Napoli president says he would allow Antonio Conte to leave for Italy job

Napoli’s president, Aurelio De Laurentiis, has said he would not stand in Antonio Conte’s way if the coach asked to take the vacant Italy job, after Conte said he ought to be under consideration to succeed Gennaro Gattuso.

Gattuso resigned as the Azzurri’s coach on Friday after Italy failed to reach the World Cup for a third straight time. Conte’s deal at Napoli runs until 2027 and the Italian champions are seven points off the Serie A leaders, Inter, with seven matches remaining.

“It’s expected that my name appears on the list of candidates for the national team,” Conte said after Monday’s 1-0 league win over Milan. “If I was the federation’s president, I would consider my name. But, you know my contractual situation, I’ll meet with my president at the end of the season and we will see.”

Conte was in charge of the four-time World Cup winners between 2014 and 2016, leading the team at Euro 2016, where they were eliminated on penalties by Germany in the quarter-finals.

He coached Napoli to last season’s Scudetto, but was close to leaving last summer after a fallout with De Laurentiis.

Gattuso left 24 hours after Gabriele Gravina resigned as the head of the Italian football federation. “If Conte asked me to allow him to become the national team coach again, I would say yes,” De Laurentiis told the website Calcionapoli24. “But as he’s very intelligent, as long as there’s no [federation] president, and up to now there hasn’t been, I don’t think he sees himself in charge of something so disorganised.”

Milan’s coach, Massimiliano Allegri, has also been linked with the Italy position, but Gattuso’s replacement will not be named until after the federation’s extraordinary meeting on 22 June to elect a new president.