Europe's 'Big Five' domestic leagues experience rare outbreak of competitiveness

To whom do you entrust the defence of a title? A trio of champions in Europe’s leading leagues were obliged to address that question during the managerial merry-go-round that was 2023.

Two of them, Paris Saint-Germain and Napoli, came up with the same name as possible new coach. Napoli, disappointed when Luciano Spalletti decided that leading the club to a first Serie A crown for 33 years was a good time to depart, immediately contacted the Spaniard Luis Enrique.

He heard them out at length, and turned them down, instead choosing Paris, where the manager’s office has a built-in ejector seat, but where coaches tend to at least win the league on their way to the sack.

From where he perches now, Luis Enrique looks as happily placed as any coach with a major league crown to defend. Across the so-called “Big Five” domestic tables, only one has the title-holder at its top – PSG, who hold a five-point lead going into the new year. Luis Enrique has endured some criticism for his tactical dogmas, but the title, as almost always, is PSG’s to lose.

Might he have made a better fist of the 2023/24 campaign at Napoli than their two different coaches so far? He could hardly have done worse. As the club's president Aurelio De Laurentiis reflected to the Italian newspaper Corriere dello Sport ahead of his team’s eighth defeat in 17 games last week: “It’s not easy to take on the legacy of someone who has won the league in the way we did.”

Napoli, scudetto winners by a canter back in May, will not retain the title. They go into Friday’s fixture with Monza at risk of plunging 20 points behind Serie A leaders Inter Milan – and seven behind fourth-placed Bologna – by the turn of the year. They have fired one successor to Spalletti, the