Aurelio De Laurentiis was on the island of Capri, taking a break from Hollywood cinema Sky Captain and the world of tomorrowwhen he read in a newspaper that Napoli, Napoli’s football club, had collapsed.
The veteran Italian film producer had offered in 1999 to buy Napoli for the equivalent of €102m, only to have his offer rejected. At the time of his vacation in Capri in 2004, the club, which then went bankrupt, only had an authorization to ask the Italian Football Federation to use the name of Napoli.
“I put €37m on the table just to buy a piece of paper,” he said. “And we started the new adventure.”
Since then, De Laurentiis has written a compelling breakthrough story worthy of the film industry his family has long been a part of. In the fairytale ending, Napoli on 4 May captured the Italian championship, the Scudetto, for the first time since 1990, when Argentine legend Diego Maradona was still at the heart of the team. Victory has begun frenzied celebrations throughout Naples.
Many had been pessimistic about Napoli’s prospects earlier in the season after De Laurentiis sold some of the team’s biggest stars and replaced them with a crop of relative unknowns. Yet the victory was a vindication of the owner’s unorthodox strategy.
“I’ve been asked what your goal is this year because you’ve let major players go and signed unknown people,” he told the Financial Times in an interview in his film company’s Rome office, surrounded by giant posters for some of his many films. “When I told them my goal is to win the Scudetto, it sounded like I was cursing. But we won.”
As he sees it, his ability to fix the broken bat, in a sport that has confused some of the richest people in the world, comes from his experience making movies.
“We have been successful because I started applying to the world of football what I have learned from the world of cinema over many years,” said De Laurentiis, 73. “My goal was to win, while remaining financially viable.”
Though his family originated in Naples, De Laurentiis grew up in Rome, where his father and famed filmmaker uncle, Dino De Laurentiis, built a major film studio and helped bring postwar Italian neorealism to global audiences.
Unlike many Italians, De Laurentiis admits, he wasn’t a football fan before. But in the wreck of Napoli, which had never recovered from its infatuation with the ingenious and troubled Maradona, he sensed a compelling turnaround scenario.
“I didn’t know the rules of football. When I bought Napoli, for me, it was a completely new domain,” he said. “But, for me, it was important to mix film and sport, to provide content for what was once TV and now platforms.”
Even though Napoli were relegated to Italy’s Serie C when the club started out under his ownership, some 65,000 people still turned out for his matches. Within three years, the team returned to Serie A.
De Laurentiis and his scouting network of “smart people” have developed a reputation for identifying young and underrated players who could be signed for a low price, developed at Napoli and then sold for a profit.
However, success doesn’t necessarily come cheap. Napoli have spent €860m on new signings over the past decade, according to the Transfermarkt website, the fifth-highest in Italy, and have recouped around €648m from player sales.
De Laurentiis’ stubborn business acumen has at times infuriated passionate Napoli fans, who resented his constant attention to the backline and his refusal to wallow in big-name talent like Juventus bad lucky purchase of Cristiano Ronaldo for 100 million euros in 2018.
Napoli fans were outraged when De Laurentiis sold three of the club’s most beloved stars, including hometown hero Lorenzo Insigne and Senegalese defender Kalidou Koulibaly, who was sold to Chelsea.
Despite finishing third in Serie A last year, De Laurentiis was convinced the squad needed to be changed. “Their will to win was exhausted,” he said. “I didn’t believe it anymore. Maybe I was wrong. But I am the owner. I decide.”
Striker Victor Osimhen leads Napoli in a lap of honor © Antonio Balasco/LaPresse/AP
By contrast, Napoli’s current crop of young players have excelled, he said, “because they are a group, not a single star.” Their story will soon be told through four hours of television filming which began in June when the season was just starting.
The Napoli owner is hoping to keep his winning squad, which includes Nigerian forward Victor Osimhen, Georgian winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and South Korean Kim Min-jae, even as the trio have become one of European football’s most in-demand stars.
But the casting director in him has already set his sights on new additions, including an American player and a Japanese player, as he looks to expand Napoli’s global appeal.
Market research firm Neilsen estimated two years ago that Napoli already had an international fan base of 83 million fans in Western countries. De Laurentiis believes that number will have risen to at least 120 million after this season’s triumph.
The Napoli patron is also harsh on billionaires and investment funds who buy clubs and then delegate key decision-making. He argues that such an approach is undermining Italian football, which has lagged far behind English Premier League.
Napoli’s rivals include AC Milan, owned by US private equity firm RedBird Capital; AS Roma, controlled by US billionaire Dan Friedkin; and Atalanta, whose majority shareholder is Bain Capital co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca.
“Italian football doesn’t progress because decisions aren’t made quickly,” he said. “When you’re an investment fund, what do you know about managing a footballer?”
While Napoli fans have embraced De Laurentiis’ leadership following the win, it doesn’t rule out future tensions.
“The problem is that football is made up of two worlds: it’s a sport and an industry,” he said. “If you don’t win, the fans don’t care if you are good at balance sheet. For them, you’re better off failing. But you have to win.
Additional reporting by Josh Noble
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