Scott McTominay bathes in the adoration as Napoli leap clear in title race | Nicky Bandini

Scott McTominay could have said anything and a whole city still would have loved him: the man who fired Napoli clear at the top of Serie A with four rounds of games left to go. His first-half strikes delivered a 2-0 win over Torino on Sunday. He had scored the only goal as Napoli won away to Monza in their previous fixture, and two out of three in a rout of Empoli before that.

Carrying his team towards the finish line, in other words, though McTominay has been decisive from the start. He scored within 28 seconds of coming off the bench for his home debut in September and his goals have broken seven 0-0 deadlocks since then. No player in Serie A has done this more.

If it is too soon to call McTominay the “Uomo Scudetto” – Player of a Title-Winning Season – it is because the prize is not Napoli’s yet. They hold a three-point lead, after Inter lost 1-0 to Roma on Sunday. All their remaining opponents are in the bottom half of the table, though that may be a double-edged sword, with Lecce, Parma and Cagliari still fighting to avoid relegation.

Perhaps there are yet some people in Naples who would not name McTominay even if the race was over. But only because they find that name hard to pronounce. Fortunately, Neapolitans are expert in creating sobriquets for closest friends and greatest heroes.

At full time on Sunday, a Dazn interviewer asked him which nickname was his favourite: “MacGyver, McTerminator, McFratm, or Apribottiglie [The Bottle Opener], because you always score the first goal?”

McTominay has a bond with Napoli fans for his efforts on and off the pitch. Photograph: Matteo Ciambelli/Reuters

McTominay started laughing before the question was finished. “[Napoli defender] Pasquale Mazzocchi would say McFratm!” he said, dissolving to giggles together with another teammate, Leonardo Spinazzola, stood next to him.

This is local humour, an in-joke, referencing years-old memes about someone mispronouncing McFlurry at a drive-through. Mazzocchi was born and raised in Naples. McTominay only got here eight months ago, yet somehow he simply belongs.

Answers like this one, almost as much as his on-pitch performances, help explain why the fans adore him, why Billy Gilmour has told reporters he cannot go anywhere in the city with his fellow Scotsman without getting mobbed. There have been plenty of players down the years who found the experience of playing in Naples, the closeness demanded by fans, overwhelming, but those who embrace it will have their affection returned a thousand-fold.

In word and deed, McTominay has been all-in from day one. He has talked about the difficulty of learning Italian yet already speaks it well enough that he does not need journalists’ questions translated. His confidence speaking has grown to the point of recording messages for the fans.

He raves about the food, not in the generic way that any person might praise Italian cuisine but with specific passion for the flavour of locally grown tomatoes. Even when things have been going well on the pitch, McTominay has spoken with an obsessive intensity about wanting to do better.

In an interview with La Gazzetta dello Sport this month, he was asked whether he had expected to make such an immediate impact in Serie A. “I see it differently,” McTominay replied. “I really think I could give more than I have so far. Some games I’ve ended disappointed because I could have scored more goals. I didn’t take full advantage of certain chances.”

He was speaking just before this recent run of five goals in three games but was already the club’s second-highest scorer. Even as his manager, Antonio Conte, was railing against excessive media expectations, reminding reporters that Napoli finished 10th last season and hinting at his frustrations over the mid-season departure, without replacement, of Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, McTominay was reiterating his intent to win it all.

McTominay pounces to score Napoli’s second goal against Torino. Photograph: Cesare Abbate/EPA

“At primary school I wrote down that my dream was to win the league,” he said. “At the start it was the Premier League, but as life goes on your dreams change. Today it’s the Italian league.”

Napoli are not a one-man show. For all Conte’s laments – some justified – this is still a team that spent almost €150m on transfer fees last summer. Alessandro Buongiorno, signed from Torino, has been a major upgrade when fit at centre-back, while Romelu Lukaku has 12 goals and 10 assists in Serie A.

There was already a core here of returning players who won Serie A under Luciano Spalletti in 2023. Conte has helped several of them, including the captain Giovanni Di Lorenzo and midfielder Frank Anguissa, to get back to their best.

Still, without McTominay it is hard to imagine they would lead the league today. Team performances have faded in the second half of the campaign, the absence of Kvaratskhelia’s creative magic being felt. Napoli were struggling to carve out chances against last-placed Monza a week ago before McTominay sealed the points with a late header.

Against Torino he struck early, side-footing in Anguissa’s centre at the near post in the seventh minute. But Napoli did not dominate after that. If anything, Torino enjoyed the better chances of a cagy first half, right up until McTominay pounced again with another first-time conversion of a cross from the right.

These goals were no acts of chance. McTominay’s success in Naples has many contributing factors, his talent and application being the greatest of all, but Conte’s tactics have been a huge element. This is what the manager does best: identifying a player’s strengths and devising specific, precise systems – drilled relentlessly on the training ground – to exploit them.

Conte has allowed McTominay to be the player he was always meant to be, something between a No 8 and No 10, breaking the lines and arriving in the box to score goals just like these ones. His 11 strikes make this the most prolific season by a Scottish player in Serie A, surpassing the 10 scored by Denis Law for Torino in 1961-62.

There is a second side to this story of Napoli’s title push. They could only pull clear on Sunday because Inter lost again – a third defeat in eight days. The defending champions look spent, exhausted from their ambitious pursuit of a quadruple. After failing to score against Bologna, Milan or Roma, and crashing out of the Coppa Italia against their city rivals, it now looks most likely they will end with no trophies at all.

Conte claimed on Sunday not to have followed their game, played a few hours before Napoli faced Torino. “I switched off my phone and everything,” he said. “At the end I heard some people were happy.”

A whole city, in fact. Two years after celebrating their third league title, Napoli are in within touching distance of a fourth. If Diego Maradona was the hero of the first two, and Kvaratskhelia shared top billing with Victor Osimhen for the most recent, it might well be McTominay who is remembered as the face of this side. “A Scottish Neapolitan”, in the words of one popular local news site. McFratm, to his friends.