“It’s nice to be dealing with a grown up,” one Chelsea insider said a few weeks into Antonio Conte’s reign at Stamford Bridge.
The club were still reeling from the second coming of José Mourinho, a manager who was mesmeric and captivating but also unpredictable. Conte was incredibly businesslike. He did not care too much about being loved or even liked by the players and the hierarchy. His demeanour was that of one of those fixers in films who survey a messy crime scene and promise to clean everything up, leaving not a trace of who was there, no trail, only peace of mind.
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The players respected his single-mindedness. It was as though they knew from his first day in the job that they were in for a short, sharp shock rather than a long-term relationship. He immediately banned anything close to comfort food and the snacks laid out as the team arrived on match day were almost comical. In pretty bowls and on delicate plates there could be found a selection of nuts. If nuts were not to a player’s taste, then they could instead choose seeds. By the end of his tenure, the players had had enough of bird food but in the early days were happy to buy into Conte’s ways if it brought them silverware.
In his autobiography, Andrea Pirlo, for whom Conte was manager at Juventus, wrote that the former Italy midfielder would throw water bottles at the wall at half-time even when the team were winning. You know where you stand with Conte. He is demanding and he is strict.
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You may assume that of all the men to have managed Chelsea, Mourinho was the one who had the media eating from the palm of his hand and yes, reporters lapped up his self-confident persona from the moment he declared himself the Special One, but Conte had seasoned hacks fluttering in admiration. Mourinho was labelled the housewife’s choice, but it took six weeks before my mostly male colleagues stopped asking me if I found the intense blue of his eyes captivating. I did not, but it seemed that they did.
In fact, Conte, while at Chelsea, had a habit of giggling, infectiously, at bad jokes and lapping up compliments while winning and in control but would convey a humourless steeliness when it began to go wrong. Throughout, though, he made clear his devotion to Elisabetta, his wife, and his daughter Vittoria and after his phone rang during a press conference he admitted that it was his wife and grinned that he deserved to be fined for the interruption.
Should anyone at Tottenham Hotspur care about the end of days at Stamford Bridge? Even though Conte won the Premier League title and the FA Cup while in west London, you can be sure that Roman Abramovich regrets at least in part the afternoon he met the man, because Conte’s departure was the most expensive in football history. The Chelsea owner had to pay £26.6 million to oust the Italian and his entourage and then, to add insult to his bruised credit card, in January 2020, Conte won his claim for unfair dismissal, which cost Abramovich an additional, if relatively token, £85,000. The most incredible element of the wrangling was that Conte chose to remain living in Cobham, a short walk from the club’s training ground, where many players and their families reside, for almost a year after being sacked. Residents would remark at how casually and comfortably he sauntered the district in spite of the acrimonious hue to his departure from the club.
There was also the rather swift manner in which Conte’s stock fell the season after winning the title. The 52-year-old expected a power shift, an increase in influence having secured the title in his first season, but Chelsea do not do gratitude. They are used to silverware and regard it as the norm that managers are paid handsomely for a reason, and that reason is not to dictate transfer policy. In the end Conte was forced into praising the work of the academy to appease his employer but the rift was not one that could be papered over.
The question mark over Conte is the sense of impermanence, that he offers a glamorous short-term and generously funded fix. On the other hand, his famous three-at-the-back formation, which was first deployed in anger at half-time after a mauling against Arsenal, does form the basis of Chelsea’s present success under Thomas Tuchel. Under Conte, however, the system became too defensive and his FA Cup triumph in 2018 was a joyless, stoic affair, while Abramovich has always preferred to win in style.
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Conte labelled himself “a serial winner” after that victory over Manchester United but he is also a serial non-compromiser and left Inter Milan in May after guiding the club to its first Serie A title in 11 years after being asked to trim the wage bill and the size of the squad. Is he the coach to reinvigorate Harry Kane? Diego Costa would say not, given the striker was a critical component of Conte’s success at Stamford Bridge but received word that he was no longer considered terribly useful via a text message from his manager. Kane needs something more carefully thought through — although Conte’s five title crowns, four of them in Serie A, may be enough on their own to inject energy into the entire Tottenham squad.
