Aurelio De Laurentiis in Spain as Napoli push hard to hire Unai Emery as manager

What once was a curiosity became a long shot. What was a long shot became something that could potentially come true. What had potential is suddenly looking very possible.

Napoli are pushing hard to land Unai Emery to manage the club next season. Aurelio De Laurentiis himself has flown to Madrid with the club's managing director Andrea Chiavelli, where Emery's agent, the very familiar Manuel Garcia Quillon, is busily at work. Quillon is in Spain's capital to wrap up negotiations for former Napoli manager Rafa Benitez to take over at Real Madrid, and also represents the interests of Emery. Supposedly it was Quillon who originally told De Laurentiis of Emery's interest in the club, and now here we are.

Napoli have supposedly put down a very lucrative contract offer to Emery, hoping to attract the Spaniard to sign quickly. Emery is in Morocco at the moment, but is supposed to be back in Spain very soon. He reportedly wants assurances as to his future ability to direct purchases, as well as guaranteed investments in the squad. Given how well he did at Sevilla working directly with Monchi, the club's sporting director, there's little reason to think that he couldn't excel again doing the same at Napoli.

Of course, there's one concern looming over these reports: what if Napoli are just being used? Sevilla and their president seem awfully confident that Emery will stay -- though so does every president in this situation -- and apparently Quillon and Emery are going to let Sevilla match Napoli's offer if they so choose. If it winds up that Napoli just got used to negotiate Emery's contract extension in a leverage play ... man, that would suck a big one.

Hopefully that's just needless pessimism and soon we're talking about Emery getting hired, because Emery as Napoli manager could be awesome. But with the way this season went, it's hard not to get worried about something going wrong, because basically everything has gone wrong lately.