The mayonnaise will never set. Rudi Garcia lasted four months on the Napoli bench before being sacked last November. The game and the results were not there. Already heavily criticized by the Italian press during his time in the south of Italy, the former Roma technician was demolished by his sulphurous former Neapolitan president, Aurelio de Laurentiis, in the columns of Corriere dello Sport.
“The first one I contacted was Thiago Motta. It’s not like I saw anything wrong, huh? But he didn’t want to. Because you know what that is? You’re coming to take the legacy of someone who won the championship that way. And if things go wrong for me, he thought, what should I do? That’s the same thing Spalletti must have been thinking. He must have said to himself: I’m leaving this town a hero. Then I went to see Luis Enrique. He brought his people to Naples, detained me for three days and asked me for a lot of money. We even reached a near-deal, but then he said no, because he wanted to win even more. And it was Nagelsmann’s turn. I consulted five or six coaches, no more. But I said forty as a joke, to shuffle the cards. And finally, I landed on Garcia. Who in Italy had won two second places with hectic locker rooms, full of high-level players,” says de Laurentiis, before admitting that Rudi Garcia was only a secondary option in his eyes.
“The day I presented him to Capodimonte. I should have pulled a stunt and said: I introduced him to you, but now he’s leaving. Because someone who comes and says: I don’t know Naples, I’ve never seen a match… I should have understood. And instead, I laughed about it. The fact is that he repeated it on other occasions. It would have been enough for him to play the same football as Spalletti. Instead, he demanded that I fire a perfect physical trainer, to call one who… I had been told: “the players like this one” (ironic). I should have stayed at Castel Volturno (the training center) morning and evening.” The fate of the 59-year-old technician was therefore sealed from the start of the story…
