Despite his best efforts at (more) sour grapes, Napoli owner Aurelio De Laurentiis has actually managed to pay his team’s former head coach a couple inadvertent compliments.

The man who loves the sound of his voice just a bit too much apparently just can’t quit his former employee who rejected him so publicly after three years together, launched a rather unprovoked broadside while talking with local newspaper Il Corriere di Mezzogiorno, attacking Sarri’s personality, beliefs, and even his timid, non-caring approach to the transfer market.

“Sarri seemed timid and I discovered he was so dissatisfied with his past (working in finance). For a Communist to base his profession on the evils of money brought him to suffer from a syndrome of dissatisfaction. “I found Sarri to be very highly-strung. His wife couldn’t even come to the stadium. I used to say to Sarri, who shall we buy? He’d reply that he didn’t want to know anything about it.” “I’d known Ancelotti for five years, but when we met up, I found a man who was relaxed and content, with a thousand interests you could sit down and talk about, without ever having to discuss football all night.”

At least De Laurentiis thinks he’s criticizing the man who followed his heart to quit the riches of high finance and coach football in the depths of the Italian lower divisions for peanuts, the man whose singular focus on his passion is unwavering (possibly to a fault, in fairness) and makes his poor conversationalist, and the man who simply can’t quite bring himself to care about transfer market games and shenanigans.

But looked at another way, those are all perfect qualities for a head coach, and the latter should certainly be kept in mind for the months (and hopefully years) ahead for all the upcoming headlines of Sarri “buying” players and “launching bids” and so on and so forth.

On a side note, yes, Carlo Ancelotti is all sorts of wonderful and he surely doesn’t deserve the treatment he’s going to get when the inevitable fallout with ADL occurs.

Meanwhile, amidst all the criticism, ADL does spare a thought for his own self-aggrandizement.

“I chose Sarri against everyone’s advice. At the time, the city was covered in banners protesting my decision. “He had a way of making himself adored even by the most extreme fringes of the fanbase. He’s an individualist, someone who suffered in the lower leagues on pitches with no grass and the odd stone. He’d also suffer because he tended to be fired after six games. “Then he had that run from Serie C to Serie A with Empoli and when we lost 4-2 against him, I thought he might be the right man for us.” -Aurelio De Laurentiis; source; Il Corriere di Mezzogiorno via Football Italia.

Thanks for finding him, ADL. That fact that he’s continuing to be so upset by all this is really a reflection of how much he hated to lose Sarri, which, in a backhanded way, is a huge compliment to the timid, football-obsessed Commie Banker’s talent as a coach.