From Hollywood to Scudetto — how an Italian movie producer revived Napoli’s fortunes

Aurelio De Laurentiis was on the island of Capri, taking a break from making Hollywood film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, when he read in a newspaper that Napoli, the football club in Naples, had collapsed.

The veteran Italian film producer had in 1999 offered to buy Napoli for the equivalent of €102mn, only to have his bid rejected. By the time of his holiday in Capri in 2004, all that was left of the club, then bankrupt, was an authorisation to ask the Italian football federation to use the Napoli name.

“I put €37mn on the table just to buy a piece of paper,” he said. “And we started the new adventure.”

Since then, De Laurentiis has scripted a compelling turnround story worthy of the film industry of which his family has long been a part. In the fairytale ending, Napoli on May 4 clinched the Italian championship, the Scudetto, for the first time since 1990 when the Argentine legend Diego Maradona was still at the heart of the team. The victory set off frenzied celebrations across Naples.

Many had been pessimistic about Napoli’s prospects at the start of 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 was asked what is your goal this year because you have let go the most important players and engaged unknown people,” he told the Financial Times in an interview at his film company’s office in Rome, surrounded by giant posters for some of his many films. “When I told them, my goal is to win the Scudetto, it seemed as if I was blaspheming. But we won.”

As he sees it, his ability to fix the broken club, in a sport that has confounded some of the world’s richest people, stems from his experience making films.

“We were successful because I started to apply what I learned from the movie business in many years to the football world,” De Laurentiis, 73, said. “My goal was to win, while remaining sustainable financially.”

Although his family originates from Napoli, De Laurentiis was raised in Rome, where his father and famous film-making uncle, Dino De Laurentiis, built a major film studio, and helped bring postwar Italian neo-realism to global audiences.

Unlike many Italians, De Laurentiis admits, he was not previously passionate about football. But in the wreckage of Napoli, which had never recovered from its infatuation with the brilliant and troubled Maradona, he sensed a compelling turnround scenario.

“I didn’t know the rules of soccer. When I bought Napoli, for me, it was completely a new domain,” he said. “But, for me, it was important to mix movies and sport, to furnish content for what was in the past TV, and now platforms.”

Although Napoli was relegated to Italy’s Serie C when the club started under his ownership, crowds of nearly 65,000 still turned up for its games. Within three years, the team was back in Serie A.

De Laurentiis and his scouting network of “clever people” developed a reputation for identifying young, undervalued players who could be signed for a low price, developed at Napoli, and then sold for profit.

However, success has not necessarily come cheap. Napoli has spent €860mn on new signings over the past decade, according to the Transfermarkt website, the fifth highest in Italy, and recouped around €648mn from player sales.

De Laurentiis’s hard-headed business savvy has at times infuriated Napoli’s passionate supporters, who resented his steady focus on the bottom line, and his refusal to splash out on celebrity talent like Juventus’s ill-fated purchase of Cristiano Ronaldo for €100mn in 2018.

Napoli fans were outraged when De Laurentiis sold three of the club’s most loved 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 that the line-up needed changing. “Their will to win was exhausted,” he said. “I didn’t believe in them anymore. Maybe I was wrong. But I’m the owner. I decide.”

In contrast, Napoli’s current crop of young players has excelled, he said, “because they are a group, and not a single star”. Their story will soon be told through four hours of television that started filming in June when the season was just starting.

The Napoli owner hopes to keep hold of his winning team, including Nigerian striker Victor Osimhen, Georgian winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, and South Korean Kim Min-jae, even though the trio have become some of the most in-demand stars in European football.

But the casting director in him already has his eyes on new additions, including an American and a Japanese player, as he looks to expand Napoli’s global appeal.

Market research firm Nielsen estimated two years ago that Napoli already had an international fan base of 83mn supporters in western countries. De Laurentiis believes that number will have risen to at least 120mn after this season’s triumph.

The Napoli owner is also scathing about the billionaires and investment funds that buy clubs then delegate the key decision-making. He argues that such an approach is undermining Italian football, which has fallen far behind England’s 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-chair Stephen Pagliuca.

“Italian soccer doesn’t progress because decisions are not quickly made,” he said. “When you are an investment fund, what do you know about managing a football player?”

While Napoli fans have embraced De Laurentiis’s leadership after the victory, he does not rule out future tensions.

“The problem is football is two worlds — it is a sport and industry,” he said. “If you don’t win, supporters don’t care if you are good in the balance sheet. For them, its better you go bankrupt. But you must win.”

Additional reporting by Josh Noble