Every season of The White Lotus starts with the hotel manager welcoming guests to the resort, unaware of the hedonistic and sadistic life-altering drama about to unfold. No place on earth does trouble in paradise better than Italy.
And so, it is with great trepidation and no end of excitement, that I welcome you to Serie A for another year, a place where parties in Naples last all summer long and any grip on reality is lost amid disorientating points penalties suspended then reapplied. Last season will be hard to live up to on and off the pitch. But we said the same a year ago after the previous title race went down to the final day.
Come through reception, let me add your baggage to mine and I’ll check you in…
Expect the unexpected
Napoli became champions for the first time since 1990 last season and they won the league so comfortably it’s tempting to predict a repeat. But Napoli have never gone back-to-back. In fact, no one has retained their title since Juventus in 2020. Serie A has had four different winners in each of the last four years, a level of domestic competitiveness other leagues dream about.
Can the streak realistically continue?
Serie A enjoyed seven different winners between 1983 and 1991. Which begs the question: whose turn is it this time? Is it Lazio’s? Runners-up in June; Maurizio Sarri knows what it takes to win a league.
Can Napoli win back-to-back titles for the first time? (Photo: Getty)
Could Atalanta become the first Serie A first-time winners since Sampdoria in the Roberto Mancini and Gianluca Vialli years?
Might a triumphal arch or column be erected in Rome for Jose Mourinho, as they were in ancient times for all-conquering emperors, in the event he delivers a Scudetto in the final year of his contract with Roma?
The league’s recent history nurtures belief and captures the imagination, which is why stadiums up and down the bel paese are full again. But economics and broader experience steer us away from romance and back to one of the big three: Champions League finalists Inter Milan, moneyballers AC Milan and Juventus in the centenary year of the Agnelli family’s ownership.
Rudi, don’t be a hero
When Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis allowed his Scudetto-winning coach Luciano Spalletti to see out the final year of his contract back on the farm in Tuscany, he was left with the unenviable task of finding someone capable of replacing a history-maker.
“Starting today, I’m going to go through a list of candidates,” De Laurentiis explained back in June. “Originally it had 22 names on it, but that has since risen to 40.”
Rafa Benitez put himself in the frame. Luis Enrique came up — as did the coach he eventually replaced at PSG, Christophe Galtier. Paulo Sousa was mentioned on the back of the fine job he is doing down the Amalfi coast at Salernitana.
In the end, De Laurentiis settled on Rudi Garcia, hoping a nearly man with Roma does as well as his predecessor, a former nearly man with Roma. Unlike a decade ago, when Daniele De Rossi had to Google Garcia’s name and came across this video of him playing guitar, he is a known quantity.
Garcia surprised everyone at the time, setting a Serie A record by winning the opening 10 games of the season. Fearing for his Scudetto, Antonio Conte pushed Juventus harder than ever before and made it to 102 points, the highest total ever recorded in Italy.
Juventus aren’t what they once were and Scudetti have been won with around the same number of points as Garcia achieved in his first season at Roma, which was a club record… until Spalletti bettered him in 2017.
Still, the appointment was met with scepticism. Garcia had been coaching in Saudi Arabia until Al Nassr sacked him shortly after the signing of Cristiano Ronaldo. Has the 59-year-old peaked already? Surely Roma got the best of Garcia, appointing him shortly after he led Lille to a first league title since the 1950s.
The same was said of Spalletti, who became the oldest first-time winner of the Scudetto in May. Recent history tells us that coaches replacing champions (Andrea Pirlo at Juventus and Simone Inzaghi at Inter) don’t retain the title.
But Garcia has only lost one first-team player (the Serie A defender of the year Kim Min-jae) and if he checks his ego at the door and doesn’t change too much — a mistake Benitez made when taking over Mourinho’s treble-winning Inter side in 2010 — they should be OK.
**Tu vuo fa l’Americano **
So you want to be an American, eh? Dance rock and roll? Play football instead of baseball. Serie A has certainly given that impression this summer with the arrivals of Timothy Weah at Juventus, and Christian Pulisic and Yunus Musah at AC Milan.
It’s almost three decades since Padova, on the back of USA 94, made Alexi Lalas the first American to play in Italy’s top flight. Lalas remains the most iconic. He joined the league in a golden age and scored his first goal relatively soon after joining against Fabio Capello’s legendary AC Milan; the one with Paolo Maldini, Franco Baresi and Marco van Basten.
All the best players played in Serie A at the time, and Lalas was one of the novelties that made the league weird and wonderful with his long red hair and willingness to get the guitar out on television. For Italians of a certain generation, he’s still the first American they think of when it comes to Serie A.
The best and most impactful up until now was the New Jersey-born Giuseppe Rossi, who declared for Italy. Rossi is the best American player to compete in Italy even though he isn’t thought of as such because of his decision to play for the Azzurri instead of the USMNT. He memorably helped Parma pull off a great escape and scored a magnificent hat-trick for Fiorentina in a come-from-behind win against Juventus, ensuring he’d never have to buy a steak in Florence ever again.
Musah and Pulisic are now at Milan (Photo: Getty)
Enzo Bearzot, the 1982 World Cup-winning coach, nicknamed him Pepito in honour of Pablito, or Paolo Rossi, whose goals fired Italy to glory in Spain in 1982. Serious injuries, often badly timed, blunted Rossi’s career, which he called time on earlier this summer.
Since then, other Americans have pitched up in Serie A without leaving much of a mark unless you literally count Oguchi Onyewu’s training ground bust-up with Zlatan Ibrahimovic back in 2010. There have been brief flashes of stars and spangles in rare ascendancy, such as Michael Bradley’s part in Roma’s 2013-14 title challenge and Weston McKennie’s knack for scoring big goals in big games in his first year at Juventus. But it was never sustained.
Tanner Tessmann and Gianluca Busio were relegated with Venezia and have stayed in the second division. The question is: can the trend be broken? Is this the year an American truly becomes the face of the league for more than just the purposes of marketing state-side and tapping into a pool of almost 18 million Italian-Americans?
The Pognaissance?
Let’s have an honest conversation about Serie A and superstardom. Who is the league’s truly transcendent, box-office name? Is there anyone?
Since the departure of Cristiano Ronaldo, this title has probably oscillated between a coach and player from the same generation, a case of 2021 to ’23 feeling like 2008 to 2010. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mourinho and Ibrahimovic.
When either of them say or do something, their words and actions have a ripple effect and it gets picked up everywhere.
The same can’t be said of the league’s current MVPs and rising stars like Victor Osimhen, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Rafael Leao. Not yet, anyway.
Members of Argentina’s World Cup winning squad, Lautaro Martinez and Paulo Dybala have a case although the highlights they made in Qatar were limited to clutch penalties in shootouts. Only boy-next-door Dybala, the Efron-Bieber of Serie A, has managed to make a career exclusively in Italy and cultivate tens of millions of followers. La Joya has the second most Instagram followers of any Serie A player.
The No 1? That’s right, it’s his old friend Paul Pogba with just over 60 million.
Pogba was the biggest disappointment of last season in Serie A. He was hampered by extraordinary off-the-pitch issues and his decision to eschew knee surgery in order not to miss the World Cup, a tournament he missed anyway because… he needed knee surgery, which kept him out until the spring, when he pulled up with another tear-jerking injury. A season that never got started ended abruptly.
GO DEEPER
Paul Pogba’s return to Juventus has not worked out like anyone hoped
Whether he’ll ever get back to his best remains to be seen.
Pogba returned to Turin early this summer to get in the gym and be ready for pre-season but has only appeared in one friendly, scoring in the 5-0 win over Alessandria on Wednesday. The Bianconeri need him to deliver this campaign. Out of Europe and able to focus on the league, there are echoes of 2011-12 all over again. A title tilt isn’t out of the question, particularly if Pogba returns.
Saudi Arabia has picked off Serie A’s past midfielder of the year winners Marcelo Brozovic and Sergej Milinkovic-Savic. A vacuum has been left for Pogba to fill. All he has to do is get fit — which is easier said than done.
Otherwise, my money for that award would be staked on Nicolo Barella at Inter, Napoli’s Stanislav Lobotka or Milan’s new signing Tijjani Reijnders.
**Is this the year Inter get sold? **
As of last December, Grand Tower, the Luxembourg-based shell company that controls the club, owed US hedge fund Oaktree Capital Management €329million (£281.4m; $359m). The debt matures next May and, unless Inter’s owners Suning repay, refinance or sell the club in the meantime, Oaktree will become Inter’s new custodians.
Considering Steven Zhang is being chased by China Construction Bank for so far failing to pay back more than €300m borrowed by a company he owned and controlled in 2020, it remains to be seen whether Oaktree will be able to recover its money when it’s due. Regardless of how effective Inter’s chief executive Giuseppe Marotta has been in adapting to straitened financial circumstances and keeping the club competitive on a lower cost base, the ownership situation doesn’t loom large enough in the wider consciousness.
Inter have been a slow partner with AC Milan in shared plans to redevelop San Siro, which is a contributing factor in Milan giving more and more thought to going it alone and building their own ground. As with Juventus and the consequences of the Prisma investigation, the tightening of the purse strings at two of Italy’s big three has inevitably led to less trickledown in Serie A and a slowing of the market itself.
Ongoing issues at Inter have helped slow down plans to redevelop San Siro (Photo: Getty)
Last season glossed over these issues at Inter. After winning the Coppa Italia and Super Cup, the campaign climaxed in Inter making the Champions League final for the first time in 13 years. As such, some of the frustrations felt last summer at missing out on players like Gleison Bremer and Dybala subsided.
Maybe we’ll see a repeat. Inter finished last season playing at the same level as the best Napoli. They led the league in xG and were applauded for how well they competed against the best team in the world, Manchester City. But it’s been a bitter-ish summer.
Inter have been ghosted by Romelu Lukaku, outbid by Atalanta for Gianluca Scamacca and had to settle, in the end, on bringing Marko Arnautovic back to the club (from Bologna) for around €10m. Lazar Samardzic, one of Serie A’s best up-and-coming playmakers, spent days in a Milan hotel while Inter tried and failed to negotiate a commission with his agent, which, in fairness to Inter, wasn’t helped by the player changing agent three times in 10 days. But it’s hard to escape the feeling that the old Inter would have done these deals already. The new one can’t.
A resolution to the club’s future needs to be found.
GO DEEPER
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In support of Jankto
After courageously coming out in the spring, Jakub Jankto is back in a top-five league.
The 27-year-old returned to Italy, the country where he made his name as a talented midfielder, over the summer to join newly promoted Cagliari. One can only hope he finds a tolerant, respectful and welcoming environment in which to play his football. Unfortunately, Italy’s minister of sport, the former president of Serie B, Andrea Abodi has already gone on the radio and attracted controversy by saying “I don’t love ostentation but respect individual choices” when broaching the subject of Jankto’s decision to come out.
Ostentation? Since when was having the courage to be yourself ostentatious?
GO DEEPER
Well done Jakub Jankto. Now football has to support its most high-profile gay player
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear a member of Giorgia Meloni’s government assert this position. Abodi has since walked back his comments but a concern for LGBTQ+ rights in Italy was aired by Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau at the G7 summit in March, causing Meloni to shuffle awkwardly.
Jankto’s coach at Cagliari, Claudio Ranieri, who first worked with him at Sampdoria, has hailed the inner strength the Czech Republic international showed. “I know how much he suffered before coming out,” Ranieri said, “When I made this decision (to sign him), I looked at his profile as a player and the fact this team is a family. We have an excellent dressing room and I’m convinced there won’t be any problems at all.”
As for the reception awaiting Jankto in grounds up and down Italy, Ranieri said: “I’ve often touched on this. The mother of idiots is always pregnant. Maybe there will be some idiots who’ll say something but we need to get past it.” Cagliari and the league will need to work on a response, too.
**Is another De Zerbi out there? **
Style-wise, probably not.
You have to go to Nice and check out what one of his former assistants, Francesco Farioli, is getting up to in order to get your dose of De Zerbi. But Italian football’s greatest export remains its coaching. No nationality has produced more Premier League-winning managers than Italy and there is no shortage of talented sideline strategists. This quartet in particular has caught the eye.
One of several Gian Piero Gasperini disciples currently operating in the league, Raffaele Palladino was a revelation at Monza last season. No one stepping in for another coach in-season had a bigger impact than he did and, although it’s true Monza were the league’s biggest net spenders last summer, it was still a surprise to see them beating Napoli, going undefeated against Inter and famously doing the double over Juventus. An early exit from the Coppa Italia (Reggiana knocked them out) suggests this year could be tougher.
Palladino did a brilliant job at Monza last season (Photo: Getty)
Over in Bologna, Thiago Motta was tactically fascinating too. He just has to figure out a way to integrate strikers into his system rather than falling out of love with them. Paulo Sousa made a brilliant return to Italy with Salernitana, likewise. He has been sneakily influential in Serie A’s tactical progression over the last decade. It was his Fiorentina team that introduced the hybrid systems that are so fashionable today — four-at-the-back out of possession, three-at-the-back in possession.
Speaking of the Viola, let’s end with Vincenzo Italiano. He has raised the bar every year, which begs the question: what next for Fiorentina? They were the most improved side in Serie A in his first season and got back into Europe after five years. Last season they reached the Conference League and Coppa Italia finals. What awaits us this season then? A trophy? A place in the top four? Vuo fà l’Italiano.
Predictions
Siren-wailing, mascara smudged, operatic chaos, beauty in dysfunction, therapy guaranteed.
(Lead image: Getty Images)
