Napoli boss Luciano Spalletti has addressed his thoughts on Pep Guardiola after the Manchester City boss said he was fearful of making the Italian “grumpy”.
Guardiola hailed Napoli as “the best team in Europe” following their 5-0 aggregate win over Frankfurt in the last-16 of the Champions League. Spalletti in response accused the Catalan coach of mind games, saying: “Are we putting Napoli in front of Manchester City? If they can spend €900m compared to our €9m, there must be a reason. It’s a game to build us up so they can knock us down."
READ MORE: 'Emotionally I'm destroyed' - Guardiola post-Bayern win
Guardiola was again asked to comment on Napoli ahead of City’s quarter-final with Bayern. "I don’t want to talk about Napoli because the manager will be grumpy with me. So sensitive!” he responded with a smile.
Spalletti was made aware of Guardiola’s comments and sought to address his stance on the City manager to cool down any tension. Passionately standing up midway through his press conference to deliver his speech, the Napoli boss said: “I realised from his response that what I said did not have the desired effect.
“For a start, I will stand when talking about Guardiola, because I learned so much from him and he can be compared to the absolute greatest that we all learned from, including Jurgen Klopp and Roberto De Zerbi, some of those coaches I watch constantly.
“If it didn’t have the effect I wanted, then I apologise to Guardiola, because we love it when people talk about Napoli and praise the way we play.
"However, if I am told Guardiola said we can win the Champions League, then that’s different, because we are not that team who should feel performance anxiety in this competition.
“We’ve already made history, now we need to enjoy ourselves. Hopefully, I can sit down with Guardiola with a nice Turkish coffee and have a good laugh about all this.”
Napoli face AC Milan in their quarter-final clash and will face either Inter Milan or Benfica in the semi-final should they progress. City, Bayern, Real Madrid and Chelsea are the teams on the other half of the draw.
