Deep in the bowels of the Stadio Marcantonio Bentegodi in Verona, Antonio Conte made his case in typically brutal fashion.

“I’m ashamed as a coach, a thing like this has rarely happened to me,” he said after Napoli were thrashed 3-0 by Hellas Verona on the opening day of the Serie A season.

“Today my heart is bleeding. Let’s see if anyone else is bleeding in the next few days.”

This was not Conte setting his stall out. He had already done so before a ball had been kicked in anger.

“A total rebuild is needed,” he thundered ahead of the campaign. “From the foundations. When a team puts 10 or 12 players on the transfer market, it means there’s a rebuild under way.”

The 55-year-old, after all, is not a man used to failure. Tottenham remains the only club where he did not land a trophy since leaving Siena 14 years ago, after getting his first break as manager in Serie A.

And after Napoli beat Cagliari 2-0 at the Maradona on Friday night, he stands alone as the only man to have won Serie A with three different teams. 

Fabio Capello won four titles with AC Milan between 1992 and 1996, before leading Roma to the promised land five years later. He then won two more with Juventus in 2005 and 2006 but they were revoked in the wake of the Calciopoli scandal.

Having restored Juve to the top of calcio’s pyramid in 2012, Conte led Inter Milan to victory nine years later, their first Scudetto since Jose Mourinho in 2010. He has now delivered Napoli’s fourth.

The Partenopei’s triumph this season is drastically different from the title they won under Luciano Spalletti to end a 33-year wait for a Scudetto in 2023.

Spalletti’s Napoli were Serie A’s great entertainers, scoring goals for fun, their foot firmly pressed on the gas at all time, caution be damned.

Conte’s team are far more pragmatic. A solid, old-fashioned Test cricket approach to Spalletti’s Bazball philosophy.

Napoli scored 59 goals and conceded 27, finishing on 82 points. Two years ago, they scored 77 goals and conceded 28 en route to a 90-point tally, 16 clear of Lazio in second place.

Napoli have been far more attritional than under Spalletti, which is paradoxically Conte’s biggest achievement as he has won the title in dramatically different fashion with a broadly similar team.

Victor Osimhen, Kim Min-Jae and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, the heroes of two years ago, are gone, but of the 12 players Conte has used the most this season, eight were in the squad in 2023.

The total rebuild he advocated in the summer never quite came, but Napoli did strengthen in some key areas.

The Azzurri spent €40m (£34m) on Torino captain Alessandro Buongiorno, signed defender Rafa Marin from Real Madrid and snapped up Euro 2020 winner Leonardo Spinazzola on a free. 

Far more significantly, after the debacle in Verona, Aurelio De Laurentiis sanctioned deals for Romelu Lukaku and Scott McTominay, who arrived for €30m each from Chelsea and Manchester United respectively.

To say the duo have been crucial to Napoli’s title would be an understatement. It was them who sent the home fans wild on Friday night, McTominay breaking the deadlock shortly before the break and Lukaku doubling the advantage early in the second half.

With 14 goals and 10 assists Lukaku is Napoli’s top scorer and their best provider, while McTominay has netted 12 goals and half a dozen assists in a fantastic debut season, which was capped with a stunning opener against Cagliari.

Such has been McTominay’s impact that he even forced Conte to abandon his favourite 3-5-2, which he began the season with, in favour of a 4-2-3-1 with the Scot almost playing the role of an auxiliary striker alongside Lukaku with Kvaratskhelia and David Neres tucking in.

Neres, a summer arrival from Benfica, has proved to be another shrewd signing, his importance highlighted by the fact Napoli won just one of the five games he missed across February and March.

The Brazilian and Kvaratskhelia were used as traditional wingers by the end of October as Conte switched to a 4-3-3 with McTominay operating as the most advanced in the midfield trio alongside Stanislav Lobotka and Frank Zambo-Anguissa.

Then came Kvaratskhelia’s departure in January, which prompted Conte to reshuffle his pack again, using McTominay as a box-crasher with a front two of Lukaku and Giacomo Raspadori.

With Napoli losing just once this calendar year, the system has been mightily effective. So this is very much Conte’s triumph.

As he has repeatedly pointed out this season, Napoli were not expected to win the league, certainly not after finishing 41 points behind Inter last term in what was statistically the worst title-defence in the history of Serie A. But after losing in Verona, the Partenopei set a relentless pace, winning eight of their next nine games and drawing against Juventus.

A 3-0 thrashing at home to Atalanta was followed by a draw at the San Siro against Inter, before Lazio became the second team in a month to win at the Maradona in December. It proved to be a decisive moment as Napoli rattled off seven consecutive wins, a run which included consecutive victories against Atalanta and Juventus.

After the win in Bergamo even Conte allowed himself to admit that Napoli were in the race for the Scudetto, as well he may have done for his team spent 21 weeks at the top of Serie A, 12 more than Inter.

A seven-game run across February and March that returned just one win and five draws seemed to have derailed Napoli’s bid, but they had still enough petrol in the tank to overtake Inter just as the title race entered the final stretch after the Nerazzurri lost to Bologna and Roma.

And while he publicly may have talked Napoli’s prospects down, Conte’s all-consuming drive to succeed told a different story. And it is that ferocious intensity that may well see him and the Azzurri part ways. 

“The Scudetto? It would repay me for everything I’ve poured into this year. I’ve given it all,” he told DAZN after the draw against Parma in the penultimate game. 

“I’m also very tired, I’m just about making it to the end of the season. Naples is a beautiful place, but the expectations are beyond what’s realistically possible.”

A manager who demands constant investment pitted against a chairman who has an eye forever on the bottom line, Conte and De Laurentiis have always appeared a marriage of convenience and have fired verbal volleys at each other throughout the season.

It is a pattern that has been seen before with Conte who, lest we forget, left Inter three weeks after winning the Scudetto.

But then managing Napoli is indeed an enormously demanding job, so much so that Spalletti was so exhausted after the title two years ago that he needed a sabbatical.

If Conte does leave, he will do so having won six titles with four clubs in two countries over the past 13 years.

He may not win many style points but, as Jose Mourinho pointed out after winning the Europa League with Manchester United in 2017: “There are lots of poets in football, but poets, they don’t win many titles.”