Rudi Garcia certainly did not make his departure from Naples a celebration, but he perhaps did not imagine it to be so bitter either. Appointed in June 2023 at the head of the club, crowned Italian champion a few weeks earlier, the former OM coach ultimately stayed barely five months in post, due to a lack of results that met expectations. He will have experienced some nice parentheses, like his two successes in the Champions League against Braga, then Union Berlin, but he will have finally been carried away after a defeat against Empoli in the championship, mid-November (1-0), that too much.
At the time, however, there was no cause for alarm according to the person concerned: “When I arrived, everyone wanted to leave: half of the players, the staff… Even though they were reigning champions. So there you say to yourself that something is wrong. But despite that, we were in the race, we were in the top 4 in Serie A, we won at Union Berlin in the Champions League, in fact, everything was going well.recalls Garcia in an interview given to Media Square. Everything or almost, because according to the person concerned, the wishes and choices imposed by his boss Aurelio De Laurentiis simply made the exercise of his profession impossible.
Aurelio De Laurentiis was invasive
“The president, little by little, wanted to put his nose into the team composition, into the choices of the players, and I’m sorry, but it’s not 60 brooms that a president is going to tell me how play, who I have to play. He wanted me to play players for 45 minutes, to bring others on during the break… It’s innovative, why not”he quips. As a reminder, De Laurentiis did not spare Garcia after his departure, not hesitating to put him in a box in the press: “I should have made a dramatic move and said: ‘Here he is introduced, but now he’s leaving.’ Because a person who arrives and says: “I don’t know Napoli, I haven’t seen a match…. I should have understood”had entrusted the sulphurous Italian leader to Corriere dello Sport.
But obviously, this interview and this famous “twist of theater» did not pass by Rudi Garcia. “The “twist”, he would have done better to do it by leaving me at the head of the team, maybe he would have finished in the Champions League at the end, and maybe not 10th, nor in 1/8th of C1. He is a man who knows a lot about cinema, but not much about football. What is not good is to be slanderous afterwards, perhaps to legitimize your choice, except that its results did not legitimize them at all. The Napoli boss’s response is awaited.
