How Antonio Conte eclipsed the Premier League's three young managerial gods at Chelsea

The Italian is outclassing Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho and Mauricio Pochettino in his debut season at the Bridge

Conte celebrates with his players after Chelsea's recent win over Everton Getty

Someone compared Antonio Conte this week to a trullo, the Spartan dry-stone hut with a conical roof built for agricultural labourers which is unique to the Chelsea manager’s native Puglia, on the heel of the Italian peninsula. The construction’s functionality and extreme flexibility sums up the man who exudes less razzle-dazzle than Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino and Jose Mourinho, and features far less than them in the Premier League conversation, yet is on the brink of outclassing all three.
The other members of that elite young managerial quartet have fascinated more than the Italian because of their complexity, their poetry and perhaps also their photogenicity. Conte, with his gradually improving English and puritanical work ethic, is not so beguiling, though the clinical 3-0 win at Everton on Sunday demonstrates that he will have the last word this season. On paper, it was Chelsea’s last major Premier League challenge.
Conte has demonstrated his flexibility, of course, with his willingness to switch Chelsea to a 3-4-3 system on the basis of the personnel available to him – just as he abandoned 4-2-4 for 3-5-2 at Juventus. Systems are “the clothes that best fit the players,” Conte once said. But there are also Spartan qualities about the way the players are put to work. “That’s the prime difference – the training. Relentless. It sometimes seems endless,” says one source close to Conte’s league leaders. That was evident at Goodison, in the team’s capacity to break out of their own ranks with incredible intensity, despite a tough examination in the game’s first hour.