Sosa: Spalletti wanted to quit football, not take a year off

Speaking from Argentina on Radio Marte, the Pampa recalls a lunch at Castel Volturno with the then-coach and Cristian Bucchi, and says the Napoli departure was never about a year off.

by Gennaro SanninoMonday 5 October, 14:22 CET· 2 hours ago

Lo stadio Diego Armando Maradona di Napoli

Lo stadio Diego Armando Maradona — Foto: Gae C. at Italian Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

Roberto Carlos Sosa has pushed back against the official story of Luciano Spalletti's Napoli exit. Speaking from Argentina on Radio Marte's show "Los Ultimos Diez", hosted by Dario Sarnataro and Gianluca Gifuni, the Pampa said Spalletti never asked Aurelio De Laurentiis for a year off with a promise not to coach another Italian club in the meantime. "That's not how it was," he said, flatly.

Sosa's version comes from a direct memory, not something picked up second-hand. Around the time of the departure he was a regular visitor to Castel Volturno (Napoli's training ground) and often had lunch with the coach. Cristian Bucchi was at the table too, Sosa says, and Spalletti's message was clear: he wanted to quit football outright after winning the Scudetto (the Serie A title) with Napoli. Only a call-up from the Italy national team changed those plans. When the spell as national-team coach did not go as hoped, Juventus came in for him - a club Spalletti would have found hard to turn down professionally, in Sosa's telling.

'I'm objective, I don't take sides'

Sosa also addressed comments Spalletti gave recently to Tuttosport, already doing the rounds in the days before.

"The problem is the people in the middle who want to make you take sides for or against someone. I'm objective: I gave my soul for the Napoli shirt, but that doesn't mean I have to lie if I see it playing badly. I don't take sides for or against - I analyse. Even when it comes to who's on the bench."

On Spalletti's quality as a coach, Sosa left no room for doubt: "He was the best coach I've had in my career, tactically speaking. I know him, he was with me at Udinese."

He was harsher on the Juventus remarks. "I don't agree with what he said, because I know him and I know he isn't at a club where winning is the only thing that matters either. Saying he's free to play his football in Turin... That isn't his football: he isn't about winning at all costs." Sosa closed the thought with a comparison to Maurizio Sarri: "Sarri won there too, but then he had to leave. And Sarri's football is similar to Spalletti's."

The story lands in a week when voices from Napoli's recent coaching past have kept coming, between Spalletti's Tuttosport interview and Antonio Conte's piece for The Athletic about the two years that "consumed" him. Sosa adds a detail nobody had given with this much first-hand precision - not transfer gossip, but a personal memory of a lunch at Castel Volturno. What is left is the paradox the fanbase has carried for years: a coach wins the Scudetto and leaves, not over a row, not for an offer he could not refuse, but because by then he simply wanted to stop coaching.