Napoli: Can They Keep Their Momentum Despite Buzz on Manager's Potential Exit?

The recurring storyline throughout Napoli's season has been whether manager Rafael Benitez will be coaching in Naples next year.

The issue has dogged the team since the summer.  In early September, reports emerged of a rift between Benitez and the team's owner, Aurelio De Laurentiis, which the former denied.  Similar reports of departures—like this one from the Daily Mail—have cropped up throughout the year, and each one has been dismissed as the team have tried to get themselves through the never-ending onslaught of distractions.

They've done so with only varying degrees of success.  Napoli started the season at a deep low after losing to Athletic Bilbao in the Champions League playoff round.  The hangover from the loss and the resulting media furore saw them drop seven points in their first three Serie A games.  They righted themselves briefly only to run into the winter break on the back of three draws and a loss in their last six games.

Alvaro Barrientos/Associated Press/Associated Press

It wasn't just that they were dropping points that was so alarming.  It was who they were dropping points to.  This is a team that has been assembled for big money.  According to Transfermarkt.com, they are the third-highest valued team in Serie A in terms of total transfer-market value—€253.75 million—and possess the third- and fourth-highest valued individual players.

This isn't a team that should be losing to Chievo and drawing with the likes of Empoli, Atalanta and Cagliari.  Yet they had put up those exact results over the course of the season before they marched onto the field to face Juventus for the Christmas-time Supercoppa Italiana fixture.

The start of that game seemed to confirm Napoli's struggles.  Carlos Tevez scored early for Juve, but the Bianconeri failed to take charge of the game and Napoli took control.  They equalized only to again be put behind by Tevez at the beginning of extra time.  Another last-gasp equalizer sent the game to penalties, where Napoli survived three penalty saves by Gianluigi Buffon to eventually win a marathon shootout and claim their first silverware of the season.

The win galvanized the team.  They won seven of their next eight in all competitions, the lone negative result being a 3-1 loss to Juve in the league.

But after they thrashed Trabzonspor in the Europa League round of 16, more reports began to swirl about Benitez's future.  In early March—days after a surprise 1-0 loss to Torino—Italian newspaper Il Mattino (h/t Britain's Metro) reported that Benitez had rejected a contract extension and had designs on returning to Liverpool, where he enjoyed his best success as a manager.

Michael Sohn/Associated Press/Associated Press/Associated Press

Since those reports began afresh, Napoli have been knocked out of the Coppa Italia by Lazio and dropped out of the Champions League places for the first time since January.  It has only been in the last week that the Partenopei have warmed back up.

Their recent form has certainly come at the right time.  Last week's 3-0 thrashing of Fiorentina was critical in determining European places, while their total obliteration of Wolfsburg away from home in the Europa League quarter-finals was a major step toward the European trophy.  After crushing relegation-strugglers Cagliari on Sunday, Napoli are now back in the conversation for the Champions League places—something that can also come through winning the Europa League.

The question now is whether they can keep it up—especially with so much instability in the manager's office.

There is a rough correlation between Napoli's roughest patches this season and the intensity of the media noise surrounding Benitez's future.  When they win, they look like a team that is laser-focused on results, but when they fail, they tend to look distracted.

Benitez's tactical setups have often been good.  There have been some questionable decisions—in particular the general absence of Gokhan Inler in midfield and the recent lack of playing time for captain Marek Hamsik—but for the most part, when Napoli has failed, the players have simply looked wayward.

This is a team that, over the years, have had occasional mental lapses.  That this is yet to improve is mostly the fault of Benitez's predecessor Walter Mazzarri, who routinely found ways to blame everyone but himself and his team when things didn't go to plan.  Mazzarri's pass-the-buck attitude produced a team that didn't take accountability and lost focus at critical moments.

With a team already prone to distraction, the media circus around their manager is bound to be detrimental.  They have finally picked up their form, but as the year draws to a close, the talk of Benitez's fate will only intensify.

Napoli are talented in the extreme, but in the past, they have not handled challenges to their focus particularly well.  If they can do that this time and qualify for the Champions League for the second year running, it will be a major step in their development as a club.  

Until then, however, any uptick in form should be considered encouraging, but taken with a grain of salt.