Napoli has fallen off this season and it’s really bad. The Naples side won the Serie A last season with 16 points clear of second place Lazio but at the time of writing this article, they’re currently languishing in 9th position on the Serie A table. Nothing seems to be going right at the club and everything seems to have fallen apart. Even the players look to be out of form. To understand what caused the massive drop-off in the performance of Napoli this season, we must first understand how they got so good in the first place.
Victor Osimhen
Napoli had not won the Serie A in 33 years before they won it in 2023. While they’ve always been a little more than a mid-table team, they had not really challenged for the title in a while. That changed in recent times as they finished third with 79 points in the 2021/2022 season. AC Milan won the league that season but Napoli scored the third most goals (74) in the league just behind Inter Milan and Lazio. They also tied with AC Milan for the least amount of goals conceded (31) a testament to the effectiveness of their then-new coach Luciano Spaletti, their sporting director Cristiano Giuntoli, and the signings they made in the preceding summer transfer window.
Victor Osimhen
In the summer after the end of the 2021/2022 season, the Napoli squad underwent an overhaul that saw the exit of big players like Insigne and Kalidou Koulibaly. They went to the market and brought in defender Kim Min Jae from Fenerbache and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia from Dinamo Batumi in the Georgia first division. Both players had a massive impact on Napoli’s performance in the 2022/2023 season and their emergence as Serie A champions. Kim Min Jae was solid at the back and gave Napoli the defensive solidity they needed while Kvaratskhelia bossed the midfield creating chances and scoring goals to keep Napoli at the top of the table.
Luciano Spaletti
Their star forward Victor Osimhen also benefited from the team overhaul as he scored 26 goals and made four assists; his highest league goal contribution tally to clinch the Serie A Golden Boot. Kvaratskhelia won the Serie A MVP for his 22 Serie A goal contributions in their title-winning season. The midfielder scored 12 goals and made 10 assists in their historic campaign. Kim Min Jae also won the Serie A Defender of the Year last season for his solidity at the back. All of them enjoyed manager Luciano Spaletti’s style of play which was more flexible and allowed for creativity in the midfield. His style freed up Osimhen a lot, allowing him to receive the ball in dangerous areas in the opponent’s half. They ended up creating many chances and Osimhen put enough of the chances in the back to make him the highest goalscorer in the Serie A.
Victor Osimhen wins the Scudetto and highest goalscorer award
The result was the Scudetto triumph and excellent performances in the Champions League. They made it to the quarter-final stage where they were eventually knocked out by AC Milan after defeating Frankfurt and doing the double over Liverpool in earlier stages of the competition. Spaletti was obviously an effective manager whose tactics seemed to be working for Napoli.
Luciano Spaletti wins the Scudetto
The summer after their Serie A win was when their troubles really started. Luciano Spaletti left the club saying he wanted to take a paid sabbatical. Kim Min Jae left for Bayern Munich, and their sporting director who is credited for bringing in Kim and Kvaratskhelia joined Juventus. Aurelio De Laurentiis had to quickly replace Spaletti with Rudi Garcia but it would prove to be a mistake.
Rudi Garcia
In the absence of Spaletti, the team began to fall apart quite early in the season. They weren’t creating enough chances, they weren’t scoring enough goals and they struggled to beat anyone; even mid-table teams that should have been a walk in the park for the defending champions gave them a hard time. In addition to this, Rudi Garcia did not seem to connect with the players and the fans well; definitely not as well as Spaletti did. His in-game tactics and man management left both fans and players frustrated. The manager was only 12 games into this season’s Serie A when he received the sack. To be fair after witnessing their abysmal performances at the start of the season, everyone knew he was going to get the sack sooner than later. They were 10 points behind league leaders Inter Milan, in fourth place, and had suffered four home defeats when Garcia got the sack. It was quite bad but it got worse.
Rudi Garcia wasreplaced by Walter Mazzari who the club hoped would turn the season around for them but that obviously did not happen. They are now in 8th position in the league and below Roma and Lazio. They scored 53 goals and conceded 44; way off their stats last season.
THE VICTOR OSIMHEN ANGLE
Victor Osimhen
The shambolic state of the team has been reflected in Victor Osimhen’s performance as well. The creativity in the midfield fell off as the new manager changed the system and encouraged higher pressing and zonal defending. This means that they created less chances and Osimhen did not have as much service as last season. He is currently on 15 goals which is quite impressive given his struggle with injury, the massive overhaul in the team, and having to play under a different manager and a different system. It’s still a far cry from his goal tally last season. When the system is bad, everyone underperforms and Osimhen is no exception.
Walter Mazzari
We have seen this pattern more than once in recent times. A smaller, less prominent team manages to assemble a team and staff that allows them to challenge the big teams and even win trophies. After one or two seasons, they start to haemorrhage their best players and staff to bigger teams, sometimes even rivals. It happened with Leicester City after their unprecedented Premier League triumph in 2016, happened with Ajax in 2019 and now it’s Napoli. Bayer Leverkusen and Girona may suffer the same fate soon. Before they won the league, big teams were looking to steal their coach Xabi Alonso. Florian Wirtz, Jeremie Frimpong, and Tah are also on the radar of some big teams and may soon leave Bayer Leverkusen. It’s the same pattern with Girona who have had an amazing season in La Liga.
Victor Osimhen
The onus is on the small team to keep their best-performing players and staff but it’s usually hard to do when they cannot match the financial compensation offered by the bigger clubs. The Napoli situation looks like it’s going to get worse before it gets better if it will at all. Osimhen is reportedly on his way out of the club. He has been linked with Chelsea and PSG all season and it’s reported that talks have advanced with PSG. Losing their striker will definitely affect Napoli and leave them worse than they already are right now. The question now is whether they can turn things around and that remains to be seen.