Napoli players celebrate the Italian League title.
Photo: EFE – CIRO FUSCO
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The history of Napoli, a recent Italian football champion, is the story of South Triumph over industrialized Northern Italy. No one understood that better than Diego Armando Maradona.
The Napoli, champion in 1987, 1990, 2022 and 2025, was not the first southern team that won calcium. Before, in 1970, led by the prodigious left -hander of Gigi Riva, the Cagliari had defeated the traditional powers of the North. From Rome down, the league had never traveled to the south … or later, until the arrival of Maradona.
In 1984, the Argentine star arrived with the team closer to the descent than from the glorious he imagined. But a season later third parties ended to be champions in 1987. His figure was such that, as Arrigo Sacchi, coach of the best Milan in history, once said the days before facing Napoli, Baresi, Maldini, Gullit, Rijkaard, Van Vasten and company trained nervously to what they were coming.
Beyond the triumph of Cagliari, that Napolitan victory of 87 was the triumph over a class and even racist north with its compatriots who, as an offense, called Africans. The banners with which Napoli was received in the north were very saying. From the “Welcome to Italy”, when they crossed the imaginary border from south to north, to the “Vesubio, make us dream”, the Napoli represented, and continues to do so, that population of southern Italy who wants and has managed to demonstrate to the north that they are not lazy or lazy. Today are the best.
Today's Napoli is very different from Maradona's. After the convulsed departure from the Argentine, accused of doping in 1991, the Neapolitan club began a free fall that concluded with the administrative descent of the team to the third division for the 2004-05 season. Already then, the Italian director and producer Aurelio de Laurentiis had acquired the team for € 40 million, committing to deal with the debt that was around € 80 million.
De Laurentiis, in itself it is a particular character. When the team was in the C series, from Hollywood Medsiant an interview at the Gazzetta Sportiva, he asked the president of the Italian Federation to administratively return to Napoli to the A because “putting the Napoli in the series C was a great marketing error for what the city represents.”
Like everything about Napoli, the city's relationship with the filmmaker is ambiguous. De Laurentiis, born in Rome, but from Neapolitan family, speaks with a Roman accent that he does not like in the city. Nor does it help. He once said that he preferred Roman pizza to the Neapolitan. Sacrilegious!
Today, with two titles, such as Maradona, even the ultras accept De Laurentiis. It remains to be seen if the coach Antonio Conte will continue, whose goal would have to be to seek success in the maximum continental competition. A challenge that even with Maradona was able to achieve.
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