Napoli on the brink: Why are Antonio Conte's teams so bad in the Champions League?

Conte is unquestionably an elite-level manager. Inter defender Alessandro Bastoni once called him "the Lionel Messi of coaches" and that's a view shared by many of his former charges. Indeed, there are few more transformative forces working in the game today. 

As the great Andrea Pirlo wrote in his autobiography, "When Conte speaks, his words assault you. They crash through the doors of your mind, often quite violently, and settle deep within you. I lost track of the number of times I found myself saying: 'Hell, Conte said something really spot-on again today!'"

That inspirational mix of insight and intensity is the main reason why Conte has thrice taken over clubs in crisis (Juventus, Chelsea and Napoli) and led them to a league title in his very first season in charge.

In all three instances, though, the team in question had performed so poorly the season before that Conte was unburdened by European football. As a result, he regularly had a week to prepare for domestic matches - which is obviously a massive advantage to have over title rivals.

For starters, it affords a manager more time to study an opponent's strengths and weaknesses, thus making it easier to come up with a detailed game plan for nullifying the former and exploiting the latter. 

However, it also rather crucially offers players more time to recover from their previous fixture - and that's always been of the utmost importance for Conte teams.

Although he is associated with three-man defences, Conte is a more tactically versatile coach than many pundits acknowledge. He has regularly changed formation to suit the players he has at his disposal - and often to excellent effect.

However, all of his teams have one thing in common: intensity. As he says himself, his players "always have to go at 200 kilometres an hour" - because if even one of them takes his foot off the gas, the whole system breaks down. 

Consequently, Conte has always been a fan of buying players with Premier League experience, as they are already accustomed to the unrelenting pace and physicality of the football he wants to play.

The Inter team with which he won Serie A in 2020-21 featured several players who had previously plied their trade in England, including Romelu Lukaku and Christian Eriksen, while it's no coincidence that the athletic but technically accomplished Scott McTominay is the poster boy of his current Napoli side.

The recurring question when it comes to Conte, though, is whether his punishing approach is sustainable over the course of an entire campaign for a team competing in Europe.

The only man to have won the Scudetto with three different clubs has never even gone close to lifting the Champions League. Only once has he made it to the quarter-finals and that was 13 years ago with Juventus, who were beaten 4-0 on aggregate by eventual winners Bayern Munich.

Since then, he's been twice eliminated in the group stage (with Juve in 2013-14, and Inter in 2020-21) and bowed out in the last 16 with both Chelsea (2017-18) and Tottenham Hotspur (2022-23).

In total, he's won just 17 of the 49 matches he's coached in the competition and is now on the verge of falling at the first hurdle for the third time in six attempts after a desperately disappointing 1-1 draw with 10-man Copenhagen left Napoli with just eight points from their seven games in this season's Champions League. 

"It's a result that hurts me and it should hurt my players too," Conte told Sky Sport Italia last week. "The game was there to be one, and for us to reach the play-offs. We might have a thousand excuses, but tonight they don’t fit, because the match was going so well.

"We were in total control, with 11 men against 10, so even if you’re missing 10 players and feeling fatigue, you have to win these games. You just have to. We didn't manage it, though, so evidently our level right now is not suited to this competition, and we’ve got to all accept the blame here, because you’ve got to take home the result in a situation like this.

"There’s not much else to say, we just have to be angry with ourselves, because it was a golden opportunity, and perhaps we didn’t realise what was at stake. It was like we were riding a bike downhill and somehow managed to make it go uphill all by ourselves."

Conte has often attributed his teams' failings to a perceived lack of support in the transfer market from those above him. At Juve, for example, he surprisingly stepped down in the summer of 2014 after winning three consecutive scudetti because of irreconcilable differences with his bosses over how to construct a Champions League-winning squad. 

"You cannot eat in a €100 restaurant with €10 in your pocket," Conte famously quipped during one of his many public attacks on the Bianconeri board.  

However, Conte couldn't complain about a shortage of signings at Napoli last summer - so he instead argued that "too many" new players had been brought in. 

"Last year we won a championship where the players pushed themselves to the limit; we had unity in every way," Conte told Sky in October. "We opened the transfer window because we were forced to do so. We tried to strengthen the squad but it takes time and patience. 

"The old guys, myself and those from last year, need to step up our game and find unity again, because bringing nine new players into the dressing room isn't easy."

One could certainly understand where Conte was coming from but it wasn't an argument he really should have made after a shameful 6-2 Champions League loss to PSV for which there was really no excuse.

Conte also suffered the ignominy of being put in his place by Benfica boss Jose Mourinho after bringing up Napoli's lengthy injury list before and after their 2-0 loss in Lisbon in December. 

"Saying we were fresher physically sounds like an excuse," the Portuguese said. "I have heavy absences, too, but I don't want to cry about it."

There is no denying, though, that Napoli have been hit hard by injuries, with Kevin De Bruyne, David Neres, Amir Rrahmani, Billy Gilmour, Matteo Politano, Frank Zambo Anguissa and Vanja Milinkovic-Savic all presently out of action. As a result, the often combustible Conte wasn't even that upset by Sunday's loss to Juve.

"There's little to reproach the players over," he said. "Even tonight, they gave everything, and sometimes you get past the obstacle, other times you don’t. 

"For the first time in my career, I brought on a player I had never seen before, a youngster who arrived yesterday [from Verona]. 

"We are sailing in the open sea, but we're not getting off the boat. We want to fight with all our strength, knowing that we are living in an almost unbelievable situation."

Given Napoli's fitness issues, it's hard to make a strong case for them getting the victory they need over Chelsea to sneak into the Champions League play-off round. 

As well as being shorn of the services of several first-team regulars, the enforced absence of rotation in recent weeks and months has left the likes of McTominay looking tired at precisely the wrong time. 

It also feels as if Napoli couldn't be running into Chelsea at a more inopportune moment, with the Blues benefiting from something of a 'new manager boost' following Liam Rosenior's appointment as Enzo Maresca's successor. 

Conte being Conte, he is not prepared to throw in the towel before the fight has even begun - but he knows he needs Napoli's famously fervent fanbase to reinvigorate his weary players. 

"The stadium has to give the boys important support," he said. "It’s too easy to be a fan only when things go well. It’s a difficult moment, and I expect the fans to be close to the team, in good and bad times.

"We have to be united, compact, one single body. We need positive energy, emergency energy - and especially from the outside."

Basically, Conte wants to get the Maradona jumping on Wednesday night. And who knows, if Napoli spare him yet more Champions League misery, he might even join in this time!