De Laurentiis admitted during a full press conference on Wednesday that he had thought about thanking the French coach shortly after his appointment. “What should I have done when he told me he didn’t watch any Napoli matches? If I had sent him home, it would have been a revolution, you, the press, would have said ‘You’re crazy!, you decide everything,’ said the film producer who took control of Napoli in 2004 I tried to give Garcia his chance and possibilities by talking to him. When he listened to me, we won, like in Lecce 4-0,” he continued.
“But as soon as I left, he did very questionable things and we lost,” said “ADL”, before returning to the last match of Napoli led by Garcia, a 1-0 defeat on November 12 at home against the poorly ranked Empoli. Before the match, I went down to the dressing room and said to him, ‘You’re wrong to play like that’ and he said, ‘Leave it to me’. When someone talks to you like that, you either send them off or you shut up,” explained De Laurentiis.
“At the break I went back down to the dressing room and said to him, ‘What the hell are you doing? Do you really want to get fired?’” he added, before admitting to having “wanted to fire Garcia several times” before this match. Under Garcia, whose physical preparation De Laurentiis also criticized, Napoli lost three of their twelve league matches, all at home, and were 4th in Serie A.
The reigning Italian champion, now led by Walter Mazzarri, is currently 7th. De Laurentiis, who recruited Garcia in view of his past in European competitions (“where he did better than Spalletti”), admitted to having made a mistake: letting go of Luciano Spalletti who wanted to take a step back and who has since become coach of Italy. “I should not have accepted the provocation of Spalletti who no longer wanted to coach. I should have told him ‘You signed a contract two years ago, you continue’. “It was the mistake that triggered all the others,” he concluded.