Chelsea FC Manager Antonio Conte is certainly an intriguing and interesting guy. He’s an extremely hard-line leader with a very strong ego and penchant for maintaining centralized authority. Since he took over at Chelsea, there have been plenty of news stories, rumors and gossip linking him with a return to home country of Italy.
We’ve also heard a lot of narratives related to Conte being at odds with Chelsea club leadership, butting heads with his superiors and therefore being on the hot seat.
It all certainly drives home the point of what a high stress job being a manager of a big club can be, and Antonio Conte admits that sometimes he hates his job during a very revealing interview with Gentleman’s Quarterly.
Yesterday definitely had to be one of those days as his reigning champions Blues fell to last place Crystal Palace; shocking the football world. It was more than just a loss to a last place side, it was a defeat at the hands of a team that had not even scored during the entire season and lost all of their previous seven games, and it inspired a ton of schadenfreude on social media worldwide.
It’s the kind of day that would make you feel extremely low about life, when footy is in fact all-consuming in your life. Thus, what Antonio Conte recently said in the interview is extremely timely.
“I always felt I would do this, that this would be my life,” he told GQ, but sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I hate this job, because sometimes you lose your life. If you want to do this job, to be a good coach, a great coach, you must sacrifice your life and sometimes I hate this.”
“I have to think football 18 hours a day. Football is my life. I was born with a ball in the belly of my mother. My father was a football man. He was my first coach, my first owner, my first kit man.”
“It is not easy to not think football. To be without football for a whole day is impossible. The mind is always working.”
Antonio Conte is definitely a workaholic, it sounds like. Of course, it’s what you have to be in order to survive in this business.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now and Minute Media. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes regularly to WGN CLTV and Chicago Now.
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