When Antonio Conte began learning the English language there was one word in particular he wanted to be taught. In Italian, they say soffrire. It’s a phrase heard so frequently across his training pitches from Arezzo to Inter Milan via Juventus. Soffrire summed up Conte’s approach as a coach, and so it was crucial to learn the translation when he landed at Chelsea in 2016.
“To suffer,” Cesc Fabregas says. “This was always repeated, it was always in his mouth. He would say, ‘We need to be ready to suffer, ready to suffer, ready to suffer.’ He wanted to make sure we were training so hard and the training was to suffer — even sometimes thinking that you would not make it to the end of the session. But you have to be mentally strong. You have to make sure you suffer a bit.”
Because the outcome, more often than not, is worth it. From promotion to Serie A with Bari to three consecutive scudetto with Juve, and a fourth with Inter this year, having won the Premier League and FA Cup at Chelsea, Conte’s methods have always delivered success. It’s a trend Tottenham Hotspur hope continues after this week convincing him to replace Nuno Espírito Santo as the club’s head coach and work his magic on their squad.
And so Conte returns as a Premier League coach, starting on Sunday against Everton at Goodison Park, with Tottenham’s players preparing for a man who shows the extremes of emotion, from throwing water bottles around a changing room in anger and yelling at the top of his lungs to launching himself into the supporters with unbridled celebration.
History has a warning for them: either go along for the ride or be cast aside. “It’s very hard, it’s very demanding,” Fabregas tells The Times. “If you want to perform well under him you need to breathe football, you need to live football 24/7, you need to go to training ready to spend a lot of energy in areas you probably thought was not possible. You play well for him, you work hard for him, and if you don’t and are going your own way then, you will not be in his plans.”
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Such ruthlessness was seen in 2011 when Conte secured his first job at an elite level with Juventus. He was an icon of the club, a former captain in the era of absolute dominance with five scudetto in eight years and a Champions League. Conte felt a duty to return Juve to its original status having slipped into mediocrity with two seventh-place finishes after the Calciopoli match-fixing scandal. “Lads,” he said, addressing the players at their first meeting, “it’s time we stopped being shit.”
Claudio Marchisio, the former Juventus midfielder, had been a teammate of Conte when he was captain of the club. “He criticised some players like [Gianluigi] Buffon, [Giorgio] Chiellini and me,” Marchisio, 35, tells The Times. “Gigi had won quite a lot, Georgio had been playing for quite a while, and I also had quite a lot of appearances in the team. He specifically said that the team is shit and that he wanted Juventus to be back on track.”
They would do it, but his way. To illustrate how serious he was, Conte sent an early message to the squad. They were on pre-season tour in the United States. “He uses lots of videos,” Marchisio explains. “We used to watch a lot to prepare the matches. At that time a player arrived from Sampdoria, [Reto] Ziegler. He was not really in line with Conte’s idea of using videos, not really participating, and that’s why he never played because it was against Conte’s idea.”
Marchisio represented Italy when Conte surprised the country by accepting the role as national team manager. “Everybody thought it was not really his cup of tea because he was used to working 365 days a year but with the national team that was not possible,” Marchisio explains. “But I remember when we were at Coverciano [the Italian Football Federation’s headquarters] he obliged us to attend training sessions until late, even when the lights were going down and it was very difficult to see, just because he had less time and wanted to exploit every possible moment in order to make the most of it.”
Those who buy into the methods are rewarded. At Inter, Romelu Lukaku’s status grew under Conte and he became considered one of the world’s best strikers, but there was no escaping scrutiny. “What I’m living with Antonio is in front of everybody,” Lukaku, now of Chelsea, told The Times last year. “His videos — he calls you out in front of everybody if you’re not in the right positions. That’s what I love about Antonio. He understands me better that I’m that beast, that I want it so bad, that I’m willing to go to the extremes to get it.”
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Fabregas was one of the beneficiaries despite a difficult start. “The first four or five months was very difficult because it’s a demanding methodology,” he says. “You need to adapt, and you know with Antonio I needed to adapt even double, but I did it. It was a little bit like going to school. I had always been a player that tried to do the best by acknowledging the game by myself and tried to show what I feel inside, and he was basically telling me what I had to do in every single move.
“I’d never had someone that was telling me where I had to pass the ball. I always passed the ball where I felt was the best option for me. What I felt straight away with Antonio was that it’s his way — he has everything studied, everything in his books, and he will tell you what the best way to go forward and win games.”
Such tactical intelligence was first, and most memorably, seen at Arsenal eight weeks into the 2016-17 season when Chelsea were 3-0 down at half-time. Conte switched the formation to his preferred three-at-the-back and the improvement was immediate. Chelsea dominated the second half and won their next 13 consecutive league games on their way to lifting the Premier League title. But one of the most memorable moments of those early days for the players was the Tuesday after losing to Arsenal.
“He made training so hard, he was not talking to anybody, just making sure we put a big session in our legs — run, run, run,” Fabregas says. “That week was all about building up a new formation, but this training on the Tuesday after Arsenal felt like a bit of a punishment. For him, sometimes, if you don’t play well or he doesn’t think you are the right level as a team he will put a big session which shows he is upset with you, to make us pay for the game. But it works. He wants a reaction from the team.”
Andrea Pirlo has described drinks being thrown across the Juventus dressing room and recalled how Conte “assaulted” players with words. “Its not that he gets angry and upset so easily,” Marchisio said, “he just gets angry when he knows you can do much better, that there is room for improvement. This is the only reason why he gets upset.”
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Fabregas concurs. “Sometimes you need to be like that, ruthless and aggressive, to win games and especially to win the Premier League against [Pep] Guardiola, against [Jürgen] Klopp, against [José] Mourinho at Man United at the time,” the Monaco midfielder says. “He was a hard coach, 100 per cent, but he was a nice human being. Of course, sometimes as a player you want everything nice but he has his way of competing and he has his way of lifting the players.”
Such generous testimonies partly come from a history of success. Fabregas won his second Premier League and FA Cup winners’ medals with Conte, while Marchisio’s collection of Serie A titles began after his arrival. “He works hard for days like this,” Fabregas says. “Imagine how he is upset when you don’t win, but in the same way he was so happy and full of emotion when you win. He was so satisfied and full of gratitude to the players.”
The end with Conte is often ugly. His departures from clubs are largely down to fallouts with employers, usually over the transfer market. And yet both Fabregas and Marchisio suggest there is also a limit to his methods, only so long players can meet his demands and soffrire.
“He decided to leave when it was very difficult for him to keep up the same pace he had maintained for four years and he probably realised it would not be possible to continue going on like this,” Marchisio says of Conte’s exit in 2014.
“Once you bring the foot off the gas a little bit then it cannot work,” Fabregas says. “It needs to be always 100 per cent. Once the players cannot achieve that is when the methodology doesn’t work as well. You need to be ready to suffer every day, as he says.”
