to the title. “Whether we win or lose, it doesn’t matter. He works, so we work. Work, work, work. And we all know that in football, and all sports really, you have to work so hard to reach the summit.”
The point is that working with Conte comes down to how much sacrifice players are willing to put in to reach their goals. As Hazard put it: “If someone had told us before the season that if we did everything Conte asked of us we’d have a chance to become champions again, we’d all have signed up.”
Spurs’ players will, first of all, see Conte’s indefatigability during training sessions, which are physically and mentally extremely demanding. Many of the Tottenham squad felt physically undercooked playing for Jose Mourinho last season, and after a brief uptick following Nuno Espirito Santo’s arrival in the summer, have remained less fit than most of their rivals.
They can expect big changes under Conte, who often talks about how his players will have “to suffer”. Training under him is intense — and will be even more so with the confirmation that Giampiero Ventrone, whose nickname is The Marine, will be one of Conte’s fitness coaches. Ventrone was on Marcelo Lippi’s staff at Juventus when Conte was a player, and helped push the players to three straight Champions League finals between 1996 and 1998. Spurs players should prepare to be beasted on his watch.
Away from Ventrone, there are lots of sprinting and physical exercises under Conte. He does not put so much of an emphasis on gym work — he wants his players to be lean so his players can run more, rather than bulk up. He will try to slim them down and get them to peak fitness, similar to how Mauricio Pochettino used to.
“When he arrived at Juventus in 2011, there was some scepticism,” says a source in Italy. “But he made an instant impression. The players said they nearly threw up in his first sessions because they were so much harder than his predecessors.”
One of those players was the legendary defender Chiellini, who said in 2018: “It is not only in the match with Conte. It is all day, every training session. He is like a police sergeant.
“When you finish training, you are dead. Not tired — dead. You can do it only because you believe in what he does. We had 40 days in France and it was like entering another world. You are 100 per cent with him. He creates an atmosphere, everyone gives energy to each other. For sure he is one of the very best.”
The former Spurs striker Fernando Llorente, who also worked under Conte at Juve, said in 2013: “The physical work is outrageous. We did very special strength work with machines I knew nothing about, explosive exercises. The workouts are more demanding than what I have done in my career so far. It has taken me a lot to adapt to the workload. It’s brutal.”
Fabio Quagliarella, his striker at Juventus, described Conte’s training sessions as “back-breaking”. Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Here we run a lot. I’ve run an awful lot since I arrived.”
Pre-season is massively important to Conte, and it’s a shame that Spurs have missed out on that this year. During Conte’s first pre-season at Chelsea, the players were pushed extremely hard and felt as though they had never been drilled like that before. Working in intense American heat, the players were left feeling exhausted — but the benefits were obvious and so they quickly bought into what Conte was asking of them.
They felt fitter than pretty much every team they played and scored several late goals. In Conte’s first eight Premier League matches, Chelsea scored six goals in the 80th minute or later. Hazard especially benefited, developing far greater muscle definition and looking as fit as he ever had. How Conte turned around Hazard’s fortunes after a difficult season the previous year bodes well for the Italian working with Kane, who has not looked at his sharpest this season.
As with most areas of Conte’s management, his punishing regimens are not for everyone. Take Danny Drinkwater, who Conte pushed hard to sign in 2017. In his first game since joining, Chelsea played against Drinkwater’s former club Leicester City, but Conte was informed that the midfielder was way short of match fitness after an injury from the previous campaign had disrupted pre-season. Conte’s response was to double down straight away with intense sessions to try and get Drinkwater into shape.
It backfired. Drinkwater picked up a calf injury within days that ruled him out for six weeks, which turned out to be the first of several fitness issues that season. Drinkwater’s Chelsea career has failed for all sorts of reasons, but there was a feeling that his first season was badly mishandled.
To get his players into the best physical shape, Conte also places a big emphasis on diet and nutrition. He likes to hang up bits of paper around the training ground, and often this will include dietary instructions. Goji berries, which have long been used in medicine to support immunity to illness and infection, and Rhodiola rosea supplements, which studies show can reduce physical and mental fatigue, are favourites of his.
Journalist and author Alessandro Alciato explained in his 2015 book Metodo Conte how Conte would set up tables at breakfast during his time as Italy manager with individual food groups (one for protein, one for fats, one for carbohydrates, and another for tea, cappuccino and fruit juice).
The players had never experienced anything like this. Then they would look up to see those bits of paper Conte likes to leave around. Messages included mantras like: “Diet can make the difference between victory and defeat” and “FUNDAMENTAL: Start the day with a good breakfast. If breakfast is inadequate, your glycogen reserves may run close to empty.”
At Chelsea, Conte was just as hands-on, and completely changed the players’ diet — introducing more protein through chicken and salads, and less carb-heavy foods like pasta. He did compromise on this, though, when some of his players said they felt their energy levels weren’t high enough going into games. Conte also banned his players from having pizza, fizzy drinks, tomato ketchup and brown sauce. Black rice and low-calorie shirataki noodles were introduced instead, and the expectation at Spurs is that the diet will be tightly controlled and move back towards how it was under Pochettino.
To ensure he understands how his methods are working, Conte is big on screenings and physical assessments of players to gauge their body fat and weight. He does this alongside his team of nutritionists and, if needs be, puts players on strict diets.
This was the case with Romelu Lukaku after he joined Inter. Conte thought Lukaku was too heavy for what he was demanding of him, and promptly oversaw a programme that led to the striker losing three kilograms. Lukaku’s prescribed diet included lean meats like chicken and turkey and lots of vegetables, with fried food and mozzarella off-limits. Carlos Tevez, who puts Conte at the same level as Sir Alex Ferguson, was given a plan to help him lose six kilograms when he returned from pre-season overweight in 2013.
We don’t know if any of the Spurs players will be subjected to a similar regimen, but what tends to happen is that most of Conte’s players shed weight because of the general dietary rules and intensity of the training sessions. Again, this is more Pochettino and less Mourinho, who gave the Tottenham players more leeway when it came to what they ate.
Conte is far more of a control freak in this regard. At Chelsea, he even asked the owner of the Italian restaurant Gola, which he and some players frequented, to send him pictures of what his players were eating.
No dietary detail is too small for Conte, and if he approaches his new job like he has previous ones, then the Spurs players can expect their head coach to compile lists with scores for their weight, fat percentage and how they have performed in physical tests. These are marked green for good, yellow for OK and red for bad. Anyone scoring badly can expect pretty blunt advice about what they need to do to improve.
Ensuring his players are in peak physical condition is critical to Conte, but so is ensuring his tactical messages are received crystal clear. The idea is that through constant repetitions, they become automatic.
Conte’s preferred formations are a 3-4-3 (as seen at Chelsea) or a 3-5-2. But he started his career using a 4-2-4 based on the ideas of Eugenio Fascetti, whose Lecce side of the 1980s employed the system. In possession, Conte’s teams still tend to move into a 4-2-4 system, with the wing-backs moved high, the outside centre-backs pushed wide and deep like full-backs, and the defensive midfielder dropping in alongside the central centre-back.
To be able to successfully play Conte’s system requires painstaking preparation on the training ground. Conte is known for constantly stopping sessions to get his message across. At Chelsea, training was often very stop-start as Conte would remind players if they had wandered even marginally out of position. He’s hands-on and if players are not in the right place he will come and physically drag them to where he thinks they should be. Some of his players have felt as though he’s playing a PlayStation, getting them to move precisely where he tells them. For others, it has seemed as though they’re being brainwashed through constant repetitions.
The general message from the more experienced players at Chelsea at the time was that he was the “most demanding” of the club’s recent managers.
Conte’s frequent exhortations at Cobham meant he would be constantly sucking Ambrosoli al Miele lozenges in training and on the touchline because his throat was always raw from all the shouting. Conte already sounded a touch hoarse as he addressed the media on Thursday night following the Europa Conference League win over Vitesse. “My wife tells me my voice is more attractive like this, more sensual,” he said in November 2016 with his Chelsea team in the middle of a 13-match winning run. “But I prefer to have my normal voice.”
Conte is similarly vocal during matches, prompting that Hazard joke about being relieved to only have to listen to his head coach for half of the match. “There are times he’s screaming at you to do this or that, telling you to concentrate and work, and you’re thinking: ‘Hold on, we’re 4-0 up with five minutes to play. Easy, boss. Calm down…’. But that’s the way he is,” Hazard said a few months into Conte’s Chelsea reign.
As well as receiving these constant instructions on the pitch, Chelsea’s players did far more tactical work than they had been used to previously. At times, they wanted to have more fun, do more ball work. But that sensational winning run convinced everyone of the merits of Conte’s methods. “Everyone feels one step ahead of where we were last year (under Mourinho),” Nemanja Matic said in November 2016.
One of Conte’s favourite ways to imprint his tactical messages is to play an 11-v-11 game and map out their movements. Another exercise he regularly employs is setting up an 11-v-0 scenario and making the players repeat the same moves for 45 minutes — “Until he sees that they’re working and that we’re starting to feel sick,” Pirlo wrote in his 2014 autobiography. “And that’s why we still win when it’s 11 against 11.”
Some Spurs players will be given individual drills to improve on a particular area of their game — as was the case for Lukaku when Conte took over at Inter. In the Belgian’s case, Conte would make Lukaku stand with his back to goal and ask the rugged 6ft 4in centre-back Andrea Ranocchia to go hard at him again and again. Every time Lukaku lost the ball, they would start the drill again. This went on for three months — constant repetitions until Conte was satisfied Lukaku was at the level he needed to be.
Conte is willing to compromise on some things and at Chelsea, he reduced the video sessions he made his players sit through. In Italy, it’s typical for video sessions to last 15-30 minutes, but with the national team, Conte’s sessions sometimes lasted an hour. He quickly realised at Chelsea that his players were finding the sessions too much and so he scaled them right back.
Conte will do whatever it takes to get across his tactical message — sometimes running through movements with his players with the large Subbuteo board he keeps in his office.
For someone with such precise ideas about pretty much every aspect of his coaching, it’s unsurprising that Conte is known to erupt when things don’t go to plan.
He has a fierce temper and it is standard practice for him to chuck around any loose objects during half-time. Pirlo described his corner of the dressing room as “the most dangerous spot in the whole of Turin… especially at half-time”.
“He’s never happy,” Pirlo said of a man he described as “like a bear with a sore head”. “There’s always some small detail that’s not quite right in his mind. He can see in advance what might happen in the 45 minutes to come.
“He’s obsessed over every last detail, exploiting it to his advantage. He is allergic to error.
“Even when we’re winning, Conte comes in and hurls against the wall, and thus my little corner, anything he can lay his hands on… almost always full bottles of water. Fizzy water. Very fizzy water.”
Chiellini wrote in his autobiography: “Conte’s natural element is fire: I’ve lost count of the whiteboards that have been thrown around the dressing room at half-time. No one ever got hit by one in the heat of the moment. But if he finds an object in his path, he’ll throw it, kick it, he goes berserk. Then, when the game’s over, he lets the situation cool off, as almost everyone does.”
But Conte tends not to say much after matches, especially if his team have lost.
Shortly before he left Juventus, there was a famous incident before the team’s final game of the season against Cagliari. Juventus were on 99 points and long since crowned champions, but Conte was obsessed with becoming the first team to break the 100-point barrier in Serie A.
Conte was leading a video analysis session on the eve of the game when he was interrupted by the club captain Gianluigi Buffon. Along with the club’s CEO Giuseppe Marotta, Buffon entered the room and raised the topic of bonuses owed to the squad for winning the title.
Conte lost it, screaming at Buffon: “I’ve had it with the lot of you. Get out! I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Buffon tried to respond, but Conte shot back: “Shut up. You’re the captain, Gigi, and you don’t understand a fucking thing.” Conte is then said to have muttered “shame on you” as the squad left the room.
Interviewed for the book Metodo Conte, a philosophical Buffon said he bore no ill will towards Conte for the incident. He suggested it was a motivational tactic to keep Juve’s focus on the 100-point mark, and added: “It’s the kind of thing I might have done. If it served his purpose, it’s fine by me.”
Juventus ended up beating Cagliari 3-0 to finish with 102 points.
At Chelsea, the game in which Conte is said to have been most animated was the famous defeat away at Woolwich that prompted the switch to a back three and that 13-match winning streak. Chelsea were 3-0 down at half-time, and such was Conte’s ranting and raving there were genuine fears he might resign there and then. The club’s owner Roman Abramovich was at the training ground for three days after that defeat, underlining how seismic it felt at the time.
Conte admits he was extremely angry after that game and that it was a difficult defeat to accept. He channelled that fury brilliantly to turn his team around, but a variant of that rage is present after most defeats.
Even pre-season losses can infuriate Conte. One journalist remembers being promised a one-on-one interview with him after a pre-season game against Inter in Singapore in the summer of 2017. Chelsea lost the game 2-1 and it was clear that Conte was furious, struggling to say anything positive and unable to shake off the anger at losing the game. The interview was eventually cut short with barely a grunt of acknowledgement as Conte walked angrily onto the bus to leave the stadium.
But alongside Conte’s red mists is the rousing rhetoric. The Tottenham squad have already had an insight into his charisma after he gave a stirring speech upon meeting the players on Tuesday afternoon. Conte told the group he would help them win again, but that they had to give absolutely everything for him, and that he would always be there for them as long as they gave their all in training and matches.
For close observers of Conte’s career, it brought back memories of his rallying cry upon taking over at Juventus a decade ago. “He got at our pride,” midfielder Claudio Marchisio said last year. “He told us: ‘You’ve been seventh for two years. You’ve been awful for two years. From now, on you either get your head down or get out’. He pushed us to earn it on the pitch.“
Pirlo recalls Conte telling the players: “Every single person here has performed badly over the last few seasons. We need to do whatever it takes to pull ourselves up and start being Juve again. Turning around this ship is not a polite request, it’s an order, a moral obligation. You guys need to do only one thing and it’s pretty simple: follow me.”
In his next job as Italy head coach, Conte gathered the players in his first squad and said: “I will call up only those players who deserve it. Remember that I don’t need to explain myself to anyone.”
Before even taking over at Chelsea, Conte met with Hazard and explained how he would help him rediscover his best form. “He spoke to me about the difficult season I’d had, and what he expected of me,” Hazard said in 2016. “I’d not scored many goals last season, but he saw me as a goalscorer. He spoke a bit about the system he wanted to play, the 3-4-3 or even one with two attackers up front. His passion and enthusiasm were obvious even then.”
Camaraderie and team spirit are important to Conte. When he met with the Spurs players on Tuesday, he pushed the importance of togetherness and said they had to enjoy themselves again after a rough start to the season.
There’s hope among the Spurs squad that Conte’s arrival will see a return to the Pochettino days when team meals and other bonding activities helped to maintain a good team spirit. Monthly group meals were a staple of Conte’s time at Chelsea, especially in his first season when they weren’t in Europe, and it was something he replicated at Inter. Conte also ingratiated himself with the players at Stamford Bridge by singing his initiation song with gusto, sending them into hysterics. Few who were there can forget the sight of Conte standing on a chair in the middle of a room in Minneapolis belting out the Neapolitan favourite Malafemmena.
Conte did not want his Chelsea players to be completely consumed by their work, so would allow them a beer after a game — but there were rules. “One. Not a lot. And, after you finish the game, you must drink it quickly, not an hour after the end.” At Stamford Bridge, Conte would also buy Prosecco for his staff at Christmas and take the press pack out for an occasional pint at the Old Plough, close to the club’s training ground.
Creating a good atmosphere where the whole squad feels like a family is very important to Conte. And now that his English is far better than when he joined Chelsea five years ago, it should be easier for him to get across these messages. Communication matters to Conte — at Inter, Lukaku spoke Italian upon joining and was accepted more quickly by the group. Christian Eriksen, by contrast, did not and it took him longer to settle.
Conte’s desire for the whole group to stay as one can sometimes be taken to extremes. At Juventus, for instance, midfielder Arturo Vidal was notorious for going out and partying, but Conte thought it would be better to punish the whole team, not just Vidal. He would tell the team that everyone would be put through an especially physical session, with lots of running, expecting Vidal to be revealed as being a little worse for wear. “The problem is Arturo is made out of iron,” Marchisio said in 2020. “A few kilometres into the run we were all gasping for breath and begging for mercy while he kept running at the front of the group, chatting as if he were at the bar.”
Those runs were a bonding experience for the squad and did nothing to harm the relationship between Vidal and Conte, who, as hard-running central midfielders, were kindred spirits on the pitch. “If I had to go to war, I’d take Conte with me,” Vidal once said and Conte has said the same about the Chilean.
Man-management has been an issue with this Tottenham squad, most recently with Nuno creating the sense of a two-tiered group by leaving behind his preferred Premier League team for the Europa Conference trip to Vitesse.
Generally — though not always, as we’ll see later — man-management has been a skill of Conte’s. At Chelsea, he was able to win over the wantaway Matic in 2016 and get the best out of him. Conte is known more for the use of stick than carrot but on this occasion went for the latter and, recognising that Matic felt unappreciated and unwanted, said in July 2016: “Matic is a very important player for my idea of football.
“He knows this and I’m delighted by his attitude and behaviour. I know with work he can become a fantastic midfielder, one of the best in the world. He is not for sale.”
Matic ended up leaving the following summer, but extracting one last season was an important factor in Chelsea winning the title.
Conte’s greatest diplomatic feat was managing the transition of John Terry from “captain, leader, legend” to warming the bench. This could have been a very awkward situation, and one only has to remember how toxic things became at Chelsea when Rafael Benitez dropped Terry in 2013. But Conte was able to keep Terry onside by frequently stressing how important he was in the dressing room, and how valuable it was to have those leadership skills in the building even if he wasn’t starting games. Conte has continued to speak well of Terry since leaving Chelsea, and the feelings of goodwill are reciprocated.
“In that last year under Conte at Chelsea, I was lucky because I had a really good relationship with him,” Terry said during an Instagram Live last year.
“I started the season, and then he changed formation. I got injured, and he had a really honest conversation with me and said we were going to play three at the back. He didn’t think I suited three at the back.”
At Inter in May, Conte masterfully diffused the tension between himself and Lautaro Martinez after the striker had reacted angrily to being substituted by challenging him to a boxing match during training. Conte’s response to Martinez’s initial petulance was typically to berate him, even though Inter had already won the Serie A title and the match against Roma was essentially meaningless.
Above all, Conte’s squads must be a meritocracy. And this will be appreciated by the Spurs squad in the wake of Nuno’s Arnhem decision when it felt as though there was little fringe players could do to get in the team. If a player doesn’t perform in training, they simply won’t be selected. This happened to Michy Batshuayi on a couple of occasions at Chelsea, when Conte decided that he wasn’t following instructions properly and so was replaced by Hazard as a false nine.
Likewise, if Conte feels a player is deserving of criticism, he will deliver it without hesitation — no matter how established the player is. Even Inter’s talisman Lukaku was given a severe dressing-down in front of his team-mates after a substandard performance against Slavia Prague in the Champions League in September 2019.
“I played really badly, and Conte told me I was trash in front of the entire team,” Lukaku told Sky Sports in January.
“He tells you to your face if you’re right or wrong, he said he would substitute me after five minutes if it happened again.
Pirlo is another in the Conte disciple camp, and his autobiography is littered with fulsome praise for his compatriot. “I consider myself fortunate: I know Antonio Conte,” Pirlo said. “When Conte speaks, his words assault you. They crash through the doors of your mind, often quite violently, and settle deep within you. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve found myself saying: ‘Hell, Conte said something spot-on today’.”
Lukaku has spoken in similarly gushing terms. “The mister is a mentor,” he said in September 2020. “He’s like a father who understands me really well. Playing for him is like a dream come true.”
When Conte left Inter at the end of last season, Lukaku posted a heartfelt message on Instagram that included the words: “I will keep your principles for the rest of my career (physical preparation, mental and just the drive to win…) it was a pleasure to play for you! Thank you for all that you did. I owe you a lot.”
Italy’s legendary centre-back Leonardo Bonucci told The Athletic earlier this year that: “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. He changed my career. It’s the mentality he gave me and Juventus too, the football knowledge he passed on.”
Conte’s abrasive management style is not for everyone. He is not exactly warm and friendly to players who are struggling and because he is so dedicated, he can struggle to understand why anyone else would have anything in their life outside of football. He is not the most sympathetic when it comes to personal issues.
And not every player reacts as well as Lukaku to being hung out to dry in front of their team-mates.
“There’s a reason he has not stayed more than a couple of years in a job,” says a source in Italy. “He has such a divisive character and a bad temper, eventually his relationship with the board deteriorates, as well as sometimes with his players.”
Chelsea is a good case study, where the huge excitement and buzz of the first season gave way to a pretty miserable second.
And even in that first season, there was some collateral damage. Mikel John Obi, for instance, is still angry at Conte for the way he was frozen out of the team. Mikel told The Athleticearlier this year that Conte informed him that if he played for Nigeria at the Olympic Games in Rio he would not be part of his plans at Chelsea.
Mikel was not dissuaded and helped his country win a bronze medal in Brazil. Mikel never played for Chelsea again after a decade of service.
“This guy who has just walked in the door for five minutes is telling me I had to choose,” Mikel said. “He was saying, ‘If you do that, you won’t be a part of this team’. I spoke to the club and told them that I wanted to go. The club respected me because of what I had done for them and how long I’d been there. So off I went and I felt punished for that. I came back and I didn’t make the squad. I was never in the squad on match days again.
“The funny thing is, just before the January window was going to start, he came up to me and said, ‘I want a meeting with you’. This was after making me train on my own for months, treating a player who had been at Chelsea for a long time like this!
“When he tried to meet with me he was like, ‘Let’s try and make up, I will need you in the team, let’s squash this, blah, blah, blah!’. I was like, ‘Are you joking?! Are you naffing serious?!’. He knew I wanted out. I stood up and walked out of the room. You can’t disrespect a human being like that.”
But during that first season, Mikel was generally a lone dissenting voice. Even Diego Costa, who clashed with Conte during training and was dropped for a game against Leicester in January 2017, generally got on well with the head coach. That confrontation came after Chinese side Tianjin Quanjian had made a huge bid to sign Costa, who it was known wanted to leave England. Sources at the time claimed Conte shouted “go to China” during the heated argument.
It was more evidence of Conte not taking a backward step no matter who he was dealing with. After all, Costa was the Premier League’s leading goalscorer at the time with 14 goals and was known for his combustible personality. But Conte had no issue with confronting and then dropping one of the team’s most important players.
Costa ultimately left Chelsea for Atletico Madrid eight months later after a drawn-out transfer saga that included Conte texting the striker to say he wasn’t in his plans. Much was made of that message, but those close to the situation say that, although Chelsea were annoyed with Conte for weakening their bargaining position, there was an almost unanimous agreement that it was in everyone’s interests for Costa to leave.
Chelsea’s hierarchy were less impressed with Conte’s frequent complaints to the board about that summer’s transfers (a window that saw Bakayoko, Drinkwater, Alvaro Morata, Antonio Rudiger, Davide Zappacosta, Ethan Ampadu and Willy Caballero brought in). The tension was increasingly apparent and filtered down to the players and contributed to what was a pretty disastrous 2017-18 season.
Conte was angry at Chelsea missing out on signing Lukaku from Everton and then seeing Spurs pip them to the signing of Llorente. His mood wasn’t helped when the indications from Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Virgil van Dijk’s camps were that both were minded to join Liverpool — partly because they found Klopp more likeable and upbeat but also because they were also more enthused by his style of play and had concerns over how long Conte would be at Chelsea.
The season that followed should act as a warning for him and the Tottenham players of the downside of his volatility. The arguments with the board over transfers was one thing, but it was the conflicts with the players that really derailed Chelsea’s season.
Tensions first spilt over following an embarrassing 3-0 defeat at Roma in October when Conte spotted Kenedy yawning during a team meeting. Furious, he unleashed a tirade at the 21-year-old for his lack of professionalism, which prompted David Luiz to intervene and defend his compatriot. David Luiz barely played again that season and was pretty much completely bombed out having been a key player in the title-winning campaign. His compatriot Willian was similarly peripheral in 2017-18, leading to the midfielder covering Conte’s face with emojis when he posted a picture on Instagram of the team celebrating their FA Cup win at the end of the season.
Willian later unconvincingly blamed the image on his young daughter playing with his phone.
Conte irked his players in other ways that season. Some were frustrated by him asking them to stay in a hotel together the night before games when they would rather have been at home.
Others felt they were being worked too hard, and that Conte wasn’t making allowances for the fact that, unlike the previous season, they were having to juggle domestic with European commitments. This came to a head after a humiliating 4-1 defeat at Watford in February 2018 when the players made clear their frustrations and requested extra time off. Conte agreed and gave them three days to recover after admitting they had played “with fear” at Vicarage Road.
He also denied that he had been demanding too much of his players and suggested they had actually been “working a lot less”.
As the season concluded, many at Chelsea had completely lost patience with Conte. They felt he was permanently seeking trouble and conflict, and by the end, he had rubbed most of the players up the wrong way. It was a shame, given how strong the bond had been the previous season.
After Chelsea ended their season by winning the FA Cup, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois explained how draining it had been for the players having so much uncertainty surrounding their head coach’s future amid his frequent disagreements with the club’s board.
“I don’t think it is a question for the players (whether it was a distraction), it is a question for the board,” he said. “I think we trained very well with him.
“You can not have him one more year and then not know if he will go away the next year or not. You need some clarity so that everyone knows what way the club is going forward. It is what we lacked this season. There were always rumours about everyone and it is not easy then to defend the title, with all the criticism.
“There was a negative spirit sometimes and then it’s hard to raise yourselves.”
Conte wasn’t sacked until after the start of pre-season in July 2018, much to the shock of some of the Chelsea players who were at the World Cup and couldn’t believe he was still in the job.
Conte’s time at Chelsea should not be dominated by memories of how it ended — there were many extreme highs in there as well and it ranks as an exception in his career given how devoted other dressing rooms were to him. When Conte resigned from Juventus, Chiellini said: “Me, Leo (Bonucci) Andrea (Pirlo) and Gigi (Buffon) would not have let him go.” When his underdog Italy side lost the Euro 2016 quarter-final on penalties, the entire team broke down in tears.
Barely able to control the waves of emotion running through him, Andrea Barzagli wept as he said: “In the future, no one will remember this national team that gave its all. There was a desire carry on together.” The next day, Conte cried too and confessed that if he had not already agreed to join Chelsea he would have stayed, so tight was the bond he struck with his players.
Inter fought to keep him and were successful at the end of his first season after a crisis summit at Villa Bellini. Once he delivered the league title, an achievement chief executive Marotta called a “work of art”, the board tried to retain him again. Conte was Inter’s “top player” who was worth every penny. “It’s better to sign one player less in the transfer market and appoint a great coach.”
Inter desperately wanted him to lead the club’s title defence and be the manager who earned them a second star to commemorate a 20th scudetto. But Conte was not for turning and agreed a severance package. “These last two years have been hard and tiring but we won and all the hard work paid off,” Inter goalkeeper Samir Handanovic said. “You were hard but fair. I learned from you as a player and as a captain. You were the one who always raised the bar and put the right pressure on everyone. You were the one who made the difference. Thank you, coach, and thank you to your staff, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work and win with you.
Nevertheless, it’s understandable why some of the Spurs squad might have felt a touch nervous hearing from their Chelsea colleagues about the Italian’s time at Stamford Bridge.
It all ties back to the fact that Conte’s high-energy approach is not for everyone — at Chelsea and wherever he’s been. Some players tire of hearing the same phrases, like “Be ready to suffer”, ad nauseam. Others find that, even though they know he’s a great coach, they tire of his demands eventually.
“Not everyone can handle the intensity, himself included,” Chiellini wrote in his autobiography. “He never switches off and sometimes he needs to. He can get tired too.
“In the beginning with Antonio you give your all, but staying with it on a mental level is hard, harder than from a physical perspective because Conte trains you so hard that in the end, you become a war machine.
“Everything with Antonio is always pushed to the max: if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t get on with him.”
Ultimately, Conte’s success at Tottenham will come down to how much his players are willing to sacrifice themselves and commit to the head coach’s methods. Do this and the rewards are substantial.
That’s what it’s like playing for Antonio Conte
Blimey, that WAS a read ..
I got through War & Peace quicker!!
Loving the sound of Tony Conte though!!!
EXACTLY what we need!!
We have bad experiences with the pointing sort in recent history
And thats why hes dead now!
Huh? He won gold medals in his 30s which is extremely rare for swimmers.
Great stuffHaha.
Bye bye Dele
Pray for Ndombele
*nabbed from the other place.
‘You either improve or you die’ – What it’s like to play for Antonio Conte
Players who worked under Conte explain what it's like to play for the brilliant and sometimes maddening new Spurs manager
After the Tottenham squad had spoken to their colleagues at Chelseaabout what to expect from Antonio Conte as head coach, some felt a degree of trepidation.
This is perhaps understandable. After all, they would have been told about the ferocious work ethic, the instructions during training that are so relentless he has to constantly suck throat lozenges and the volcanic temper that can erupt when things are not going his way.
Most who have worked with Conte have a story or two to tell. Andrea Pirlo remembers his habit for chucking bottles across the dressing room (he regretted his station in the corner of the room that was invariably right in the line of fire), Eden Hazard joked that he was blessed to be a winger as it meant having Conte screaming in his ear for only half the game, and Giorgio Chiellini said players were “not tired — dead” after his training sessions.
Tiemoue Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Sometimes I get the feeling I have to make even more effort in training than I do in a match. That’s the level of intensity he demands every day in what we do.”
But the Spurs players were also told that if you embrace Conte’s methods then the rewards are huge. Which is why those such as Harry Kane, desperate to finally win some silverware, are so enthused by Conte’s appointment.
Not that his frenzied, sometimes maniacal energy is for everyone. There will be some at Spurs who will go the way of many of his players at Chelsea. Burnt out by and fed up with Conte’s uncompromising demands and constant appetite for conflict. So much so that it is believed several players would have pushed for a move in 2018 if Conte hadn’t been sacked.
“He is so demanding, it’s almost psychopathic,” says one source in Italy. “He seems crazy at times.”
After speaking to those at Chelsea and getting a sense of how Conte operates, the Spurs players should have taken a deep breath and prepared themselves. For the meticulous physical and tactical training, the dietary requirements that will see goji berries and shirataki “miracle” noodles added to their diets and the half-time rages when things are not going to plan.
But they will also be working with a head coach who likes to foster a team spirit and camaraderie, and demands that his squad become a tight-knit group.
This is what it’s like to play for Antonio Conte…
Conte’s work ethic is legendary, and he expects similar from his players. In his first press conference at Chelsea, he used the word “work”, or one of its derivatives, 32 times in a little under an hour, including one response where he insisted he was “a worker who likes to work”.
After news of his move to Tottenham began to circulate earlier this week, social media was abuzz with quotes of his celebrating the value of work. One of the most famous comes from an interview with Thierry Henry while at Chelsea: “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.”
Tottenham’s players, if they embrace Conte’s work ethic, will be imbued with a similar dedication. “He never stops working,” Hazard told the Guardian in 2016, with Chelsea en route to the title. “Whether we win or lose, it doesn’t matter. He works, so we work. Work, work, work. And we all know that in football, and all sports really, you have to work so hard to reach the summit.”
The point is that working with Conte comes down to how much sacrifice players are willing to put in to reach their goals. As Hazard put it: “If someone had told us before the season that if we did everything Conte asked of us we’d have a chance to become champions again, we’d all have signed up.”
Spurs’ players will, first of all, see Conte’s indefatigability during training sessions, which are physically and mentally extremely demanding. Many of the Tottenham squad felt physically undercooked playing for Jose Mourinho last season, and after a brief uptick following Nuno Espirito Santo’s arrival in the summer, have remained less fit than most of their rivals.
They can expect big changes under Conte, who often talks about how his players will have “to suffer”. Training under him is intense — and will be even more so with the confirmation that Giampiero Ventrone, whose nickname is The Marine, will be one of Conte’s fitness coaches. Ventrone was on Marcelo Lippi’s staff at Juventus when Conte was a player, and helped push the players to three straight Champions League finals between 1996 and 1998. Spurs players should prepare to be beasted on his watch.
Away from Ventrone, there are lots of sprinting and physical exercises under Conte. He does not put so much of an emphasis on gym work — he wants his players to be lean so his players can run more, rather than bulk up. He will try to slim them down and get them to peak fitness, similar to how Mauricio Pochettino used to.
“When he arrived at Juventus in 2011, there was some scepticism,” says a source in Italy. “But he made an instant impression. The players said they nearly threw up in his first sessions because they were so much harder than his predecessors.”
One of those players was the legendary defender Chiellini, who said in 2018: “It is not only in the match with Conte. It is all day, every training session. He is like a police sergeant.
“When you finish training, you are dead. Not tired — dead. You can do it only because you believe in what he does. We had 40 days in France and it was like entering another world. You are 100 per cent with him. He creates an atmosphere, everyone gives energy to each other. For sure he is one of the very best.”
The former Spurs striker Fernando Llorente, who also worked under Conte at Juve, said in 2013: “The physical work is outrageous. We did very special strength work with machines I knew nothing about, explosive exercises. The workouts are more demanding than what I have done in my career so far. It has taken me a lot to adapt to the workload. It’s brutal.”
Fabio Quagliarella, his striker at Juventus, described Conte’s training sessions as “back-breaking”. Bakayoko said soon after joining Chelsea that: “Here we run a lot. I’ve run an awful lot since I arrived.”
Pre-season is massively important to Conte, and it’s a shame that Spurs have missed out on that this year. During Conte’s first pre-season at Chelsea, the players were pushed extremely hard and felt as though they had never been drilled like that before. Working in intense American heat, the players were left feeling exhausted — but the benefits were obvious and so they quickly bought into what Conte was asking of them.
They felt fitter than pretty much every team they played and scored several late goals. In Conte’s first eight Premier League matches, Chelsea scored six goals in the 80th minute or later. Hazard especially benefited, developing far greater muscle definition and looking as fit as he ever had. How Conte turned around Hazard’s fortunes after a difficult season the previous year bodes well for the Italian working with Kane, who has not looked at his sharpest this season.
As with most areas of Conte’s management, his punishing regimens are not for everyone. Take Danny Drinkwater, who Conte pushed hard to sign in 2017. In his first game since joining, Chelsea played against Drinkwater’s former club Leicester City, but Conte was informed that the midfielder was way short of match fitness after an injury from the previous campaign had disrupted pre-season. Conte’s response was to double down straight away with intense sessions to try and get Drinkwater into shape.
It backfired. Drinkwater picked up a calf injury within days that ruled him out for six weeks, which turned out to be the first of several fitness issues that season. Drinkwater’s Chelsea career has failed for all sorts of reasons, but there was a feeling that his first season was badly mishandled.
To get his players into the best physical shape, Conte also places a big emphasis on diet and nutrition. He likes to hang up bits of paper around the training ground, and often this will include dietary instructions. Goji berries, which have long been used in medicine to support immunity to illness and infection, and Rhodiola rosea supplements, which studies show can reduce physical and mental fatigue, are favourites of his.
Journalist and author Alessandro Alciato explained in his 2015 book Metodo Conte how Conte would set up tables at breakfast during his time as Italy manager with individual food groups (one for protein, one for fats, one for carbohydrates, and another for tea, cappuccino and fruit juice).
The players had never experienced anything like this. Then they would look up to see those bits of paper Conte likes to leave around. Messages included mantras like: “Diet can make the difference between victory and defeat” and “FUNDAMENTAL: Start the day with a good breakfast. If breakfast is inadequate, your glycogen reserves may run close to empty.”
At Chelsea, Conte was just as hands-on, and completely changed the players’ diet — introducing more protein through chicken and salads, and less carb-heavy foods like pasta. He did compromise on this, though, when some of his players said they felt their energy levels weren’t high enough going into games. Conte also banned his players from having pizza, fizzy drinks, tomato ketchup and brown sauce. Black rice and low-calorie shirataki noodles were introduced instead, and the expectation at Spurs is that the diet will be tightly controlled and move back towards how it was under Pochettino.
To ensure he understands how his methods are working, Conte is big on screenings and physical assessments of players to gauge their body fat and weight. He does this alongside his team of nutritionists and, if needs be, puts players on strict diets.
This was the case with Romelu Lukaku after he joined Inter. Conte thought Lukaku was too heavy for what he was demanding of him, and promptly oversaw a programme that led to the striker losing three kilograms. Lukaku’s prescribed diet included lean meats like chicken and turkey and lots of vegetables, with fried food and mozzarella off-limits. Carlos Tevez, who puts Conte at the same level as Sir Alex Ferguson, was given a plan to help him lose six kilograms when he returned from pre-season overweight in 2013.
We don’t know if any of the Spurs players will be subjected to a similar regimen, but what tends to happen is that most of Conte’s players shed weight because of the general dietary rules and intensity of the training sessions. Again, this is more Pochettino and less Mourinho, who gave the Tottenham players more leeway when it came to what they ate.
Conte is far more of a control freak in this regard. At Chelsea, he even asked the owner of the Italian restaurant Gola, which he and some players frequented, to send him pictures of what his players were eating.
No dietary detail is too small for Conte, and if he approaches his new job like he has previous ones, then the Spurs players can expect their head coach to compile lists with scores for their weight, fat percentage and how they have performed in physical tests. These are marked green for good, yellow for OK and red for bad. Anyone scoring badly can expect pretty blunt advice about what they need to do to improve.
Ensuring his players are in peak physical condition is critical to Conte, but so is ensuring his tactical messages are received crystal clear. The idea is that through constant repetitions, they become automatic.
Conte’s preferred formations are a 3-4-3 (as seen at Chelsea) or a 3-5-2. But he started his career using a 4-2-4 based on the ideas of Eugenio Fascetti, whose Lecce side of the 1980s employed the system. In possession, Conte’s teams still tend to move into a 4-2-4 system, with the wing-backs moved high, the outside centre-backs pushed wide and deep like full-backs, and the defensive midfielder dropping in alongside the central centre-back.
To be able to successfully play Conte’s system requires painstaking preparation on the training ground. Conte is known for constantly stopping sessions to get his message across. At Chelsea, training was often very stop-start as Conte would remind players if they had wandered even marginally out of position. He’s hands-on and if players are not in the right place he will come and physically drag them to where he thinks they should be. Some of his players have felt as though he’s playing a PlayStation, getting them to move precisely where he tells them. For others, it has seemed as though they’re being brainwashed through constant repetitions.
The general message from the more experienced players at Chelsea at the time was that he was the “most demanding” of the club’s recent managers.
Conte’s frequent exhortations at Cobham meant he would be constantly sucking Ambrosoli al Miele lozenges in training and on the touchline because his throat was always raw from all the shouting. Conte already sounded a touch hoarse as he addressed the media on Thursday night following the Europa Conference League win over Vitesse. “My wife tells me my voice is more attractive like this, more sensual,” he said in November 2016 with his Chelsea team in the middle of a 13-match winning run. “But I prefer to have my normal voice.”
Conte is similarly vocal during matches, prompting that Hazard joke about being relieved to only have to listen to his head coach for half of the match. “There are times he’s screaming at you to do this or that, telling you to concentrate and work, and you’re thinking: ‘Hold on, we’re 4-0 up with five minutes to play. Easy, boss. Calm down…’. But that’s the way he is,” Hazard said a few months into Conte’s Chelsea reign.
As well as receiving these constant instructions on the pitch, Chelsea’s players did far more tactical work than they had been used to previously. At times, they wanted to have more fun, do more ball work. But that sensational winning run convinced everyone of the merits of Conte’s methods. “Everyone feels one step ahead of where we were last year (under Mourinho),” Nemanja Matic said in November 2016.
One of Conte’s favourite ways to imprint his tactical messages is to play an 11-v-11 game and map out their movements. Another exercise he regularly employs is setting up an 11-v-0 scenario and making the players repeat the same moves for 45 minutes — “Until he sees that they’re working and that we’re starting to feel sick,” Pirlo wrote in his 2014 autobiography. “And that’s why we still win when it’s 11 against 11.”
Some Spurs players will be given individual drills to improve on a particular area of their game — as was the case for Lukaku when Conte took over at Inter. In the Belgian’s case, Conte would make Lukaku stand with his back to goal and ask the rugged 6ft 4in centre-back Andrea Ranocchia to go hard at him again and again. Every time Lukaku lost the ball, they would start the drill again. This went on for three months — constant repetitions until Conte was satisfied Lukaku was at the level he needed to be.
Conte is willing to compromise on some things and at Chelsea, he reduced the video sessions he made his players sit through. In Italy, it’s typical for video sessions to last 15-30 minutes, but with the national team, Conte’s sessions sometimes lasted an hour. He quickly realised at Chelsea that his players were finding the sessions too much and so he scaled them right back.
Conte will do whatever it takes to get across his tactical message — sometimes running through movements with his players with the large Subbuteo board he keeps in his office.
For someone with such precise ideas about pretty much every aspect of his coaching, it’s unsurprising that Conte is known to erupt when things don’t go to plan.
He has a fierce temper and it is standard practice for him to chuck around any loose objects during half-time. Pirlo described his corner of the dressing room as “the most dangerous spot in the whole of Turin… especially at half-time”.
“He’s never happy,” Pirlo said of a man he described as “like a bear with a sore head”. “There’s always some small detail that’s not quite right in his mind. He can see in advance what might happen in the 45 minutes to come.
“He’s obsessed over every last detail, exploiting it to his advantage. He is allergic to error.
“Even when we’re winning, Conte comes in and hurls against the wall, and thus my little corner, anything he can lay his hands on… almost always full bottles of water. Fizzy water. Very fizzy water.”
Chiellini wrote in his autobiography: “Conte’s natural element is fire: I’ve lost count of the whiteboards that have been thrown around the dressing room at half-time. No one ever got hit by one in the heat of the moment. But if he finds an object in his path, he’ll throw it, kick it, he goes berserk. Then, when the game’s over, he lets the situation cool off, as almost everyone does.”
But Conte tends not to say much after matches, especially if his team have lost.
Shortly before he left Juventus, there was a famous incident before the team’s final game of the season against Cagliari. Juventus were on 99 points and long since crowned champions, but Conte was obsessed with becoming the first team to break the 100-point barrier in Serie A.
Conte was leading a video analysis session on the eve of the game when he was interrupted by the club captain Gianluigi Buffon. Along with the club’s CEO Giuseppe Marotta, Buffon entered the room and raised the topic of bonuses owed to the squad for winning the title.
Conte lost it, screaming at Buffon: “I’ve had it with the lot of you. Get out! I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Buffon tried to respond, but Conte shot back: “Shut up. You’re the captain, Gigi, and you don’t understand a fucking thing.” Conte is then said to have muttered “shame on you” as the squad left the room.
Interviewed for the book Metodo Conte, a philosophical Buffon said he bore no ill will towards Conte for the incident. He suggested it was a motivational tactic to keep Juve’s focus on the 100-point mark, and added: “It’s the kind of thing I might have done. If it served his purpose, it’s fine by me.”
Juventus ended up beating Cagliari 3-0 to finish with 102 points.
At Chelsea, the game in which Conte is said to have been most animated was the famous defeat away at Woolwich that prompted the switch to a back three and that 13-match winning streak. Chelsea were 3-0 down at half-time, and such was Conte’s ranting and raving there were genuine fears he might resign there and then. The club’s owner Roman Abramovich was at the training ground for three days after that defeat, underlining how seismic it felt at the time.
Conte admits he was extremely angry after that game and that it was a difficult defeat to accept. He channelled that fury brilliantly to turn his team around, but a variant of that rage is present after most defeats.
Even pre-season losses can infuriate Conte. One journalist remembers being promised a one-on-one interview with him after a pre-season game against Inter in Singapore in the summer of 2017. Chelsea lost the game 2-1 and it was clear that Conte was furious, struggling to say anything positive and unable to shake off the anger at losing the game. The interview was eventually cut short with barely a grunt of acknowledgement as Conte walked angrily onto the bus to leave the stadium.
But alongside Conte’s red mists is the rousing rhetoric. The Tottenham squad have already had an insight into his charisma after he gave a stirring speech upon meeting the players on Tuesday afternoon. Conte told the group he would help them win again, but that they had to give absolutely everything for him, and that he would always be there for them as long as they gave their all in training and matches.
For close observers of Conte’s career, it brought back memories of his rallying cry upon taking over at Juventus a decade ago. “He got at our pride,” midfielder Claudio Marchisio said last year. “He told us: ‘You’ve been seventh for two years. You’ve been awful for two years. From now, on you either get your head down or get out’. He pushed us to earn it on the pitch.“
Pirlo recalls Conte telling the players: “Every single person here has performed badly over the last few seasons. We need to do whatever it takes to pull ourselves up and start being Juve again. Turning around this ship is not a polite request, it’s an order, a moral obligation. You guys need to do only one thing and it’s pretty simple: follow me.”
In his next job as Italy head coach, Conte gathered the players in his first squad and said: “I will call up only those players who deserve it. Remember that I don’t need to explain myself to anyone.”
Before even taking over at Chelsea, Conte met with Hazard and explained how he would help him rediscover his best form. “He spoke to me about the difficult season I’d had, and what he expected of me,” Hazard said in 2016. “I’d not scored many goals last season, but he saw me as a goalscorer. He spoke a bit about the system he wanted to play, the 3-4-3 or even one with two attackers up front. His passion and enthusiasm were obvious even then.”
Camaraderie and team spirit are important to Conte. When he met with the Spurs players on Tuesday, he pushed the importance of togetherness and said they had to enjoy themselves again after a rough start to the season.
There’s hope among the Spurs squad that Conte’s arrival will see a return to the Pochettino days when team meals and other bonding activities helped to maintain a good team spirit. Monthly group meals were a staple of Conte’s time at Chelsea, especially in his first season when they weren’t in Europe, and it was something he replicated at Inter. Conte also ingratiated himself with the players at Stamford Bridge by singing his initiation song with gusto, sending them into hysterics. Few who were there can forget the sight of Conte standing on a chair in the middle of a room in Minneapolis belting out the Neapolitan favourite Malafemmena.
Conte did not want his Chelsea players to be completely consumed by their work, so would allow them a beer after a game — but there were rules. “One. Not a lot. And, after you finish the game, you must drink it quickly, not an hour after the end.” At Stamford Bridge, Conte would also buy Prosecco for his staff at Christmas and take the press pack out for an occasional pint at the Old Plough, close to the club’s training ground.
Creating a good atmosphere where the whole squad feels like a family is very important to Conte. And now that his English is far better than when he joined Chelsea five years ago, it should be easier for him to get across these messages. Communication matters to Conte — at Inter, Lukaku spoke Italian upon joining and was accepted more quickly by the group. Christian Eriksen, by contrast, did not and it took him longer to settle.
Conte’s desire for the whole group to stay as one can sometimes be taken to extremes. At Juventus, for instance, midfielder Arturo Vidal was notorious for going out and partying, but Conte thought it would be better to punish the whole team, not just Vidal. He would tell the team that everyone would be put through an especially physical session, with lots of running, expecting Vidal to be revealed as being a little worse for wear. “The problem is Arturo is made out of iron,” Marchisio said in 2020. “A few kilometres into the run we were all gasping for breath and begging for mercy while he kept running at the front of the group, chatting as if he were at the bar.”
Those runs were a bonding experience for the squad and did nothing to harm the relationship between Vidal and Conte, who, as hard-running central midfielders, were kindred spirits on the pitch. “If I had to go to war, I’d take Conte with me,” Vidal once said and Conte has said the same about the Chilean.
Man-management has been an issue with this Tottenham squad, most recently with Nuno creating the sense of a two-tiered group by leaving behind his preferred Premier League team for the Europa Conference trip to Vitesse.
Generally — though not always, as we’ll see later — man-management has been a skill of Conte’s. At Chelsea, he was able to win over the wantaway Matic in 2016 and get the best out of him. Conte is known more for the use of stick than carrot but on this occasion went for the latter and, recognising that Matic felt unappreciated and unwanted, said in July 2016: “Matic is a very important player for my idea of football.
“He knows this and I’m delighted by his attitude and behaviour. I know with work he can become a fantastic midfielder, one of the best in the world. He is not for sale.”
Matic ended up leaving the following summer, but extracting one last season was an important factor in Chelsea winning the title.
Conte’s greatest diplomatic feat was managing the transition of John Terry from “captain, leader, legend” to warming the bench. This could have been a very awkward situation, and one only has to remember how toxic things became at Chelsea when Rafael Benitez dropped Terry in 2013. But Conte was able to keep Terry onside by frequently stressing how important he was in the dressing room, and how valuable it was to have those leadership skills in the building even if he wasn’t starting games. Conte has continued to speak well of Terry since leaving Chelsea, and the feelings of goodwill are reciprocated.
“In that last year under Conte at Chelsea, I was lucky because I had a really good relationship with him,” Terry said during an Instagram Live last year.
“I started the season, and then he changed formation. I got injured, and he had a really honest conversation with me and said we were going to play three at the back. He didn’t think I suited three at the back.”
At Inter in May, Conte masterfully diffused the tension between himself and Lautaro Martinez after the striker had reacted angrily to being substituted by challenging him to a boxing match during training. Conte’s response to Martinez’s initial petulance was typically to berate him, even though Inter had already won the Serie A title and the match against Roma was essentially meaningless.
Above all, Conte’s squads must be a meritocracy. And this will be appreciated by the Spurs squad in the wake of Nuno’s Arnhem decision when it felt as though there was little fringe players could do to get in the team. If a player doesn’t perform in training, they simply won’t be selected. This happened to Michy Batshuayi on a couple of occasions at Chelsea, when Conte decided that he wasn’t following instructions properly and so was replaced by Hazard as a false nine.
Likewise, if Conte feels a player is deserving of criticism, he will deliver it without hesitation — no matter how established the player is. Even Inter’s talisman Lukaku was given a severe dressing-down in front of his team-mates after a substandard performance against Slavia Prague in the Champions League in September 2019.
“I played really badly, and Conte told me I was trash in front of the entire team,” Lukaku told Sky Sports in January.
“He tells you to your face if you’re right or wrong, he said he would substitute me after five minutes if it happened again.
Pirlo is another in the Conte disciple camp, and his autobiography is littered with fulsome praise for his compatriot. “I consider myself fortunate: I know Antonio Conte,” Pirlo said. “When Conte speaks, his words assault you. They crash through the doors of your mind, often quite violently, and settle deep within you. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve found myself saying: ‘Hell, Conte said something spot-on today’.”
Lukaku has spoken in similarly gushing terms. “The mister is a mentor,” he said in September 2020. “He’s like a father who understands me really well. Playing for him is like a dream come true.”
When Conte left Inter at the end of last season, Lukaku posted a heartfelt message on Instagram that included the words: “I will keep your principles for the rest of my career (physical preparation, mental and just the drive to win…) it was a pleasure to play for you! Thank you for all that you did. I owe you a lot.”
Italy’s legendary centre-back Leonardo Bonucci told The Athletic earlier this year that: “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. He changed my career. It’s the mentality he gave me and Juventus too, the football knowledge he passed on.”
Conte’s abrasive management style is not for everyone. He is not exactly warm and friendly to players who are struggling and because he is so dedicated, he can struggle to understand why anyone else would have anything in their life outside of football. He is not the most sympathetic when it comes to personal issues.
And not every player reacts as well as Lukaku to being hung out to dry in front of their team-mates.
“There’s a reason he has not stayed more than a couple of years in a job,” says a source in Italy. “He has such a divisive character and a bad temper, eventually his relationship with the board deteriorates, as well as sometimes with his players.”
Chelsea is a good case study, where the huge excitement and buzz of the first season gave way to a pretty miserable second.
And even in that first season, there was some collateral damage. Mikel John Obi, for instance, is still angry at Conte for the way he was frozen out of the team. Mikel told The Athleticearlier this year that Conte informed him that if he played for Nigeria at the Olympic Games in Rio he would not be part of his plans at Chelsea.
Mikel was not dissuaded and helped his country win a bronze medal in Brazil. Mikel never played for Chelsea again after a decade of service.
“This guy who has just walked in the door for five minutes is telling me I had to choose,” Mikel said. “He was saying, ‘If you do that, you won’t be a part of this team’. I spoke to the club and told them that I wanted to go. The club respected me because of what I had done for them and how long I’d been there. So off I went and I felt punished for that. I came back and I didn’t make the squad. I was never in the squad on match days again.
“The funny thing is, just before the January window was going to start, he came up to me and said, ‘I want a meeting with you’. This was after making me train on my own for months, treating a player who had been at Chelsea for a long time like this!
“When he tried to meet with me he was like, ‘Let’s try and make up, I will need you in the team, let’s squash this, blah, blah, blah!’. I was like, ‘Are you joking?! Are you naffing serious?!’. He knew I wanted out. I stood up and walked out of the room. You can’t disrespect a human being like that.”
But during that first season, Mikel was generally a lone dissenting voice. Even Diego Costa, who clashed with Conte during training and was dropped for a game against Leicester in January 2017, generally got on well with the head coach. That confrontation came after Chinese side Tianjin Quanjian had made a huge bid to sign Costa, who it was known wanted to leave England. Sources at the time claimed Conte shouted “go to China” during the heated argument.
It was more evidence of Conte not taking a backward step no matter who he was dealing with. After all, Costa was the Premier League’s leading goalscorer at the time with 14 goals and was known for his combustible personality. But Conte had no issue with confronting and then dropping one of the team’s most important players.
Costa ultimately left Chelsea for Atletico Madrid eight months later after a drawn-out transfer saga that included Conte texting the striker to say he wasn’t in his plans. Much was made of that message, but those close to the situation say that, although Chelsea were annoyed with Conte for weakening their bargaining position, there was an almost unanimous agreement that it was in everyone’s interests for Costa to leave.
Chelsea’s hierarchy were less impressed with Conte’s frequent complaints to the board about that summer’s transfers (a window that saw Bakayoko, Drinkwater, Alvaro Morata, Antonio Rudiger, Davide Zappacosta, Ethan Ampadu and Willy Caballero brought in). The tension was increasingly apparent and filtered down to the players and contributed to what was a pretty disastrous 2017-18 season.
Conte was angry at Chelsea missing out on signing Lukaku from Everton and then seeing Spurs pip them to the signing of Llorente. His mood wasn’t helped when the indications from Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Virgil van Dijk’s camps were that both were minded to join Liverpool — partly because they found Klopp more likeable and upbeat but also because they were also more enthused by his style of play and had concerns over how long Conte would be at Chelsea.
The season that followed should act as a warning for him and the Tottenham players of the downside of his volatility. The arguments with the board over transfers was one thing, but it was the conflicts with the players that really derailed Chelsea’s season.
Tensions first spilt over following an embarrassing 3-0 defeat at Roma in October when Conte spotted Kenedy yawning during a team meeting. Furious, he unleashed a tirade at the 21-year-old for his lack of professionalism, which prompted David Luiz to intervene and defend his compatriot. David Luiz barely played again that season and was pretty much completely bombed out having been a key player in the title-winning campaign. His compatriot Willian was similarly peripheral in 2017-18, leading to the midfielder covering Conte’s face with emojis when he posted a picture on Instagram of the team celebrating their FA Cup win at the end of the season.
Willian later unconvincingly blamed the image on his young daughter playing with his phone.
Conte irked his players in other ways that season. Some were frustrated by him asking them to stay in a hotel together the night before games when they would rather have been at home.
Others felt they were being worked too hard, and that Conte wasn’t making allowances for the fact that, unlike the previous season, they were having to juggle domestic with European commitments. This came to a head after a humiliating 4-1 defeat at Watford in February 2018 when the players made clear their frustrations and requested extra time off. Conte agreed and gave them three days to recover after admitting they had played “with fear” at Vicarage Road.
He also denied that he had been demanding too much of his players and suggested they had actually been “working a lot less”.
As the season concluded, many at Chelsea had completely lost patience with Conte. They felt he was permanently seeking trouble and conflict, and by the end, he had rubbed most of the players up the wrong way. It was a shame, given how strong the bond had been the previous season.
After Chelsea ended their season by winning the FA Cup, goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois explained how draining it had been for the players having so much uncertainty surrounding their head coach’s future amid his frequent disagreements with the club’s board.
“I don’t think it is a question for the players (whether it was a distraction), it is a question for the board,” he said. “I think we trained very well with him.
“You can not have him one more year and then not know if he will go away the next year or not. You need some clarity so that everyone knows what way the club is going forward. It is what we lacked this season. There were always rumours about everyone and it is not easy then to defend the title, with all the criticism.
“There was a negative spirit sometimes and then it’s hard to raise yourselves.”
Conte wasn’t sacked until after the start of pre-season in July 2018, much to the shock of some of the Chelsea players who were at the World Cup and couldn’t believe he was still in the job.
Conte’s time at Chelsea should not be dominated by memories of how it ended — there were many extreme highs in there as well and it ranks as an exception in his career given how devoted other dressing rooms were to him. When Conte resigned from Juventus, Chiellini said: “Me, Leo (Bonucci) Andrea (Pirlo) and Gigi (Buffon) would not have let him go.” When his underdog Italy side lost the Euro 2016 quarter-final on penalties, the entire team broke down in tears.
Barely able to control the waves of emotion running through him, Andrea Barzagli wept as he said: “In the future, no one will remember this national team that gave its all. There was a desire carry on together.” The next day, Conte cried too and confessed that if he had not already agreed to join Chelsea he would have stayed, so tight was the bond he struck with his players.
Inter fought to keep him and were successful at the end of his first season after a crisis summit at Villa Bellini. Once he delivered the league title, an achievement chief executive Marotta called a “work of art”, the board tried to retain him again. Conte was Inter’s “top player” who was worth every penny. “It’s better to sign one player less in the transfer market and appoint a great coach.”
Inter desperately wanted him to lead the club’s title defence and be the manager who earned them a second star to commemorate a 20th scudetto. But Conte was not for turning and agreed a severance package. “These last two years have been hard and tiring but we won and all the hard work paid off,” Inter goalkeeper Samir Handanovic said. “You were hard but fair. I learned from you as a player and as a captain. You were the one who always raised the bar and put the right pressure on everyone. You were the one who made the difference. Thank you, coach, and thank you to your staff, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work and win with you.
Nevertheless, it’s understandable why some of the Spurs squad might have felt a touch nervous hearing from their Chelsea colleagues about the Italian’s time at Stamford Bridge.
It all ties back to the fact that Conte’s high-energy approach is not for everyone — at Chelsea and wherever he’s been. Some players tire of hearing the same phrases, like “Be ready to suffer”, ad nauseam. Others find that, even though they know he’s a great coach, they tire of his demands eventually.
“Not everyone can handle the intensity, himself included,” Chiellini wrote in his autobiography. “He never switches off and sometimes he needs to. He can get tired too.
“In the beginning with Antonio you give your all, but staying with it on a mental level is hard, harder than from a physical perspective because Conte trains you so hard that in the end, you become a war machine.
“Everything with Antonio is always pushed to the max: if you’re not passionate about it, you won’t get on with him.”
Ultimately, Conte’s success at Tottenham will come down to how much his players are willing to sacrifice themselves and commit to the head coach’s methods. Do this and the rewards are substantial.
That’s what it’s like playing for Antonio Conte
was a joke, because apparently all that he was eating was so bad.
Gollini
Sanchez Dier Davies
Doherty Dele Winks Celso Sessegnon
Kane Son
All hail Lord Conte
Sanchez Dier Davies
Doherty Dele Winks Celso Sessegnon
Kane Son
All hail Lord Conte
By being unhealthy, why would you want to start the worst years of your life at 50 instead of 75?
And why would the one hour a day you're eating be more important than the other 23 when you're not? I'd rather feel good 95% of the time and suffer taste wise the other 5%, than the other way around.