Antonio Conte is best known today as a coach, recently the three-time Serie A champion with Juventus and currently the ambitious commissario tecnico of the Italian national team. But before that, he was a tough midfielder of humble origins who battled through sheer force of will to reach the captaincy of one of the top teams in Europe.
The Boy from Lecce
Antonio Conte was born on July 31, 1969 in Lecce, at the very tip of the far-southern Salento peninsula. He came from a working class family – his father owned a car rental business, his mother was a seamstress – who instilled a strict sense of discipline and responsibility in their three sons. Little Antonio was a serious boy, and took his studies seriously – asking his mother midway through first grade if he could change schools because they weren’t learning enough – but from earliest childhood, he dreamed of playing football.
His father Cosimo, in addition to his business, was the president, manager, kitman and general dictator of a local amateur team, AS Juventina Lecce. “The name of the club seemed to anticipate my destiny,” admitted Antonio later in his memoirs (published by Rizzoli in 2013.) The younger Conte was held to the strictest standard of professionalism by the elder, and quickly demonstrated himself to be a serious talent – so much so that the real professional team in town, US Lecce, invited him for a tryout with the youth ranks. Thirteen-year-old Antonio pleaded with Cosimo to be allowed to go, promising to continue focusing on his studies, and eventually Cosimo relented – but not without obtaining a transfer fee from Lecce in the princely sum of eight real leather footballs.
“We weren’t so much a football team as a total band of lunatics, raising hell everywhere we went and not understanding the meaning of the word “discipline.” Conte writes of the Lecce youth team with a mixture of embarrassment and nostalgia. He was considered “the serious one” of the group, as little as that frequently meant, but among all the pranks and late nights and ruined away games was a strong camaraderie and sense of team spirit that stayed with him and formed his character as a player and later as a coach.
He made his debut in Serie A at the age of 16, a late second-half sub in a dead-rubber match after Lecce’s relegation to Serie B had already been confirmed, but became a regular in the first team in the coming years. By 1989, the 20-year-old Conte was a starter, and wearing the number 10 shirt, it soon fell to him to go up against the most famous number 10 in world football: Diego Maradona. Instructed by his coach to mark Maradona specifically on defense, the young talent was well aware of the importance of the occasion.
“I couldn’t even close my eyes the entire night before the match,” recalled Conte, “and once I found myself face to face with him on the pitch I had to force myself to not pull my legs back out of his way – how could I have not felt that sort of reverential fear?”
Maradona did not score in that match. Conte, however, did. In what would end up the only goal he ever scored in the red and yellow stripes of his hometown team, the defensive midfielder pushed up through a break in the defense, received a pinpoint cross from a teammate and fired it home with perfect timing and composure. Lecce drew level with the powerhouse Napoli, and the assembled fans at the San Paolo were treated to the first occurrence of what would become a famous sight: Antonio Conte, mad with joy, running with arms outstretched toward his supporters as if to embrace them all in wild celebration.
A Long Journey North
In 1991, he had caught the attention of Juventus manager Giovanni Trapattoni, and the transfer was wrapped up quickly. Shockingly quickly for the young Conte, who writes openly about his mixed feelings at leaving his hometown club: “I was so sad I could die, leaving the boys I’d started this whole adventure with, we were really like brothers. But I kept asking myself, when will a chance like this come along again?”
The first year at Juventus was a difficult one. Starting from zero at an intimidatingly elite club, far from his friends and family, suffering through the foggy and rainy climate of Piedmont and wondering what had ever possessed him to leave his sunny Salento, Conte struggled with his confidence. On the pitch he was disorganized, hesitant and prone to errors. In his first match as a starter, a friendly against Monaco, he misjudged a pass back to goalkeeper Tacconi, gifting Monaco the game’s only goal and getting himself a disparaging headline in the next morning’s Gazzetta dello Sport. Conte recounts what happened next:
“I opened the paper, read the article, and wanted to disappear. That day I walked up and down Corso Vittorio Emanuele, back and forth, as if my steps could erase that awful error. At a certain point a car pulled up beside me, and the driver rolled down the window. It was Trapattoni. In an instant he understood my mental state and what I was doing. “Antonio, what’s the matter? Don’t tell me you’re still thinking about yesterday? Let it go, don’t worry about it!” he told me smiling. Then he rolled up the window and drove off. I have never forgotten that smile.”
Trapattoni had brought Conte to Juventus, convinced that he had found a diamond in the rough, and Trapattoni would forge him into a mature player. Every day at the end of training, he would stay an extra half hour working individually with Conte on refining his technique and tactical awareness. His faith and patience with his young protege were rewarded: by the beginning of next season, Conte had matured greatly both personally and as a player, and his Juventus career really began.
Il Capitano
Conte was a classic mediano, a tough and aggressive ball-winning midfielder occupied more with defense than offense, who ran tirelessly and covered great amounts of space. Watching him play, one had the sense that every game was a matter of life and death for him, to be approached with every fiber of his being. He was not a dirty player but was often a physical and combative one, and earned his fair share of yellow cards and early showers. But his commanding presence on the pitch and in the locker rooms, as his teammates have confirmed, was invaluable. He was made captain in 1996, eventually ceding the armband to one Alessandro Del Piero, but remaining a crucial leader within the squad.
He wasn’t a major goalscoring midfielder like Zidane or Nedved – his personal record for goals in a season was 7, achieved in both the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 seasons. In total, across 414 appearances in all competitions, Conte scored 44 goals for Juventus. 20 of those goals, however, were decisive: meaning that they salvaged a draw from a loss or a victory from a draw. And many of them were spectacular: a bicycle kick against Brescia, a wild diving header against Dortmund, a leap over Paolo Maldini against Milan. All of them executed with ferocious determination and all of them celebrated with unbridled joy – one, notoriously, against his old Lecce, which some Salentini fans still hold a grudge about.
Mixed with the triumphs, of course, were setbacks. He suffered more than his fair share of serious, career-threatening injuries: two broken legs, one at Lecce after a collision with a teammate and one on international duty with Italy after a vicious foul by a Romanian opponent; ruptured knee ligaments caused by nothing more than an awkward hasty change of direction; a bizarre deep muscular hematoma sustained in the 1996 Champions League final that forced him out of the game and then, slow to heal and plagued by complications, nearly put his entire subsequent season at risk. In his battles with injury, though, his greatest asset became apparent: his immense willpower and strength of character. A less determined player might have seen his career end after any of Conte’s incidents – eventually recovering physically, but not psychologically. For Conte, every injury was a personal challenge, a gauntlet thrown down, a test to overcome.
Unfortunately, his injuries often happened at exactly the “right” time to keep him out of contention for the Italian national team. His only World Cup was USA 1994, giving him the “privilege” of losing a final on penalties, and he missed out on both the 1996 Euros and the 1998 World Cup due to injury. Compared to his distinguished 414 appearances for Juventus, he only played in 20 matches for the Azzurri – a disappointing number for a player of his calibre.
By the 2003-04 season, Antonio Conte found himself being quietly pushed to the margins of Juventus. His captaincy had long since passed to the technically dazzling and media-friendly striker Alessandro Del Piero, his goal tally had dwindled to one or two a season, and he found himself more often than not starting from the bench. The final straw came during negotiations for his last contract renewal, when Juventus director Luciano Moggi abruptly changed the proposal from a two- to one-year contract, with a pay cut so significant as to strike Conte as insulting. Rather than accept a deal he found disrespectful, Conte decided that his time at Juventus had at last come to an end after 13 seasons. He briefly flirted with the idea of returning to Lecce for one final season before retirement but eventually decided against it out of respect for Juventus and Lecce supporters both, and hung up his boots for good.
He never had an official testimonial match to say farewell to the club he had been a symbol of; much less a lap of honor around a packed, delirious stadium waving goodbye to his adoring fans. Instead, for his final day as a football player, a group of fans, relatives and friends organized a friendly match at a small field on the outskirts of Torino. He battled for victory with every fiber of his being, of course. But in the end, Antonio Conte left his life as a player the same way he had begun it: as a humble boy among ordinary folk, playing with his friends for sheer and unquenchable love of the game.
The post When Coaches Were Players: Antonio Conte appeared first on Italian Football Daily.
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