Why is Napoli struggling to defend their Serie A title?

Napoli was unstoppable in Italy last season as they emphatically ended their decades-long wait to be champions of Italy and we can all understand why people have been baffled by their performance this term.

The Italian top flight has been dominated by Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan in the last few decades. Napoli did not win any of it for the past 30 years, making it easy to overlook them as favorites in most campaigns.

Under Maurizio Sarri, they had an amazing chance to be champions on at least two occasions and were one of the best teams in Europe, but Juventus under Max Allegri remained far too strong for the men from Naples.

The Bianconeri are still one of the biggest clubs in the world, but Napoli was unstoppable last season.

Luciano Spalletti deserves a lot of credit for developing a team that had just lost the likes of Dries Mertens and Lorenzo Insigne and winning a league crown with them.

They were so good that they handed the chasing pack a huge gap by the midway point of the season and we all knew it was a matter of time before they were named champions.

That victory made more football fans buy Napoli tickets, as they expected this team to become one of the world’s top sides.

Italian football has been considered boring for decades because of the defence-first approach to games.

However, Napoli played fantastic attacking football with the likes of Piotr Zielinski, Victor Osimhen and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and showed it could be done in Serie A.

The Naples club was one of the top sides in the world and ended the campaign as deserved champions of Italy.

Watching them struggle this season is hard to understand when you consider how good they were as a team in the last campaign. What could be the issue?

Managerial changes

One of the biggest determinants of a team’s success in any season is its managerial stability.

This is why most clubs become successful as a reward for sticking with a manager for a long time.

Napoli had Spalletti on their books for two seasons after Gennaro Gattuso had done some fine work on the team seasons before.

You cannot say Napoli was in good shape when Spalletti got the job, but that first season was enough time for him to understand his squad and find a system that played to their strength.

Despite losing the likes of Mertens and Insigne in his second season at the helm, they still won the league because he now had a blueprint to achieve success.

The Partenopei went to the transfer market and signed the players that his team needed to replace the top stars who had left.

The system he had mastered made it easy for the new signings to find their feet quickly and they won the league.

Unfortunately, Spalletti asked to leave the club after winning the league and has since become the manager of the Italian national team.

He was replaced by Rudi Garcia, a surprise move because fans had expected a more successful coach to be brought in.

As most would have predicted, the Frenchman did not last long and was already gone after just 16 games in charge, having won just 8 of those games.

Napoli has just replaced him with Walter Mazzarri, another underwhelming name who does not have the pedigree of Spalletti.

Garcia has not had a successful managerial spell since he won the league in France with Lille in 2011.

But should he have been given more time on the job by Napoli? Certainly, as we have discussed, managers need time and Spalletti had a season behind him before he won the league.

Mazzarri is now at the helm and will need all the time in the world to transform the team, but we know Aurelio de Laurentiis and he is not one of the owners with a lot of patience with their managers.

But the ideal situation would be for him to give Mazzarri more than enough time to understand his team before he can bring success back.

Sale of a key player

After winning the league, Napoli fans would feel their team was now one of the top sides in the league, and one way to show you are a big club was to keep your best players.

Napoli managed to keep the likes of Victor Osimehn and Piotr Zielinski, who had played very important roles in their success in the last campaign.

This is impressive, considering that many top clubs wanted to sign them. However, Napoli lost its most important defender as Kim Min-jae moved to Bayern Munich.

The South Korean was the heart of their defence last season and the few games that he missed for them ended in defeats.

Napoli should have made him untouchable, but they did not and lost the defender whose departure left a huge void to be filled.

While Zielinski stayed, the midfielder has a contract that is running down and certainly is a player who should have signed a new deal now.

Although he plays for the team, his mind is at another place now as he seems set to depart.

This uncertainty over his future is as good as already losing him, because the contract talks and attention from other clubs will make him think about other teams instead of playing football.

Lack of motivation

Winning your first league crown is a huge achievement, but maintaining that level for several seasons is a different case entirely.

Most Napoli players who won the league with them last season had never won a title in their careers, so that win was a big one.

Players like Cristiano Ronaldo are always hungry, no matter what goal they want to achieve, but not every footballer is that special.

Napoli players look more than satisfied with being Italian champions and they lack the motivation to defend the title.

A core of the group that emerged as champions remains in Naples, yet they seem more than happy to have one league title to their names, so they have not seen a need to work hard and win another title.

This lack of motivation will not get them another title this season and finishing inside the top four will be difficult for them.

To stop this rot, the club must appoint a manager who can be an inspirational figure to the group, just as Spalletti was in the last campaign.

Uncertainty over the future of key players.

Apart from Piotr Zielinski, whose contract runs out at the end of this season, several Napoli players have an uncertain future at the club.

Victor Osimhen has yet to sign a new contract, and the Nigerian has been involved in at least one controversy with the club that saw him delete all the pictures of him in a Napoli shirt.

The top European clubs are also following Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and they have failed to agree to terms of a new contract with the Georgian star.

Clubs who could not poach members of the title-winning team in the summer will return at the end of this term to sign them again and if Napoli does not have them on new deals, these players will leave.

They will likely be speaking to potential suitors already, affecting their performances on the pitch.

Napoli has been dismal this season and winning the league last season was clearly a one-off. We do not expect them to compete this term or next if they do not make the right decisions.