It's 9.41 PM in Italy. Two teams are playing simultaneously, and the fate of the Serie A title depends on their results. Inter Milan are leading in Como. Some 832 km away, down the A1, Napoli aren't against Cagliari. As it stands, the Scudetto stays in Milan. In the VIP box of the San Paolo, now known as the Diego Armando Maradona stadium, Antonio Conte (sent off the previous week, and hence banned from the touchline) can barely stand the tension of it all. On the pitch, Matteo Politano picks up the ball on the right flank. Squaring up his marker, he dribbles forward a few feet before checking himself and swinging a delicious ball into the mixer. It flies into the Cagliari box, where awaiting it is Scott McTominay...
Scott McTominay had found his way to Naples this summer after the suits at Manchester United, the club he joined aged six, had deemed him surplus to requirements. He'd had some ride at his boyhood club: When he first broke into the team, a certain Alex Ferguson had told then manager Jose Mourinho to play him more, and he had. Mourinho had also gone on to make up a prize at the season-end awards after he realised -- like all the other managers that came after him -- that there might be bigger names in the squad, but they weren't putting out their best XIs if they couldn't find a way to get him in. He was there, whenever called, doing whatever was asked of him, even as he remained underappreciated by fans and ridiculed by pundits: a readymade scapegoat as all around him a great institution collapsed in UHD slow motion.
In an interview with The Athletic last month, McTominay had spoken about he had been "misprofiled" (as a #6 or a deep midfielder) early with United's first team, how they had never really played to his strengths, "getting into the box, scoring goals, being a problem there." He understood why they did what they did but in the positions he was used, he knew he wasn't doing justice to his ability. It changed over the years -- he started crashing the box more (partly thanks to his changed role for Scotland where he became their leading goal threat), and the goals started coming, but in the summer of 2024, United decided it was time to move on. What few guessed, though, was that -- after 22 years in Manchester -- this was exactly the kind of clean break McTominay needed.
In Naples, everything turned around. He immersed himself immediately into the Neapolitan culture, falling in love with the "tomatoes", the food, the city, the people. On the pitch, Conte made it clear that he had signed him to do one thing: play the way Scott McTominay has always wanted to play. And it worked wonders.
Using McTominay as a box-to-box machine, Conte tweaked his favoured 5-3-2 to a 4-2-2-2 and later a 4-3-3 to give his midfielder the license to move how he saw fit. He arrived late in the box, drove through packed midfields, pinged passes from the middle. Conte didn't ask him to build-up or play out from deep. He asked him to go raiding, to go wreak havoc in the final third, and that's exactly what he did.
Running off Romelu Lukaku, the two ex-United players formed a brilliant connection. Going into the final game, he'd scored 11 goals in the league (all open play), more than any other central midfielder in Europe. Seven of those had been to give Napoli the lead. He cracked open games, and big games at that (Inter, Juve, Roma...), so often that they started calling him the bottle opener.
As the season wore on, he fell in love with the city, and it fell right back in love with him. A one-club city that worships players that give their all for their club, he became their representation on the pitch, the sweat clinging to his shirt at the end of every match a tribute to Naples' love for the jersey. A mural of him appeared in the city earlier this month. Neapolitans walked around wearing kilts ahead of matches. They simply couldn't get enough of McFratm, as they called him (a fusion of his name and the Neapolitan word for 'my brother'), and in turn he couldn't stop grabbing games by the scruff of their neck and changing it to suit Napoli's needs.
The more you saw McTominay at Napoli, the more you realised why Feguson had told Mourinho what he did, why another former manager in Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had recently said, "how you can sell Scott is beyond me."
And then came this final game. A must-win.
As the ball came into the box, McTominay flew. Naples flew with him. Going near parallel with the ground he held off Gabriele Zappa with absurd ease and connected, sweetly. BAM! As he exploded in celebration, Naples exploded with him. Napoli leads 1-0 and what was happening with Inter had been reduced to an irrelevance. The moment McTominay scored, everyone knew: Napoli were going to be champions.
The goal, the performance -- this game and through this season -- was a remarkable testament to what a player can do when he is understood, trusted, and loved so completely.
At the end of the match, the Naples sky blanketed in fireworks, the stadium a hazy blur, the air thick with smoke and the sounds of raucous celebration, the cameras went searching for him. They found him stood there as he stood there, soaking it all in, a club legend in his debut season, a 6'4" blue-eyed, blonde-haired Scot turned immortal Neapolitan hero. The official Serie A presentation pre-trophy lift was a mere formality, the city of Naples had already made it clear... Scott McTominay was the MVP.
And that's why our moment of the weekend, a moment played out before the weekend even began, goes to Scott McTominay and Napoli, champions of Italy.