Allegri's mistake was trusting Manna and De Laurentiis on the squad

Last season's 30th-place finish in the Champions League's single league phase was treated as a freak result, barely worth dwelling on for a team that finished second in Serie A with 76 points. That reading is now being turned on its head.

The fourth Scudetto, won in 2024-25, now looks like a title claimed at the limit. Conte, the coach who won it, later told The Athletic the experience was "wonderful" but one that drained "all his energy". If that squad was already running on empty last spring, the question now is how much of that exhaustion carried into a squad only partially renewed — and how much Allegri built his summer certainties on foundations that were not there.

Two names, one mistake

The mistake now attributed to him has two names. Allegri is said to have spent the summer believing the reassurances of Giovanni Manna and Aurelio De Laurentiis about the strength and competitiveness of the squad handed to him. The transfer window closed on 1 September with a net spend of around -€47.5m: Lucca arrived from Udinese for €35m, balanced by Gutiérrez's sale to Bayer Leverkusen for €26m.

The bill for those reassurances is now written in the table: eighth in Serie A with 10 points after six games, and zero points from two Champions League matches, following the opening defeat to Arsenal and Tuesday 13 October's 3-1 loss at Villarreal.

The De Bruyne episode

The second half of that game at Villarreal now offers a sharper explanation for the episode that dominated discussion on Wednesday 14 October: "I had asked him to swap his position on the pitch with McTominay's, but unfortunately we didn't understand each other" — the account given from the bench. De Bruyne did not drop back as instructed, while his teammates waited for leadership signals from him that never came.

A boardroom problem, not just a tactical one

This reading reopens an uncomfortable question, and it is about mentality, not legs. If the squad was already that of a team at the end of its cycle, the responsibility is no longer only tactical — it is the club's. Building a transfer window that lost money on a group that could not withstand the Champions League a year earlier, and a coach who believed in that group right to the end, are two different failures that this season's table now places on the same level.

Napoli get their first chance to answer this reading on the pitch on Saturday at 15:00 CET (14:00 UK, 09:00 ET) at the Penzo, against a Venezia side that have just changed coach, turning to Nicola. Winning will not be enough — Napoli need to win playing like a team that still believes it belongs in the Champions League, not in 30th place.