Luciano Spalletti, the Juventus coach whose exits outlast his trophies

Luciano Spalletti

Photo: Quirinale / Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 7, 1959 Certaldo
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Serie A 2022-23 · Coppa Italia ×2 · Italian Super Cup 2007 · Russian Premier League ×2 · Russian Cup 2009-10 · Super Cup 2007 · Serie A Title 2023
Individual awards	Serie A Coach of the Year · Italian Football Hall of Fame · Panchina d'Oro

At the final whistle of a win over Napoli in Turin, Luciano Spalletti pulled his staff into a long embrace and then turned to the people who had been whistling his players. Stop, he asked them, and stand with the team. It was an odd role for a man whose last great season ended with Naples dancing in the streets. Spalletti now coaches Juventus, the club his Napoli side humiliated on the way to the title, and the question his career keeps asking has followed him to Turin: can a coach who builds some of the most inventive teams in Italy survive the politics of the clubs that hire him? His football has rarely been the problem. His endings nearly always are.

He came to the game late and from below. A son of Certaldo, the Tuscan hill town outside Florence, Spalletti did not make a living from football until his mid-twenties, when he became a midfielder in the third tier with Entella, Spezia, Viareggio and finally Empoli. Nobody in those years mistook him for a future Serie A coach, and he has never pretended otherwise.

The coaching came almost by accident. When his playing days ended at Empoli in 1993, at thirty-four, the club kept him on, and within five seasons he had taken the Tuscan side from Serie C1 to Serie A with consecutive promotions. At the federation’s school in Coverciano he graduated in 1999 with the top mark of 110 cum laude, with a thesis on the 3-5-2. Short spells at Sampdoria, Venezia and Ancona followed before Udinese, where a modest squad finished fourth in 2004-05 and reached the Champions League.

That result sent him to Roma in 2005, and to the idea that made his name. Midway through his first season, Spalletti moved Francesco Totti to the tip of a 4-2-3-1 with no fixed striker, a false nine before the phrase was common in Italy. Roma won eleven Serie A matches in a row in 2006, a league record at the time, lifted the Coppa Italia in 2007 and 2008, took the 2007 Supercoppa and beat Real Madrid home and away in the Champions League in 2008. Money ran short, results dipped, and he resigned in September 2009.

Russia gave him the trophies Italy had withheld. At Zenit St Petersburg he won the Russian Premier League in 2010 and 2011-12, plus the Russian Cup and the Super Cup, and took the club into the Champions League knockout rounds for the first time. He was dismissed in March 2014 after two seasons without silverware. A second spell at Roma from 2016 brought third and second places, and a move to Inter in 2017 returned the club to the Champions League for the first time in six years, twice in a row. Inter let him go in May 2019, and he spent two years away from the bench.

Napoli was the reward for waiting. In 2022 the club sold or released Kalidou Koulibaly, Dries Mertens, Lorenzo Insigne and Fabián Ruiz, and fans expected a transition year. Instead Spalletti built a fast, fearless side around Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, Victor Osimhen and Kim Min-jae, beat Juventus 5-1 in January 2023 and reached the club’s first Champions League quarter-final. On 4 May 2023 Napoli won the Scudetto, their first since 1990. A few weeks later he was gone.

The pattern is hard to ignore. In 2016 Totti criticised him in public and Spalletti dropped him from the squad, a feud that soured his Roma return and that both men later patched up. In 2019 he stripped Mauro Icardi of the Inter captaincy amid a contract standoff. His exit from Napoli he later blamed on a running conflict with president Aurelio De Laurentiis, who, he wrote, did not phone him on the night of the title. The Italy job, which he took in September 2023, exposed something harder: his teams need time and daily contact, and a national side gives neither. Italy went out of Euro 2024 in the round of 16 against Switzerland, with reports of tension in the squad, and Spalletti said the failure came from his own team selection. In June 2025, after a 3-0 defeat in Norway in World Cup qualifying, he announced his own dismissal at a press conference and stayed on for one last match against Moldova.

Juventus called that autumn. He replaced Igor Tudor in October 2025 with the club seventh in Serie A, on a contract of eight months. In April 2026 the club extended it by two years, but the season ended badly: Juventus lost a Champions League play-off to Galatasaray and finished sixth, two points short of the top four. This season has swung harder. A 3-0 home defeat by Lazio and a 2-0 loss in Genoa brought boos, a training retreat and newspaper talk of Antonio Conte; a 2-0 win over Massimiliano Allegri’s Napoli on the first of November lifted Juventus to 17 points after ten rounds, every league win so far with a clean sheet. In the Europa League they opened with a 5-0 win over NEC Nijmegen.

Away from the touchline, Spalletti lives with his wife Tamara on a family farm on a ridge outside Montaione, in the Tuscan countryside he comes from; they have three children. In 2025 he published Il paradiso esiste… ma quanta fatica, an autobiography written with the journalist Giancarlo Dotto, as frank about his quarrels as about his teams. He was named Serie A Coach of the Year in 2006, 2007 and 2023, won the Panchina d’Oro twice and entered the Italian Football Hall of Fame in 2023.

His next test is in Florence, against Fiorentina on 8 November, a short drive from the town where he started. The question in Turin is whether he can stay long enough for his football to arrive.

Tags: sports, athletes, football managers, Inter Milan, AS Roma, Juventus, Francesco Totti, Luciano Spalletti