Luciano Spalletti is one of the most innovative minds Italian football has ever known. Why is he not a household name like Carlo Ancelotti or Antonio Conte? Well, that’s because he’s become known as the coach who notices and implements the next big tactical advancement — enjoying mediocre success with it — before the likes of Guardiola, Klopp and Conte develop and popularise it. Napoli are lucky enough to be in the safe hands of a man who’s always reading the future, and the first half of this season couldn’t have gone any better for them.

Napoli 4, Liverpool 1; Ajax 1, Napoli 6; Napoli 4, Ajax 2; and now, Napoli 5, Juventus 1. How can a club so unsuspected in recent years be flying so high? Here’s how Napoli play.

The first thing to say is that the fitness of Napoli’s players is good. It’s very good. Spalletti is a manager who believes using just one or two formations is a thing of the past, and that the main aim in football is to create space by simply manoeuvring and disrupting opposition structures. So the fitness of his players is critical to ensuring his philosophy can be implemented. There’s a lot of running to do when you play for Spalletti, always trying to be unpredictable to opposing teams.

Napoli abuse their high fitness to create overloads everywhere, some of which are unimaginably difficult to defend against by football’s current principles. In build-up, for example, Spalletti’s side deploy a 4-2-3-1. Their back-four, midfield-two and goalkeeper all engage in the first phase, creating a seven-man unit to bypass any opposition press. Given that their front-three help pin the opposing back-four back, the other team can only ever commit up to six players to the press, which isn’t enough to render Napoli’s overload null.

Their deep playmaker Stanislav Lobotka used to be an attacking midfielder until Spalletti pushed him back, using his quality on the ball to better effect. And Napoli’s front-three are often seen higher than typically expected during build-up, trying to create a big game between the opposition’s defensive and midfield lines. This is where Napoli like to begin most attacks.

Against Liverpool in the Champions League, they had to use rotations in attack, trying to mess with their defensive shape. Klopp’s team likes to play a high line, and the centre-backs aren’t always comfortable when they have no one to mark. For this reason, Spalletti ordered his striker to drop off and perform almost a false-9 function at times. The rotation below shows how Joe Gomez kept tight and followed the striker, leaving a huge gap for Napoli to exploit a one-two pass to get in behind.

Constant movement from players off the ball is the main reason other teams struggle to know when to man-mark and when to mark the space and keep the shape. Juventus found themselves with an imbalance in midfield against Napoli in the lead-up to the first goal last week. Centre-back Alex Sandro felt he had to come charging out to close down the space, and left a gap in the back line again. Napoli’s winger Matteo Politano noticed the gap and slotted himself in there, ready to receive a diagonal pass from right-back Giovanni Di Lorenzo, and Napoli scored from it.

Off the ball, Napoli are just as flexible. They do deploy formations, but loosely. The main instruction of their players is to press man-for-man and commit many men high up the pitch to force a high turnover and subsequently attack, or to close off the short passes, forcing the opposition into playing an unfavourable, long-distance and risky ball forward that will likely result in Napoli winning the ball back.

The need to feel comfortable defending in numerous shapes is another reason the fitness levels have to be so good at Napoli. Against a team building up with a 4-2-3-1, Napoli tend to defend in a 4-4-2. Against a 3-4-3, they’ll match them up by doing the same. Against a 3-5-2, they’ll use a very narrow 4-3-3, and against a 4-3-3, Spalletti’s team will go for a 4-2-3-1. These decisions are always made with a view to defending man-to-man high up the pitch.

It does leave them vulnerable to a counter-attack if their high press is somehow bypassed. However, to slow down opposition counter-attacks so that Napoli’s attackers can get back to help in defence, the back-four scrunch up extremely tight. They barely cover the width of the 18-yard box. Napoli are so good at this that, despite their high press, they have conceded very few goals from counter-attacks this season.

Spalletti’s team are very good with rotations, and create vast overloads all over the pitch. They know how to react when they lose the ball, and they know how to deny the opposition space.