Napoli look to buck recent history and retain crown in wide open Serie A

The post-Scudetto cleanup in Naples took more than a month, local authorities reporting they had gathered up enough banners and blue and white ribbons to cover the length of 400 football pitches. Those were just the ones hung on public property. In bars, restaurants and the windows of homes all over the city, Napoli’s first Serie A title in 33 years will continue to be celebrated as long as there are people to remember it.

Now, though, they must defend their crown. Easier said than done: Italy has had a different champion in each of the past four seasons. A near-decade of Juventus hegemony was broken by Inter, who were dethroned by Milan before the Partenopei’s triumph last term. All of those teams could challenge again, but each has questions to answer.

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For Napoli, the great unknown is the manager. Luciano Spalletti has gone and the decision to replace him with Rudi Garcia was so unexpected that some of the club’s directors were reported to have learned about it from the Twitter account of the owner, Aurelio De Laurentiis.

Garcia has won a single league title, at Lille in 2011 with a team featuring a young Eden Hazard. He steered Roma to consecutive runners-up finishes during his previous stint in Italy before being fired midway through his third season. His replacement, coincidentally, was Spalletti. The Italian collected 12 more points in the second half of that campaign than the Frenchman had managed in the first.

De Laurentiis’s hope will be that Garcia still has the magic touch for getting the best out of individual talents, as he did for Hazard at Lille, Miralem Pjanic at Roma and Memphis Depay at Lyon. Joe Cole claimed to have learned more about tactics from Garcia than he did from José Mourinho or Carlo Ancelotti.

Garcia will not try to reinvent the wheel, keeping a shape similar to Spalletti’s 4-3-3, but early indications are that he will have his team play with a less consistently high line. That would be a shift in identity for a side who often overwhelmed opponents with their constant readiness to press, to dribble and to make plans on the fly.

The core of the title-winning team remains, and the greatest talents – Victor Osimhen and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia – appear closer to signing new deals than departing. Yet a defensive pillar has been lost with Kim Min-jae’s sale to Bayern Munich and Napoli did lose steam in the final months of last season. A league table formed of results from March would have them fourth and Lazio as champions.

Could the Biancocelesti, runners-up in the real standings, launch a serious challenge? Never say never, but Sergej Milinkovic-Savic’s departure for Al-Hilal leaves a gap that will be hard to fill. Rather than seek a direct replacement, Lazio have reinvested in an array of young talent that will give them more depth as they return to the Champions League.

Taty Castellanos, prolific for New York City FC in Major League Soccer and productive on loan at Girona last season, offers an alternative to Ciro Immobile up front. Daichi Kamada, Gustav Isaksen and Diego González add options behind the attack. Nicolò Rovella brings fresh legs to the midfield after an impressive season at Monza. But is this group really ready to fight for a Scudetto?

Inter may be a more obvious candidate. They ended last season in a Champions League final, standing toe-to-toe with Manchester City. Yet theirs has been a chaotic and sometimes humiliating transfer window. André Onana, Edin Dzeko, Romelu Lukaku, Marcelo Brozovic and Robin Gosens have gone and although only the first of those was a fixed starter, depth was a crucial asset last season.

One transfer target after another has been missed. Attempts to bring back Lukaku were abandoned after he flirted with Juventus. Inter were outbid by Atalanta for Gianluca Scamacca and couldn’t get close to Arsenal’s asking price for Folarin Balogun. A deal for Udinese’s Lazar Samardzic collapsed amid reports that the club refused to make a €300,000 (£255,900) commission payment to the player’s father.

Instead, it appears that their most lavish signing will be Marko Arnautovic for €10m – a year younger, at 34, than fellow new arrival Juan Cuadrado. At least the capture of Marcus Thuram on a free transfer from Borussia Mönchengladbach offers some prospect for long-term returns, as does the signing of Davide Frattesi from Sassuolo.

Milan lost a fan favourite in Sandro Tonali but reinvested to make themselves less reliant on any one player. Samuel Chukwueze, Christian Pulisic and Noah Okafor will provide different angles of attack for a team too often predictable in channelling their play through Rafael Leão on the left. Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Tijjani Reijnders and Yunus Musah will seek to fill Tonali’s shoes in midfield, yet a leaky defence has so far gone unaddressed.

It has been a less busy summer for Juventus, whose most headline-grabbing addition thus far is Timothy Weah, son of the former Milan striker and Ballon d’Or winner George. Without any European competition to split their energies, could the existing group be strong enough to compete for the title?

Atalanta may yet emerge as dark horses, after flipping Rasmus Hojlund – a brilliant prospect, but ultimately a player who scored nine goals last season – to Manchester United for a profit of more than €50m and replacing him with Scamacca and El Bilal Touré. The loan signing of Charles De Ketelaere, a year after his €35m move to Milan, also intrigues.

So do many other teams, from European contenders through to likely relegation battlers. Will Lucas Beltrán, the centre-forward arriving from River Plate, give Fiorentina the cutting edge they sometimes lacked despite reaching a Europa Conference League final? What about Mateo Retegui, the Oriundo whose Italy call-up sparked so much discussion in February, and who has now joined promoted Genoa from Tigre?

Claudio Ranieri makes his return to the top flight at the age of 71, after orchestrating a remarkable turnaround last season at Cagliari. He will have a chance to renew acquaintances there with Mourinho, the man who dismissed him as “almost 70” all the way back in 2008, but with whom he now shares a friendship.

The outlook for Mourinho’s Roma is a story all of its own, the Portuguese telling Corriere dello Sport of his disappointment at the club’s failure to stick up for him as he was issued with a four-game ban for abusing the referee Anthony Taylor during the Europa League final.

He insisted during the same wide-ranging interview that he was content at the club and more relaxed than he had been in younger years. Yet Mourinho stirred the pot this month by posing for a team photo hugging the imaginary striker that his team desperately need with Tammy Abraham not expected back from his cruciate ligament injury until the new year.

Could Roma, or even another team not yet mentioned, muscle into the title conversation? After all, most pundits last summer tipped Napoli to finish outside the top four. It seems unlikely, but Bologna (so impressive after the appointment of Thiago Motta last season), Torino (upgraded by the signing of Adrien Tamèze) and Monza (looking to push on after an impressive first top-flight season) will aspire to challenge for Europe.

The competition at the head of Serie A may be the widest open of any top league on the continent. In part that reflects a loss of status, the reality that even Italy’s leading clubs are unable to buy their way to success as they once did. The party in Naples this summer, and three league representatives in European finals last season, were healthy reminders of the pleasures of unpredictability.