It’s been a long old summer for Maurizio Sarri. After finding out via a news bulletin that Napoli were appointing Carlo Ancelotti and he would no longer be charge of the team but remain under contract, his future has been in a state of suspended animation.

Sarri did what he customary does at this time of year. He returned home to Tuscany. He watched some non-league football, taking in Sambenedettese’s game against Cosenza. Probably went back and re-read some of the Charles Bukowski and John Fante novels he loves. And was made an honorary citizen of Acquaviva Picena.

The undoubted highlight though was a dinner date at the Perla Verde restaurant with Pep Guardiola and Arrigo Sacchi in Milano Marittima shortly after the opening game of the World Cup 2018. Acts of escapism to distract Sarri from the complicated exfil operations going on in tandem to get him out of Napoli and Antonio Conte out of Chelsea without it costing a fortune.

FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Show all 22 1 /22 FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea <b>Chelsea:</b> Thibaut Courtois - 7 Started in his first FA Cup game since last season’s final. Had little to do in the first half but commanded his area well with the low evening sun in his eyes. Produced two standout saves in the second half to tip Phil Jones’s header away from goal, then to rush out and deny Marcus Rashford when he was through on goal. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Cesar Azpilicueta - 8 Read the game very well on numerous occasions and put in one particularly good interception to deny Paul Pogba a chance to shoot from the edge of the box. A very impressive defensive display. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Gary Cahill - 7 Captained the side after being called up to Gareth Southgate’s England World Cup squad. Barked orders all afternoon and held the Chelsea defence together. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Antonio Rudiger - 7 Put in some very good recovery tackles when Marcos Alonso had been caught out high up the pitch. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Victor Moses - 6 Was second best against Ashley Young and gave away a concerning number of fouls around the Chelsea penalty area. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea N'Golo Kante - 7 A vintage N’Golo Kante performance. He covered so much of the midfield and frequently popped up to win the ball back for his side. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Tiemoue Bakayoko - 7 Started fairly well and put some of his poor early season form behind him. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Cesc Fabregas - 7 Very good pass to Hazard to set him away to win the penalty. The weight of the ball took Jones out the game and invited Hazard to latch onto it and run through on goal. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Marcos Alonso - 6 Should have made it 2-0 when N’Golo Kante put the ball on a plate for him in the box but he took a touch then had a shot saved by David de Gea. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Eden Hazard - 10 Won and converted a penalty in the first half. Every time he got on the ball he caused the Manchester United defenders problems. His pace and close control bought him a penalty at the expense of Phil Jones and he showed great composure to slot the ball in from the spot. An absolute joy to watch, unless you're a Manchester United fan. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Olivier Giroud - 6 Fired Chelsea into the final with a fine individual effort against Southampton. Picked up his fourth FA Cup winners medal after not having a huge hand in the game. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea <b>Manchester United:</b> David De Gea - 7 Started in place of United’s cup goalkeeper Sergio Romero. Dived the wrong way when Hazard scored from the spot. Saved well from Alonso to keep it 1-0 Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Antonio Valencia - 6 Very poor going forward and lacked the ability to play decisive and accurate passes in the final third. Improved as the game aged and played some nice through balls from deep. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Phil Jones - 3 Had a very poor first half and conceded a penalty in the 22nd minute when he brought down Hazard who raced away from him after beating him in a sprint race. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Chris Smalling - 7 Olivier Giroud had a fairly quiet first half and this was down to Chris Smalling who won most the battles he needed to. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Ashley Young - 6 Provided an outlet for Manchester United but his intentions were fairly predictable when he had the ball at his feet. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Nemanja Matic - 6 Won and lost an FA Cup final for Chelsea. May have had his heart in his mouth when Tiemoue Bakayoko went down under his challenge in the box, but nothing was given. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Ander Herrera - 5 Was tasked with tightly marking Eden Hazard when Chelsea got on the ball, which is fine except he looked lost when United turned over possession. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Paul Pogba - 6 Showed glimpses of what he is capable of. In the last moments of the first half his driving run from his own half set up a very good chance for Marcus Rashford. Should have scored when he was unmarked from a corner but glanced a header from the six-yard box wide. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Jesse Lingard - 5 Endured a very frustrating first half and really struggled to get on the ball and influence the game. Came off in the 73rd minute. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Alexis Sanchez - 6 Had some nice touches on the ball but went very deep in search of possession which limited his influence. Getty FA Cup final player ratings: Manchester United vs Chelsea Marcus Rashford - 5 Started in place of Romelu Lukaku who revealed to Jose Mourinho he would only be fit enough for the bench. Had a first half to forget, which was optimised when he blew a great chance in front of goal by scuffing a shot from close range. Made way for Lukaku after 73 minutes. Getty

A heavy smoker at the best of times - Dries Mertens jokes Sarri lights up five packs a day - one imagines the 59-year-old’s nicotine intake has been higher than usual over the course of a saga that has featured so many twists and turns. With Conte unwilling to resign and leave a huge stack of money on the table, and the vacancies at PSG, Real Madrid and Bayern all filled, Chelsea found themselves engaged on two fronts. Over in Italy, Napoli looked at Sarri’s situation as no different to having a player on their books who has lost his place in the team to another. Whether he's on the bench or not, he still has value.

The buy-out clause in his contract, which expired last month fixed a price for him. Since then it has been up for negotiation and Napoli owner Aurelio de Laurentiis is no pushover. Put his name into Google Translate and it comes back in English as Daniel Levy. It’s enough to recall Kalidou Koulibaly’s anecdote about him demanding Genk knock more money off their asking price when he discovered the Senegal international was 10cm shorter than it said on the internet.

Thankfully, the wait is now finally over and about time too. Pre-season has already begun and the start of the Premier League is less than a month away. For a coach with as sophisticated a system as Sarri and one so radically different in style and emphasis to that of his predecessor, it's far from ideal to arrive this late. Nor does it help that several of Chelsea’s key players are either still involved at the World Cup or have only recently gone on shortened summer breaks. At least it seems Chelsea are inclined to bring in some plug-in and play Sarri disciples, most notably Jorginho, which will allow for an acceleration in making this team play as he would like.

Sarri arrives after a stellar spell at Napoli (Getty)

Chelsea fans have had to be more patient than most in recent summers and they'll need more of the same virtue now Sarri is here. While defending his treatment of the Tuscan this off-season, which he insists was not vindictive, De Laurentiis reflected on the early days of them working together.

Napoli came out of the blocks slow in Sarri's first season. They lost to Sassuolo on opening the day and won only one of their first five games. De Laurentiis recalls: “[Sarri] said: ‘President, let me do it my way. We’ll maybe lose the first seven games but then the results will start to come, you’ll see’.” But De Laurentiis was having none of it. “I told him I’d sack him after three defeats.”

It never came to that. Winter champions twice in his three years at the San Paolo no one has come closer to ending Napoli’s 28-year title drought than Sarri not to mention Juventus’ seven-year grip on the Scudetto. He had a team with the fifth highest wage bill punching way above its weight, establishing new club records one year and setting new personal bests the next. Last season Napoli became only the fourth team to break the 90-point barrier and the first not to win the league having done so.

Sarri came close to ending Napoli's 28-year title drought (Getty)

It was achieved not with spending but through coaching. Three years after Rafa Benitez left for Real Madrid, the team is more or less the same, which will no doubt have appealed to this more prudent iteration of Roman Abramovich's Chelsea. The only new recruit who turned into a first team regular under Sarri was Elseid Hysaj, the Albania international full-back who he brought with him from Empoli. Aside from Raul Albiol, Jose Callejon and Gonzalo Higuain, players Benitez attracted from Real Madrid and paid for with the money PSG paid for Edinson Cavani, the rest were signed from Udinese, Brescia, Verona and Bologna.

Sarri coached them into a new dimension. Higuain didn't just break the 20-goal ceiling that had eluded him under Benitez in Serie A, he scored 36 in one season, breaking a record that had stood since 1950. When he left and Arkadiusz Milik got injured, Sarri reinvented Dries Mertens into a prolific centre-forward and made you wonder why nobody else had tried that. Like Mertens, who Benitez never saw as more than an impact sub, Jorginho was brought in from the margins and made the brain of this team.

Jorginho will follow Sarri to Chelsea (Getty)

As disappointed as De Laurentiis was with Sarri's Hamletic musings about the club's ability to prevent the team from breaking up and whether or not he should stay on and see out the rest of his contract, there's no denying the Tuscan added a colossal amount of value to this group of players. He made Juventus think spending €90m to buy Higuain out of his contract wasn't ludicrous and Chelsea and Man City draw the conclusion €50m is not too high a price to bid for Jorginho.

In terms of making returns on Napoli's investments, Sarri evidently hasn't lost the touch he showed as a foreign currency trader working for the Banca Toscana until taking a leap of faith and deciding to dedicate himself full-time to coaching in 2001. That and the style with which his sides play has left Sarri in as much demand as his players.

Although Napoli didn't win anything in the three years he was in charge, Sarri expressed the hope they would be remembered like the great Holland side of the `70s; luminaries whose contribution to the game eclipsed defeats in back-to-back World Cup finals.

Sarri will bring a distinct style with him to Chelsea (Getty)

Deflecting the pressure that comes with a title challenge, Sarri said Napoli's objective was always "beauty." When he was named Italy's Coach of the Year in 2017 the judging panel acknowledged as much with a literary reference they thought the bookish Sarri would no doubt appreciate. "Dostoevsky wrote: 'Beauty will save the world'. Who knows if, as well-read a man and great a coach as Sarri was inspired by this quote over the course of a career which, from provincial pitches to those of the Champions League, has always had good football as its common denominator."

It has won admirers in high places. The reason Guardiola and Sacchi wished to have dinner with Sarri is simple; in him they see a kindred spirit. Sacchi tells a story about watching Napoli play Cagliari when the phone rang. It was Guardiola. "He said 'How good are Napoli? What a show they're putting on'." Students of the game flocked to watch them. Eddie Howe was an early adopter, taking advantage of the open training sessions Sarri used to put on at Empoli, building a relationship which led to a friendly with Bournemouth this year.

"Going to [Napoli's training ground] Castelvolturno is like going to Palo Alto," Gianluca Vialli explained. "There's innovation, creativity." And it's now relocating to Cobham.

Sarri is revered across Europe (Getty)

As he approaches his 60th birthday, Sarri's ideas have won the recognition they deserve. It has taken a long time to get this deal done. Even longer for the world to wake up to Sarri. Until 2014 he had never coached in the top flight, an oversight which prompted the Italian football community to ask itself how it had managed to miss one of the brightest minds of a generation when he was under their noses all along.