Aurelio De Laurentiis is a man who loves the spotlight almost as much as he loves a bargain. When the Napoli supremo sits down for a press conference,...
Aurelio De Laurentiis is a man who loves the spotlight almost as much as he loves a bargain. When the Napoli supremo sits down for a press conference, you know you will get theatre, bluster, and the occasional nugget of genuine strategy. His latest briefing, as exclusively covered by GoalZaza, was no different. He laid out the club's pre. season roadmap with the kind of detail that suggests a man who wants to project control, even when the winds of the transfer market are howling around the Stadio Maradona.Yet for all the talk of training camps and friendly fixtures, there was a rather large elephant in the room. Max Allegri. The name that will not go away. De Laurentiis, when asked directly about the former Juventus boss, offered only a cryptic shrug. "You know the rules," he said, a phrase that could mean anything from 'I am not allowed to discuss him' to 'I have already made my move and you will see it when I want you to'. In this business, silence is often louder than a shouted headline.The subtext here is delicious. Napoli are at a crossroads. They have a squad that knows how to win the Scudetto but showed all the fragility of a house of cards last season. The low block of their opponents has been cracked before, but maintaining that clinical finishing and tactical flexibility over a full campaign is a different beast. De Laurentiis knows he needs a manager who can bring both structure and a bit of steel. Allegri, for all his recent struggles, is a man who understands the art of the ugly win, the ability to dig out a result when the football is not pretty.So why the silent treatment Perhaps De Laurentiis is playing a longer game. Perhaps he has already had a word in Allegri's ear and wants to avoid a bidding war or public posturing. Or perhaps he is simply enjoying the speculation, letting the rumour mill do the work for him. The fans are left to chew over the possibilities. One thing is for sure. When the chairman says 'you know the rules', he is also telling you that he is the one in charge of the rulebook. And in Naples, that rulebook has a habit of being rewritten on a whim.
