“Certain loves don’t end — they make immense detours and then come back. Loves indivisible, indissoluble, inseparable.” The Antonello Venditti lyric that opens Gazzetta’s analysis of Antonio Conte and Juventus is not chosen accidentally. Few relationships in Italian football have quite the same unfinished quality as this one — the abrupt departure of July 2014, one day after reporting for his fourth pre-season at Vinovo, left a story suspended in mid-air that has never been resolved.
Despite subsequent “sporting betrayals” — the Inter adventure, the Napoli tenure, and the near-return in 2024 that ultimately led instead to a renewal with De Laurentiis — the Juventus faithful have never entirely let go of the manager who restored the club to the summit after Calciopoli and Serie B. And Conte himself has always maintained a powerful bond with Turin, where his family remained throughout his subsequent managerial career and to which he returned after leaving Napoli. He has come to believe, over the years, that the story was left genuinely unfinished. But would he come back mid-season if the situation at the club deteriorated sufficiently? And more importantly — could Juventus actually afford it?
Would Conte Come Back In-Season? The Historical Evidence
In his entire career, Antonio Conte has taken over a club mid-season on only three occasions. At Bari in 2007, he saved the club from relegation in Serie B and then won promotion. At Atalanta in 2009, he lasted thirteen matches before resigning. At Tottenham in 2021, he secured Champions League qualification, only to be dismissed two months from the end of the following season.
His preference, well-documented and entirely consistent with his methods, is to begin from the pre-season training camp — to imprint his mentality on the group from the very first day of preparation, to build the physical and psychological foundation that his football demands. When Napoli’s crisis under Rudi Garcia deepened in the autumn of 2023, he refused De Laurentiis’s immediate approach despite having verbally agreed to take charge the following summer. It was not that he lacked ambition or desire — it was that he understood his own methods well enough to know that arriving mid-season limits what he can do.
Juventus would be different. Not any club, but his club, the institution he represented as player and manager. For Turin — and only for Turin — an exception would be considered possible if the right conditions emerged.
The Financial Reality — Thirteen Million in Managerial Salaries
The conditions the article identifies as currently “distant from being met” are as much financial as sporting. The picture is stark and must be confronted honestly.
Spalletti is contracted at Juventus until June 2028 on over €5 million net per season. Conte’s most recent contract at Napoli was approximately €8 million plus bonuses annually. In the scenario of Spalletti being dismissed and Conte appointed as his replacement, Juventus would be paying over €13 million in managerial salaries simultaneously — before considering the costs of the respective coaching staffs, whose bills add millions more.
This is a figure incompatible with the financial objectives of a club that has set Break Even by 2028 as its primary accounting goal and expects to register approximately €60 million in losses in 2026 alone. The arithmetic does not work.
The Two Scenarios That Could Change the Arithmetic
Gazzetta identifies two possible paths to reconciliation. The first requires a financial gesture from Conte himself: accepting a significantly reduced initial salary — perhaps the €4 million he was reportedly willing to accept for the Italy job — with the prospect of a full arrangement from the summer of 2027 onwards, when Spalletti’s contract would in any case be entering its final year.
The second requires a decision from John Elkann that goes beyond financial logic — a personal and institutional choice to reunite two parties whose history together represents the foundation of everything the club has achieved in the modern era.
Both remain scenarios rather than plans. Carnevali has been explicit: changing manager is not in his spirit, Spalletti is not at risk, the current project deserves time and patience. But certain loves, as Venditti wrote, make immense detours. In Turin, on the morning after the Sassuolo defeat, this one is being discussed more widely than it has been for a very long time.
