Some footballers have the privilege of working under gifted tacticians and winners during their careers, but it’s the smartest players who take it upon themselves to become students. Antonio Conte was both influential and influenced during his decorated playing career at Juventus. The tenacious box-to-box midfielder spent his career learning and his premium apprenticeship was the kind of higher education any aspiring coach would have been desperate to embark on.

Conte learned from a quartet of esteemed Italian managerial minds: Giovanni Trapattoni, Marcello Lippi, Arrigo Sacchi and Carlo Ancelotti. He admired his teachers and the admiration was undoubtedly mutual. In Conte, his managers had a born leader, an influential voice in the dressing room who put the team first. Conte’s managers inherited an excellent midfielder who was central to Juventus for over a decade, while Conte himself received the ultimate coaching manual. The Chelsea manager has always believed that you are either with or against the team and that ideology has served him well.

Conte signed for Juventus in 1991 at a time when Milan had ascended to the pinnacle of Italian football. It was a rich and fascinating period in Italian football history. Milan had won back-to-back European Cups under revolutionary tactician Sacchi and the country had high hopes for the Azzurri after managing a third-place finish while hosting Italia 90.

Juventus were enduring a trying time. The Michel Platini-inspired Juve of Trapattoni’s first reign had become an increasingly distant memory. The club had last lifted the Scudetto in 1986 and had to watch on as Milan, Napoli, Sampdoria and Inter all tasted league success.

Conte did not win domestic silverware at Juventus under Trapattoni but this was a crucial time in his development. Arriving from the comparatively humble surroundings of Lecce, the 21-year-old midfielder felt awestruck by training alongside Stefano Tacconi, Totò Schillaci and Roberto Baggio, players he had idolised. Tender in years, Conte was overwhelmed by the challenge of proving himself worthy. “There was the great Trapattoni. There was Roberto Baggio. I was very emotional. I was a player-fan,” he later admitted. He had been a fundamental component of Lecce’s system under Eugenio Fascetti and later Carlo Mazzone, but this was a considerable step up.

At Lecce, Conte received crucial lessons in life and football from Lillino Caus and Carlo Mugo, a reputable pair of youth coaches who taught the Under-15s how to become professional footballers and respectable men. Conte was brought up in a strict household, too, with his parents Cosimino and Ada ensuring that Antonio and his two brothers, Gianluca and Daniele, kept their focus first on schoolwork, then on football. Conte’s father was a coach and influential figure at Lecce and he passed that wisdom on to his son.

Conte was always a good listener and excelled at school. Once his homework was done he would play football in the street outside his house and the priests would allow him to kick a ball around the church’s courtyard. Work and focus: two fundamental aspects of Conte’s life that were deeply instilled in him from the earliest age. At home, at school and while playing for Lecce, Conte had role models around him.

Giovanni Trapattoni while in charge of Italy in 2002. Photograph: Paolo Cocco/Reuters

So, when Conte arrived at Juventus, he was intimidated by the personalities who greeted him in the dressing room. Every young footballer needs a guiding hand and, for Conte, that help came from Trapattoni. Conte had come from the southern heel of Italy to the alien surroundings of Turin in the north. It felt cold and stark compared to the sun-soaked beaches in Lecce. “At the start I thought, why am I doing this, I’m earning more, but I’m away from home, from my friends, from the sea,” reflected Conte. “I only remained because I didn’t want to return as a loser. When I arrived, there was fog, cold and at the time my friends at home were on the beach. It was really tough to adapt to that.”

Adapting to Juventus was proving difficult and his first appearance in the famous black and striped shirt made things even worse. Trapattoni had noticed Conte in training. He was raw, but worth refining, so the manager gave him his first start in a friendly against Bayern Munich. It was a cagey affair that was ultimately decided when Conte misjudged his backpass to Tacconi, allowing Bayern to clinch victory in the cruellest of circumstances for Conte.

There is no hiding at Juventus. Headline writers forget about a player’s age when the team loses. The young midfielder was already struggling to acculturate, but his sense of inadequacy deepened following that mistake.

Trapattoni noticed a sullen Conte the next day. “I walked the next day and it felt like I’d be beaten up,” Conte remembered. “All of a sudden, Trapattoni appears out of nowhere and it was as if he could read my thoughts. He said, ‘You’re not still thinking about yesterday’s mistake, are you? Oh, come on! Think of the future, you’ll be here for many years, it’s all fine’. If Trapattoni hadn’t been there, I don’t know if I would’ve stayed at Juventus.” This brief but significant episode in Conte’s formative years was pivotal. Trapattoni offered sympathy but made Conte realise that the past could not be rewritten. Ultimately, Trapattoni and Conte did not take Juventus back to the summit of Serie A, but Trapattoni’s character had affected the young player.

Marcello Lippi reads the match report after winning the World Cup final in 2006. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters

The arrival of Marcello Lippi brought tremendous success. Lippi changed Juve’s system to a 4-3-3, deploying Conte on the left side of a midfield trio alongside Angelo Di Livio and Paulo Sousa. There were trying times at the start of the 1994-95 season, including a 2-0 defeat to Foggia, but Lippi’s team established a culture of winning that had been absent during Trapattoni’s second stint.

It was under Lippi, the mastermind who later led Italy to World Cup success in 2006, that Conte truly came of age. Lippi was an excellent communicator, a man who could control a training session expertly with the projection of his voice. He also attempted to maintain close relationships with his players, which alienated Roberto Baggio, but endeared Conte. The midfielder responded enthusiastically to Lippi’s coaching, admiring his clear ideas on football and the skill with which he expressed them.

However, under Lippi, Conte discovered how educational losing could be too. Lippi led Juve to league titles in 1995, 1997 and 1998, but the club also suffered a great deal of heartache during his time in charge. They marched to three consecutive Champions League finals in 1996, 1997 and 1998 but only managed to lift the trophy once. After beating Ajax on penalties in 1996 at the end of a tournament powered by the goals of Alessandro Del Piero and Fabrizio Ravanelli, they were shocked by Borussia Dortmund the following year and then lost the 1998 final to Real Madrid.

The victorious 1996 final had been bittersweet for Conte. He became a European champion but he had been forced to watch his team-mates complete the job from the bench. Conte was substituted after 44 minutes, replaced by Vladimir Jugović, who struck the decisive penalty in the shootout.

A year later, Conte was determined to make more of an impact on the final himself. Conte had risen from a troubled beginning at one of Italy’s prestige clubs to become their captain. From retreating into his shell at the sight of Baggio when he signed, Conte had earned the respect and trust of his peers to lead a dressing room that contained dominant personalities such as Zinedine Zidane, Edgar Davids, Didier Deschamps and Paolo Montero who, with 19 red cards over 10 seasons, knew how to put himself about.

However, his 1996-97 campaign was badly affected by injury and he missed much of Juventus’ run to the final. Conte was once again forced to watch on, this time from the stands, as a Dortmund side containing four former Juve players – Sousa, Júlio César, Jürgen Kohler and Andreas Möller – outsmarted Lippi’s men to win 3-1, their fate sealed by a wonderfully improvised lob from Lars Ricken with his first touch after coming on as a substitute. Conte remained on the bench until the 77th minute in the 1998 final against Real Madrid and was unable to stop Los Blancos winning their seventh European Cup.

Carlo Ancelotti has won the European Cup five times: twice as a player and three times as a manager. Photograph: Dani Pozo/AFP/Getty Images

The near-misses were valuable lessons for Conte but his most humbling experience as a player was still to come. Carlo Ancelotti succeeded Lippi in 1999 and his first season offered plenty of promise but delivered precious little. At 29, Conte was pretty much at his peak physically and had garnered a wealth of experience in his eight years at the club.

In Conte, Ancelotti saw an obvious choice as his onpitch lieutenant. Juventus were forced to play in the Intertoto Cup, an ignominious way to start the season for a club with such stature and history. They won it anyway, with Conte scoring in their two-legged final against Rennes.

Ancelotti had secured Champions League football for Parma but some Juventus supporters were sniffy about his appointment. Many of them did not want a Milan legend in charge but Conte saw beyond that, and, alongside Del Piero, Zidane and Davids, fired Juve into a seemingly unassailable lead atop Serie A.

Then the unthinkable happened. Juventus lost four of their last eight matches to surrender the title to Sven-Göran Eriksson’s Lazio in astonishing fashion. With Conte at the centre, Juve’s grip on the Scudetto slipped catastrophically, a season’s work unravelled over the final two months of the campaign. Conte’s reaction was as you’d expect: “That was devastating. For seven days I just didn’t sleep. Not a wink. We’d lost a Scudetto that we had already won.”

Conte lost World Cup and European Championship finals with Italy but relinquishing the league title to Lazio in such an embarrassing fashion has perhaps shaped him as a manager more than anything else. “When you lose, you learn,” he later reflected. “You try to see why you didn’t win. You learn a lot about yourself. To win is beautiful. I find the peace in myself when I win. For this reason, I want to work very hard and find solutions and to give options to my players. Only when I win am I relaxed.”

Antonio Conte took over at Juventus in 2011, implemented a 3–5–2 formation and won three consecutive Serie A titles. Photograph: Di Marco/EPA

Conte retired from playing in 2004 but was far from finished with football. His development as an influential player under Trapattoni, Lippi and Ancelotti made pursuing his own managerial journey inevitable. Like his playing career, there were bumps along the way. He began his managerial career in the 2006-07 season at Arezzo in Serie B but was sacked in October after nine games without a win. His successor fared even worse so Conte was reinstated in March. The team put together a run of five consecutive wins but the team was still relegated.

He was given another chance to prove himself in Serie B in December 2007 with Bari, who he led to promotion in his first full season in charge. After a disastrous stint at Atalanta, which ended after just 14 games, he moved on to Siena, where he earned promotion to Serie A. By the time Conte returned to Juventus, he was adequately prepared.

Juventus were still on their way back from the abyss when Conte took over in the summer of 2011. They were still recovering from the Calciopoli scandal and, while they gained immediate promotion back to Serie A in 2007, they were far from the irresistible force of the 1990s. The club only managed seventh-place finishes in the two seasons before Conte arrived but the board hoped he would bring greatness back to the club. Conte exceeded expectations, leading Juventus to the Serie A title while going unbeaten for the entire 2011-12 season.

He had no qualms about telling the squad he inherited what he thought of their recent endeavours. He let them know that seventh place was simply unacceptable for Juventus. Conte was fond of the 4-2-4 system when he became a manager and, while that had worked for him to a degree, he knew it wouldn’t fit in Turin. He switched to a 4-3-3 before tinkering once more to make it a 3-5-2, a formation that brought the best out of midfielders Andrea Pirlo, Arturo Vidal and Claudio Marchisio and allowed the wing-backs to support the strikers.

The improvements made in defence, though, were the most striking. Juventus had conceded 47 goals under Luigi Delneri in the 2010-11 season. Under Conte’s new system, they shipped just 20. With Leonardo Bonucci, Giorgio Chiellini and Andrea Barzagli all enjoying remarkable campaigns, Juventus became an incredibly difficult team to breach. Signing Pirlo on a free transfer from Milan was one of the great transfers of the modern era and the stylish playmaker pulled the strings throughout the season.

Conte had a profound impact on Pirlo, who spoke glowingly of his former boss in his autobiography I Think Therefore I Play. “When Conte speaks, his words assault you. They crash through the doors of your mind, often quite violently and settle deep within you. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve found myself saying: ‘Hell, Conte said something really spot-on again today.’ I was expecting him to be good, but not this good. I’ve worked with a lot of coaches and he’s the one who surprised me the most.”

Strengthened by his experiences as a player, Conte has been fuelled by an obsessive hatred of losing. His Juventus were never likely to surrender a title the way Ancelotti’s team did in 2000. Juventus maintained extremely high standards during his three-year reign, finishing the 2013-14 campaign with an unprecedented haul of 102 points, 17 above nearest challengers Roma.

Antonio Conte celebrates after Italy’s 2-0 win over Spain at Euro 2016. Photograph: Alex Grimm/Uefa/Getty Images

He earned his appointment as Italy manager but, in a way, it was always going to be difficult for him to replicate the success at Juventus, simply because international managers can’t spend as much time with their squad as club coaches. He breathes football, much like Sacchi did, but was forced to work without the players for long periods of the season.



His work as Italy boss is viewed as a success, mainly as Italians felt the squad he took to Euro 2016 was the least inspiring Azzurri team in half a century. He managed to carve out great performances from Emanuele Giaccherini, who was deemed surplus to requirements at Sunderland, Brazilian-born forward Éder and Graziano Pellè.

It became clear that Chelsea, who announced that Conte would join them after the tournament, were inheriting a remarkable manager during Italy’s opening fixture, a 2-0 win over Belgium, who many fancied as potential winners before the tournament. Italy won their group and then beat reigning champions Spain in the last-16 before losing on penalties against world champions Germany in the quarter-finals.

Conte had again exceeded expectations and there was a sense of anticipation about his arrival in the Premier League. Stumbles early on against Liverpool and Arsenal only served to galvanise Conte and his players and, since switching to a three-man defence, they have been unstoppable.

Juve was a kind of homecoming for Conte but moving to Chelsea was different. He had to adapt to England, learn a new language and live in a different culture. He responded in the only way he knows how: throwing himself into footballing matters. He took a side whose morale had plummeted under José Mourinho and reinvigorated their appetite for success.

Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of Conte’s management is producing results in such a short space of time. After assembling his squad for the Euros, Conte spoke of how he helped create a “family environment” for the players in just 45 days. At Chelsea he seems to have done something similar, building a squad that could dominate the Premier League for years to come.

Conte’s aptitude for learning has been a wonderful asset for him in the first decade of his managerial career. The skills and methods he has learned from Lippi, Trapattoni, Ancelotti and Sacchi have informed his understanding of how football should be played and he has expanded on their vision to fashion his own brand of football. His style of management is abrasive and blunt. Juventus defender Leonardo Bonucci called him “The Hammer” because he hammers points home emphatically, with an authoritative voice. Conte will also not hesitate before dropping a club’s star players should they step out of line – ask Diego Costa – but it yields undeniable results and that’s the important thing.

Conte once likened the feeling of defeat to death. Luckily at Chelsea, it doesn’t look as though he or his players will have to suffer a grim sense of mortality too often.

• This article is from These Football Times

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