Coach Antonio Conte has led SSC Napoli back up and is heading into the top game at Atalanta Bergamo as Serie A leaders. But he will soon have to make do without a star player who has a part of Maradona in his nickname.
The video is certainly not lacking in pathos. With his wife Nitsa Tavadze, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia walks into the empty SSC Napoli stadium, under an umbrella, in heavy rain. There is a sequence in which he shows his son Damiane, who is not even a year old, his jersey with the number 77 in the dressing room.
The maximum level of pathos, how could it be otherwise in Naples, is only reached when Maradona comes into play. “Goodbye Diego, goodbye Naples,” says Khvicha Kvaratskhelia in his native Georgian.
“Kvaradona” champion in his first season with Napoli
They called their number 77 “Kvaradona” because he played such wonderfully tricky football, mostly on the left wing, and he also scored goals. He received the honorable nickname primarily because Khvicha Kvaratskhelia became champions in 2023, in his first season at Napoli.
Maradona, the late legend of football, idolized in Naples as well as in his native Argentina, was twice champion with the SSC. Khvicha Kvaratskhelia could have done that too, because the team goes into the top game of Serie A on Saturday (January 18, 2025) at Atalanta Bergamo as league leaders.
But Kvaratskhelia will – as has become apparent in recent weeks and was finally confirmed by Paris Saint-Germain late on Friday evening – leave the club and move to a club for which a championship is just another for a rumored transfer fee of 80 million euros Title of those who do not satisfy any longing. PSG wants to win the Champions League. They’ve never done that before, not even with Lionel Messi, the living Argentine legend. Not with Kylian Mbappé, not with Neymar, and not when the three played together in the French capital.
Championship celebration with wife: Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Nitsa Tavadze
Can Napoli become champions without Kvaratskhelia? The 23-year-old Georgian scored five goals in 17 games, which is only two fewer than Romelu Lukaku, the center forward.
But at SSC the main thing is not to concede any goals. There have only been twelve in 20 games. That’s twelve too many for Antonio Conte, who sometimes seems apathetic when he sits in his coaching bench, but also quickly becomes Rumpelstiltskin, preferring to show his players with his own twists how they can take a throw-in on the halfway line to the free-standing central defender get it done.
Antonio Conte has already won championships with Juve and Inter
Conte won championships and the Champions League as a player, as a coach he led Juventus to the championship three times and Inter once, and in England he achieved this with Chelsea FC.
Antonio Conte has brought Napoli out of a slump. The defending champion only finished tenth last season. But that might help now, because the lack of games and trips in the European Cup saves energy. Seven players have played 18 or more out of a possible 20 games in Serie A, and that doesn’t even include goalkeeper Alex Meret, who kept a clean sheet in 11 of 17 games. Only once did he concede more than one goal. That was in the first leg against Atalanta, when the team from the north won 3-0.
In the press conference before the second leg, Conte briefly discussed the impending departure of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia. The departures of Victor Osimhen (Galatasaray) and Piotr Zielinski (Inter) in the summer would have changed the face of Napoli quite a bit. Now, without “Kvara”, his team is completely different to the one that won the Scudetto in 2023.