Rudi Garcia is the new manager of Italian champions Napoli

Napoli, the main thing, perhaps, is the opening of the club season in European football, quickly found a replacement for coach Luciano Spalletti, who returned him the title of Italian champion, which the team had not won for 33 years. The new mentor of the Neapolitans was the French specialist Rudy Garcia, who had previously worked in Italy with Roma, and in recent months led An-Nasr from Saudi Arabia. It was for him that he played, having escaped from Manchester United in the winter, Cristiano Ronaldo. True, even with his help, An-Nasr failed to get the gold of the championship.

Napoli President Aurelio De Laurentiis has announced that Rudi Garcia has been appointed head coach of the club. Garcia himself, commenting on the appointment on Twitter, said that he was “more motivated and ambitious than ever.” Thus, the Neapolitans quite quickly found a replacement for one of the undisputed heroes of this season. We are talking about the club’s previous coach Luciano Spalletti, under whom he made a colossal breakthrough. Showing extremely bright football, Napoli was able to win the Italian title for the first time since 1990, ahead of the closest pursuer Lazio by 16 points, and also reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League.

Departure of the triumphant Spalletti, who announced that decided to take pause for rest, after the end of the season also entered the list of his most high-profile surprises. Italian publications believed that the reason for his separation from Napoli was, among other things, disagreements with De Laurentiis.

Replacement Luciano Spalletti is a 59-year-old specialist with a fairly rich career. True, its peak is already a long history.

The reputation of a coach with the potential of a top-end Garcia earned in 2011, when he won the title of French champion with Lille, which the club had not had since 1954, and at the same time revealed the future superstar in his team – the Belgian Eden Hazard.

After this success, Garcia was invited by the Italian Roma, and the contract with him looked like a hit right on the bull’s eye. The Romans made a splash by winning ten matches in a row at the start of the Italian championship. They failed to maintain the pace, but the second place after the unconditional flagship of the championship at that moment, Juventus, could not but be considered an achievement. Roma, thanks to him, qualified for the Champions League, in which they had not played for three years.

She took silver in the next Italian championship. And in the third season, under the leadership of Rudi Garcia, the Roman club, having again greatly dispersed, having been at the top of the table, suddenly surrendered in the winter, and the decline led to the dismissal of the Frenchman.

After him, the coach was no longer able to conquer the previous heights. He moved to France, where he worked without much brilliance in Marseille and Lyon, and then went abroad. In 2021, sources claimed that Spartak was showing interest in him, who nevertheless hired not Garcia, but the Portuguese Rui Vitoria, who soon failed with the Moscow club, but the Frenchman was attracted not by Russia, but by wealthy Saudi Arabia, suddenly seriously interested in football. In 2022, Rudy Garcia signed an agreement with the An-Nasr club, and that last winter suddenly found itself in the spotlight. It is in this team escaped quarreled with the management of Manchester United five-time winner of the Golden Ball Cristiano Ronaldo. However, soon some media resources – for example, Marca – already wrote about the conflict between Ronaldo and Garcia, suspecting that in April the latter was expelled from An-Nasr, which did not receive gold, despite the help of the Portuguese, largely because of him.

Rudi Garcia’s prospects at Napoli will clearly depend not only on his own tone, but also on the staffing situation at the club. The fact is that the breakthrough of the Neapolitans has radically raised the demand for their leading players. And, for example, in the section of the sports page of the BBC website dedicated to transfer rumors, almost a day later there is news about the readiness of one of the football giants to buy forwards Viktor Osimkhen and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia as part of the summer transfer window.

Alexey Dospekhov