My journey into Conte's head and thoughts

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I met Antonio Conte personally a little over a year ago, it was the spring of 2024. We are the same age, we both live in Turin, we have been (he, as is well known, still is) club coaches, but also technical commissioners of the Italian national team in team sports with global diffusion such as football and volleyball. Antonio was still a "free" coach at that time, the Napoli option was only just beginning to emerge on the horizon. So many similarities, and one big difference: he was also a great athlete who won everything; I didn't, not at all. We spent a lot of time discussing this, reasoning about advantages and disadvantages: "Not having played allows you to push your athletes to overcome their limits, because you don't know them, but for the same reason the risk is to send them out of gear" , he told me, "yes - I replied - there is a risk and a price to pay, but also the advantage of acting free from any type of conditioning". This is how our chats began, in front of his curiosity in trying to understand how acceptable, for me, the idea of ​​not coaching for a long time (for ten years I have been doing something completely different) and my admiration in recognizing his interpretation of the work in an all-encompassing, absolute, devoted way.

This is the genesis of Antonio Conte with Mauro Berruto, Dare tutto, domanda tutto (Mondadori, 2025), not strictly a football book, but a dialogue and an in-depth reflection (in unsuspected times) by Antonio Conte, the coach who for the umpteenth time has demonstrated the ability to have a sensational impact on the teams that call him to lead them. “Unsuspected times” because the book was born from those chats a year ago, in the serenity of Antonio's home, in his study where the cloth of a Subbuteo with two teams lined up is always open, halfway between a reminder and an experience simulator. “Unsuspected times” because we finished this work two months before the end of the championship, at a time when no one could know how it would end, and which, as happens when good energies align, came out four days after the Scudetto victory . It's nice, for me too, to reread it and find things that proved decisive in his triumphal ride with Napoli: rediscovering priorities, seeing concepts expressed on paper transform so effectively on the field. Among the many suggestions I will summarize some, starting with the difference between "being" a coach and "doing" a coach, perhaps Antonio Conte's most explicit calling card. His profession coincides with his life, that verb "to be" conveys the idea of ​​a man unconditionally devoted to the cause and who has, among many, an absolute value: exemplary. Precisely that desire to be a "living example" is a guarantee of credibility, coherence, solidity and is the necessary ingredient to achieve what the title evokes: before "asking for everything", you need to "give everything."

The initial and final parts of the book are in dialogic form, while the three central chapters summarize Conte's thoughts on the art of coaching. Be careful: do not expect a manual, but a series of principles that guide the actions of those who are called to build teams and orient them towards a goal, whether it is a sports field, a company, a school, a hospital, a community. Three stages, equally important, but which occur in a precise chronological sequence: "inspire, work, measure". A coach must first of all know how to inspire, imagine a world that at that moment no one sees yet and create the conditions so that other people want to belong to that world. It is an exercise that precedes technical and tactical skills, specific competences, similar to what screenwriters do when they define the narrative world of a novel or a film. It is a part of the work that we could define as "visionary", but essential as the incipit of a project. Then comes the moment perhaps most loved by Antonio Conte: that of daily work, of “work, work, work”, as he said in the presentation press conference at Chelsea in 2016, when a journalist from the New York Times calculated that Conte used the word “work”, or a derivation of it, 32 times in less than an hour.

All this work, this sweat, this remembering that there are no shortcuts, this wonderful (and so necessary, these days) apologia for fatigue makes sense when phase three comes into play: “measure”, or the step linked to the ability to obtain concrete feedback, objective evaluations that do not bend to overly personal interpretations, a fact that makes Antonio Conte an extremely modern coach, curious, capable of experimenting, hyper-attentive to novelties and the use of technology.

In the pages of this book, a romantic and visionary interpretation of the role emerges together with an absolute concreteness, made of very high demands, but always objectifiable. All mixed with a clear concept, which pervades all of Conte's experiences, both as an athlete and as a coach: a real hatred for defeat, a physical sense of pain that pushes you to do everything possible to not lose again. The last lines of Give everything, ask everything sound like a presage: written, in fact, months ago, they refer precisely to the moment in which the objective is achieved and perhaps one forgets to celebrate properly. Thinking about that recent tsunami of happiness, about those over 350 thousand people who crowded the Naples seafront to greet the Italian champions, makes you read the last page with different eyes: “If you don’t remember to celebrate them, some of those unrepeatable moments become a regret. To all my colleagues, coaches, whatever the playing field and whatever championship their teams compete in, today I say: celebrate the achievement of your goal! I love my profession and I still have a huge desire to win. What I am sure of is that, when it happens, I will not forget to celebrate every moment, nuance, detail. And then start again.” Start again, always raising the bar: first your own and then that of others.

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