In football, even the grandest designs contain elements of improvisation. No sporting director makes a wishlist of signings and manages to tick them all off. Take Napoli for example.
Cristiano Giuntoli, the club’s sporting director, had the green light to pay the buy-out clause in Erling Haaland’s contract when he was a Red Bull Salzburg player. In the end, Haaland chose Borussia Dortmund instead. Zlatan Ibrahimovic was ready to move to Naples for a reunion with his old friend from Paris Saint-Germain, Carlo Ancelotti. “I’d draw crowds of 80,000 every Sunday,” Zlatan humbly predicted, “and win the title like Maradona.” He even considered living on a boat moored in the Bay of Naples. Once Napoli sacked Ancelotti, however, he changed his mind. “I lost faith in the idea. There wasn’t the stability,” Ibrahimovic reflected. He embarked on a second spell at AC Milan instead.
It begs the question: what if either deal had come off? How different would Napoli look? Would they be where they are now? The memory is refreshed to last summer when the super agent Jorge Mendes floated the idea of signing Cristiano Ronaldo. It was not the first time he’d made the suggestion and relations with Mendes have been good ever since he brokered a contract extension with Napoli’s injury-stricken former full-back Faouzi Ghoulam. The club ran the numbers and Luciano Spalletti did more than entertain the idea. He seemed to give it his blessing. “I’d like to see who’d turn down the chance to sign Ronaldo,” he said.
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The film Sliding Doors was not released by Aurelio De Laurentiis’ Filmauro studio, but imagine if they’d caught one of those trains instead of the one they’re on now. It’s funny how football teams come together. It’s never an exact science. Napoli have always had accomplished sporting directors under De Laurentiis. Pier Paolo Marino delivered Ezequiel Lavezzi and Marek Hamsik. Riccardo Bigon, son of Alberto (the last coach to win the league with Napoli in 1990), secured the services of Edinson Cavani while Kim Min-jae, Stanislav Lobotka, Andre-Frank Zambo Anguissa, Khvicha Kvaratskhelia and Victor Osimhen are the work of Giuntoli and his five scouts.
Input comes from the hands-on De Laurentiis, as anyone who remembers him unveiling Gokhan Inler in a tiger mask can attest. The coaches have a say, too. Some of them have called to mind the so-called manager all’inglese in the style of Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger who did everything, including recruitment. Rafa Benitez brought his own database and recommended Kalidou Koulibaly and Dries Mertens to Bigon. The credibility and appeal Benitez bestowed on the club as a Champions League-winning coach helped attract players like Gonzalo Higuain and Jose Callejon from Real Madrid, who, ordinarily, would not have considered Napoli. Ancelotti is famous for having a similar effect on clubs, as Everton saw with James Rodriguez. His son and assistant, Davide, rubber-stamped the signing of Fabian Ruiz. He’d seen him play for Betis while dating a girl from Seville. Having the ability to take prospective new signings and their families to the island of Capri for the day helps seal deals, too.
Domestically, the club have always done good business with Udinese (Alex Meret, Allan, Inler, Piotr Zielinski) and likes to shop in Empoli. The sleepy Tuscan town is a proving ground for talented players, such as Giovanni Di Lorenzo, Zielinski and Mario Rui and a lab for bright young managers like, in days gone by, Maurizio Sarri and Spalletti, who have their own backstories in that sleepy part of the world.
Energy money isn’t behind Napoli’s first-ever run to the Champions League quarter-finals. No Barcelona-style levers were pulled in the assembly of this team and the overall cost of a history-making starting XI was less than half what Chelsea have spent in two windows under Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali. But it didn’t come cheap, either (€260million), at least not by Italian standards. Wednesday’s opponents, the outgoing Serie A champions AC Milan, were put together for less.
For example, only Alisson, Gigi Buffon and Francesco Toldo stand above Alex Meret as the most expensive Italian goalkeeper in Serie A history. The €26million he commanded is far from Kepa-lux and tracked the sudden inflation in goalkeeper values caused by Alisson’s move from Roma to Liverpool. Nevertheless, it’s an eye-catching fee for a player who, in five years at the club, only established himself as first choice this season and figures behind Gigio Donnarumma in the pecking order for the national team. Often criticised by Napoli fans for his prudence, De Laurentiis made Chucky Lozano his record signing in 2019, investing €45million in the Mexican winger before smashing that again in 2021 for the €71million Osimhen. The trio of Meret, Lozano and Osimhen have needed time and the right coach to fulfil their potential.
De Laurentiis has admitted he may have gotten carried away in spending what he did on Osimhen, particularly in the midst of a pandemic while the club was outside the Champions League. This season is the first in which Osimhen has played regularly after dislocating his shoulder in year one and having his eye socket smashed in year two. Prosecutors in Naples are also investigating his transfer from Lille which sent back-up goalkeeper Orestis Karnezis and no-name kids like Luigi Liguori, Claudio Manzi and Ciro Palmieri the other way in a package worth €20million. The random Italians have never played for Lille and are now back in Italy’s lower leagues. At a time of heightened scrutiny into transfers in Italy, Napoli don’t appear concerned. They were cleared in a sporting case brought by the FIGC last year and, although prosecutors in Naples have asked for another six months to conclude their investigation, the club’s lawyers are “convinced and serene” this separate case will find no wrongdoing.
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Osimhen is now the most coveted striker in Europe and prising him away for anything less than the €118million Romelu Lukaku went to Chelsea for two years ago will be challenging irrespective of the Nigerian’s dream to one day play in the Premier League. The only player De Laurentiis has lost against his will was Higuain and that was because Juventus paid the buy-out clause. Vulnerable to that prospect at the end of this season is Kim, the centre-back Spalletti considers “the best in the world”. A tough negotiator, De Laurentiis has rarely given in to indecent proposals. Lavezzi and Cavani’s moves to state wealth-backed PSG come to mind, as does the time he cleverly leveraged Man City’s interest and Sarri’s desire to be reunited with Jorginho to extract a huge fee from Chelsea.
Other than that, De Laurentiis has kept players for far longer than expected, leaning on contracts that are difficult to disentangle, a tightly run ship which means he’s under little pressure to sell, and the bond Naples and Neapolitans build with the team’s players who are treated like gods. Where De Laurentiis and Giuntoli particularly deserve credit this season is in having the courage to knock the wage bill down by 16% and break with the past, letting David Ospina, Kalidou Koulibaly, Fabian, the team’s skipper Lorenzo Insigne and Napoli’s all-time top scorer, ‘Ciro’ Mertens, leave.
To draw a Premier League parallel it would be akin to Tottenham being brave enough to clean house and move on from Hugo Lloris, Eric Dier, Ben Davies, Son Heung-min and Harry Kane. The team has been refreshed and no longer has any of the emotional baggage of near misses in title races gone by. Kvaratskhelia has been the revelation of this season in Europe. Overlooked by the elite in part because sceptical sporting directors couldn’t remember the last time Georgia produced a player this good, Napoli have been rewarded thanks to Giuntoli’s opportunism and preparedness to take a risk. Kvaratskhelia left Rubin Kazan this time last year, facilitated by FIFA’s decision to give foreign players playing in Russia and Ukraine the ability to suspend their contracts after the start of the war.
The exhilarating winger, who Rubin once valued at €30million, briefly returned home to Dinamo Batumi before Napoli struck a deal for a third of that figure (€11.5million). Curiously, Rubin’s social media admin trolled Juventus on TikTok after Kvara ripped them apart in a 5-1 defeat at the Stadio Diego Armando Maradona in January, referencing a report claiming the Bianconeri once balked at paying €20million for him, an asking price that now looks like peanuts.
As such, it remains the bargain of the season with huge upside. In terms of salary, Kvara is reportedly earning €1.2million a year. Asked if the jinking Georgian already deserves a new deal, De Laurentiis said: “Will you stop breaking my balls? There’s five years left on his contract, not one.” ‘The Alchemist’ Spalletti, meanwhile, continues to work his magic. When the lyrical Tuscan accepted the job 18 months ago, his mission was to transition Napoli from one team to another, get them back into the Champions League on a smaller wage bill and generate interest in players who’d lost value. He has done more than that and — as with Antonio Rudiger and Mohamed Salah at Roma, and Marcelo Brozovic at Inter — he has presided over player transformations, coaxing performances out of players like Kim, Kvara and Stanislav Lobotka that few thought they were capable of. Osimhen, on the other hand, seems destined to become the fourth striker to be proclaimed Capocannoniere under Spalletti, the ultimate goal whisperer.
Giuntoli has argued that rather than a miracle or a bolt from the blue, this is a project Napoli have built on. Nevertheless, for all the meticulous planning, it does feel like the stars have aligned in a way that has far exceeded expectation. “I can never enjoy the present,” Giuntoli told Sky Italia a couple of years ago. “It’s my limit.”
If he can’t enjoy it now, he never will.
(Top photos: Getty Images/Design: Eamonn Dalton)