New Napoli coach: Benitez is waiting for a signal, he would return to Italy immediately

From our correspondent Davide Chinellato

May 23rd
– Liverpool (England)

Liverpool city center is just over half an hour away on a small train which stops every five minutes, but it feels like another world. There are the Beatles, the Reds and Everton, the buildings and the traffic. Here is the mouth of the River Dee, the Welsh mountains in the background, the wind sweeping beckoning kitesurfers to throw their boards in the water and the Irish Sea calling from afar, especially on a sunny day. It is Rafa Benitez’s buen retiro, his oasis of peace and tranquility ever since he landed in Liverpool to coach the Reds. It is from here that the 63-year-old awaits a call to re-enter the world of football. One that could come from Naples, with the Spanish coach well present in the casting that Aurelio De Laurentiis is doing to replace Luciano Spalletti.

Come back in

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Benitez wants to start coaching again. “No foreclosure towards Serie A if the context is right” he told the Gazzetta a month ago. He has been out since January 2022, when Everton sacked him seven months after making him the only coach in the modern era to have coached the two Liverpool teams. Many Premier League teams, a record season for changes on the bench, thought of him: West Ham, who finally kept David Moyes, and Leicester who dragged the relationship with Brendan Rodgers until the situation was desperate , more than the others. Rafa evaluated the talks, but always answered no thanks: “I want to be sure, my staff and I have managed to be competitive in many countries,” he said recently. The desire to coach has never left him, also because the Spanish coach hasn’t taken this season as a sabbatical year, but as an opportunity to update himself, to discover new ways of doing the job he does so well. He did it so much that his editorials in the Times and his Champions League interviews were so accurate as to have predicted both the importance of Kyle Walker’s defense against Vinicius in the semi-final between Manchester City and Real, and the path of the Inter.

Predictions

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Rafa had predicted something else: the Napoli championship. He had already told Luciano Spalletti in November, when the Italian champions had moved to Liverpool to play the irrelevant last match of the Champions League with the Reds. Benitez had been to visit the Azzurri in the hotel before the match, and had confided his ideas to the coach. It wasn’t just the wish of a coach who remained particularly close to Naples (“I’m proud that two of the 13 titles I’ve won came with that team”), but of a coach who has always been captivated by the team’s way of playing by Spalletti, from that 4-3-3 and from that system that closely resembles how he likes his teams to play. Benitez left Naples in 2015 almost slamming the door, but over the years he has so mended the relationship with De Laurentiis that the president often calls him to ask for advice and opinions on what is happening around Maradona.

The list

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It is inevitable, once decided to part ways with Spalletti, that Benitez ended up in the casting for the blue bench. He knows the environment, he’s respected, he loves the game system. And of the first names on the list, he is the only one who has already won the Champions League, that trophy that President De Laurentiis would love to compete for. From his castle overlooking the Irish Sea, in the peace so close to Liverpool, Benitez waits for a call to return. And if he came from Naples, if Maradona were “the right context”, it would be very difficult to say no.