A trophyless season looms for Napoli, just a year after they dominated Cheap Serie A football kit and reached the quarterfinals of the Champions League. And as the frustration of not beating an injury-hit Barcelona in the round of 16 fades – they had the chance and didn’t take it, but maybe if Jesper Lindstrøm’s header had hit the target, and if Pau Cubarsí’s tackle on Victor Osimhen had been penalized, who knows… – they can reflect on the events that unfolded at their club over the last 11 months. Maybe one day it will become a case study at Harvard Business School and you will be able to find it here. Except it will probably be a compendium of the worst practices rather than the best – a series of don’ts rather than do’s.

This is the story of how a single, unwise certified email started a chain of events that led to the destruction of the greatest Napoli team since the days of Diego Armando Maradona. And all in less than a year.

Flash back to mid-April last season. Cheap Napoli football kit have just been knocked out of the Champions League quarterfinals, but that’s OK: they’re running away with the Serie A title. Osimhen is scoring tons of goals, Georgian sensation Khvicha Kvaratskhelia has been dubbed “Kvaradona” (without being accused of blasphemy) and coach Luciano Spalletti is Serie A’s big star.

Palletti is a proud and somewhat eccentric man. His contract expires on June 30, but everyone assumes he’ll get it extended with a hefty pay rise. He’s built this team, he loves the club and the city, he’s settled in and is happy to be there. All he has to do is sit down with club president Aurelio De Laurentiis and work it out.

Except… De Laurentiis gets a flash of inspiration.

Napoli have a unilateral option to extend Spalletti’s deal by one season for the same salary. In reality, it doesn’t mean much – no club in any sport will keep a coach against his will – but perhaps it could be an opening in the negotiation? One suspects that’s what De Laurentiis was thinking when he (or his assistants tasked with sending his emails) pressed ‘send’ on the certified letter informing Spalletti, in dry legal language, that his option year had been exercised.

Rarely has anything backfired so badly.

Maybe it would have worked with someone else, but not with Spalletti, who was offended to say the least. He is not a Lexus with an extendable lease. Yes, De Laurentiis is his boss, but he is a human being. They have a relationship with each other. Isn’t that something you discuss face to face? Instead, it was the equivalent of your better half giving you an unsigned Hallmark card on your anniversary.

Spalletti backed down. (Before you feel too sorry for him, you should know that he got a new job almost three months later: he’s now the national coach of Italy). When director of football Cristiano Giuntoli also moved on – he left for Juventus, but unlike Spalletti, he wanted to leave – De Laurentiis was left alone looking for a replacement. After several coaches rejected him, De Laurentiis appointed French coach Rudi Garcia, who was last seen coaching Cristiano Ronaldo at Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia.

Garcia had big shoes to fill, but there was reason to hope. Napoli had only lost one player from the start, defender Kim Min-jae, who switched to Billigt Bayern Munich fodboldtøj.As often happens, Giuntoli’s role in building the team was minimized and many felt he was more of a “coordinator” than a talent spotter or negotiator. There was plenty of talent: the team was undoubtedly plug-and-play, while Osimhen and Kvaratskhelia would only get better.

Twelve games into the season, with the club fourth in the table but 10 points off top spot in Serie A, Garcia was sacked on November 14. He wasn’t popular with some of the players and, as De Laurentiis himself would later point out, Garcia had the audacity to ask to be allowed to do his job when the owner told him he was messing things up. “So I told him to fuck off,” De Laurentiis said.

Several managers rejected Napoli and De Laurentiis made another disastrous appointment. To be fair, few were surprised that it went so wrong.

On the same day, he summoned Walter Mazzarri, who had been in charge of the club more than a decade earlier and led the club to third and second place finishes… except that Mazzarri had fallen short in each of his next four jobs and had been sacked early in all of them. Plus, he’d had success with a completely different system (with a three-man defense), and Napoli was built to play with a four-back line.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Napoli went from bad to worse under Mazzarri. How much worse? When he was sacked on February 19, Napoli had slipped to 10th place and were 27 points off the top of the table – also just 16 above the relegation zone. Napoli were also humiliated at home in the Coppa Italia round of 16 by Frosinone, losing 0-4.

De Laurentiis bought four players in January – defender Pasquale Mazzocchi, midfielders Hamed Traoré and Leander Dendoncker and striker Cyril Ngonge – in an attempt to turn things around (it hasn’t worked yet, with Ngonge and Dendoncker yet to start a single game). But as if to make amends, and in what looks like a fit of irritation and pettiness, he ordered the club to omit midfielder Piotr Zielinski from the squad for the knockout stages of the Champions League.

Zielinski, 29, had been one of Napoli’s mainstays for the previous six seasons, but he had rejected both a move to Saudi Arabia and a contract extension, opting instead to become a free agent in June next year. We can’t know for sure if this was the club’s way of “punishing” him for wanting to leave the club on a free transfer – and it doesn’t mean they would have beaten Barcelona with Zielinski in the team, of course – but it’s hard not to put two and two together. Especially because the Polish international has been a regular all season, starting 20 of Napoli’s 28 league games and all six Champions League group stage matches.

Back to Mazzarri. Things got so bad that De Laurentiis felt compelled to sack him just two days before Napoli’s first game against Barcelona last month.

Who convinced De Laurentiis to replace Mazzarri? Perhaps convinced that managers in jobs are better than those who are unemployed, he chose a guy called Francesco Calzona, manager of the Slovakia national team. Prior to his appointment, Calzona had exactly zero minutes as a head coach in professional club football, but he had been at Napoli before as an assistant, and he was cheap when he had to do double duty, having kept his job as Slovakia’s boss.

Calzona didn’t get his pulse racing when he was announced as interim coach, possibly because few knew who he was and because his work with Slovakia is so limited. (In any case, coaching a national team is a completely different task). That said, he qualified Slovakia for the European Championship by finishing ahead of Luxembourg, Iceland, Bosnia and Liechtenstein – say what you will about that.

What makes all of this so frustrating is that for most of the last decade, Napoli have been a model club, balancing the books and punching well above their weight. And much of this was due to De Laurentiis’ skill as a businessman and as a football operator. He can be outspoken, aggressive and unnecessarily abrasive – on Tuesday he reacted to the news that Maurizio Sarri, one of his former coaches, had quit his job at Lazio by saying: “It’s too easy to just quit…. Those who quit are losers!” — but when it comes to running a football club, he knows what he’s doing.

Or at least he did… until about 11 months ago.