The French coach was strongly criticized by a major European football leader this week.
If he left an indelible mark at AS Roma during his first stint in Italy, Rudi Garcia did not have the same success in another volcanic club in the country, Napoli. Appointed last summer by Aurelio De Laurentiis to succeed Luciano Spalletti after a historic season marked by the Scudetto, Garcia was singled out by its former president.
De Laurentiis thus admitted to having regretted having chosen the Frenchman. “The first contacted was Thiago Motta, launched the sulphurous president of Napoli in an interview with Corriere dello Sport. I saw it quite well, no (reference to the current ranking of Bologna, 4th in Serie A, editor’s note) ? But he didn’t feel like coming. For what ? Because it’s not easy to take the legacy of someone who won the Scudetto that way. »
“He’s going to shoot you players”
“In the end I went for Rudi Garcia who, in Italy, had come second twice with turbulent locker rooms, full of top players. On the day of the presentation, I should have made a dramatic statement and said: ‘Here he is introduced, but now he’s leaving.’ Because a person who comes and says: ‘I don’t know Napoli, I haven’t seen a match…’ I should have understood. While I preferred to laugh about it. The problem is that he repeated it several times. All you had to do was play the same game as Spalletti. Rather than doing that, he preferred to send me away a perfect preparer, to bring in another who… I had been warned: ‘He’s going to shoot you players.’ I had to stay at the training center from morning to evening. » Discharged from his position on November 14, Rudi Garcia spent a very brief stint on the bench of the Italian champion.
