Napoli's cliques and Allegri's crisis go hand in hand
La Gazzetta dello Sport identifies fractures inside Napoli's dressing room as Massimiliano Allegri's start to the season unravels after defeat in Porto.
Napoli's 4-1 defeat away to Porto has left them with three points from four Champions League games and in danger of missing the knockout play-off round, Football Italia reports. The result has intensified scrutiny of Massimiliano Allegri, whose squad now appears divided rather than merely out of form.
Allegri has lost seven of his first 14 competitive matches in charge and won only five. Napoli sit eighth in Serie A with 14 points from 10 games, already 14 points behind leaders Lazio, according to Football Italia.
The frustration is visible among senior players. Kevin De Bruyne was seen arguing with teammate Lorenzo Lucca during the Porto game, and Matteo Politano used his post-match media duties to point at teammates who, in his view, avoid accountability.
"It would be nice if a few other teammates came here to give an explanation and not just us Italians, but never mind," Politano said, after it was put to him that he is always the one fronting up after defeats.
Where the cliques are said to form
La Gazzetta dello Sport, as cited by Football Italia, maps out several closed groups rather than one unified squad. Giovanni Di Lorenzo, Politano and Leonardo Spinazzola form an Italian bloc. Noa Lang and David Neres, Billy Gilmour and Scott McTominay, and Alisson Santos and Giovane are named as other pairings who stick together off the pitch.
That matters beyond the dressing room. Football is coordinated through constant, instant communication: a pressing trigger only works if every player reads the same cue to step up together, and a defensive transition only holds if teammates trust each other's positioning the instant the ball is lost. Social fragmentation does not guarantee tactical fragmentation, but it removes a layer of shared understanding that coaches usually rely on to paper over gaps in structure.
La Gazzetta also names Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa and Amir Rrahmani as two senior, long-serving non-Italian players singled out in the cliques debate, despite both having been central to Napoli's two recent Scudetto wins.
Individualists complicate the midfield balance
A separate group is described by the newspaper as too individualistic: De Bruyne, Anguissa, Stanislav Lobotka and Rasmus Hojlund. That label carries tactical weight. Lobotka and Anguissa have long operated as Napoli's central midfield axis, and a double pivot only functions when both players subordinate personal instincts to cover for each other, one stepping into a passing lane while the other screens the space behind him.
If either is playing primarily for himself, build-up play suffers first: Napoli's capacity to progress the ball calmly from deep depends on disciplined rotations between the pivot and the back line, not on individual brilliance bypassing the structure. A team can survive one individualist in attack, where De Bruyne's quality can manufacture moments alone, but it struggles when that same instinct reaches midfield, where cohesion rather than talent is the currency.
Allegri's rotation dilemma amid congestion
Allegri now faces the question of how to manage a squad playing across Serie A and the Champions League without entrenching the very cliques identified by the press. Rotation is usually a tool to keep players fresh and competitive, but consistently pairing the same friendships in the same units risks hardening subgroups rather than dissolving them, while breaking those pairings too abruptly can alienate players already unsettled by results.
Politano's public frustration suggests some players already feel unevenly burdened, not just on the pitch but in representing the squad publicly after defeats. That imbalance is itself a management issue as much as a tactical one, and it lands squarely on Allegri alongside his on-field selections.
La Gazzetta dello Sport's conclusion, relayed by Football Italia, is that responsibility sits with the players as much as the coach. The paper warns that if the squad continues to function as separate factions rather than one group, it will be "a long way to go" before the season turns. With Napoli already out of the automatic Champions League qualification places and well adrift of Lazio in Serie A, there is little room left to let the problem resolve itself.