Aurelio De Laurentiis, harsh outburst without forgetting Maradona

The President of SSC Napoli, Aurelio De Laurentiis, gave a long interview to Radio CRC on Christmas Eve, drawing a balance of the Azzurri 2025: “We had won two trophies in Benitez’s time in the same year, however, they were different. This time Scudetto and Super Cup: that is no small feat. Equaling Maradona? You cannot match, you are never as big as him. He had this spirit as a Neapolitan scugnizzo, as a team boy. He worked with me, we had a very fun night together with him and Claudia, his wife, where they were telling me extraordinary things at a time when I was still a football”.

Andrea Gussoni

The number one of the champions of Italy remembers well when the situation was different: “The transition from Serie B to Serie A for me was an unforgettable moment. All my life I have been trying to entertain people like cinema, and I think there are few producers in the world who have had as many successes every year as I have had – the well-known producer was keen to point out. So when I see that the fans convey to an entire nation this sense of revenge and satisfaction, that is a feeling and enjoyment that no other situation’can give you.

And again: “I think of the uncovered bus and the numbers that made the live broadcast on Rai Italia. These are things that mark and give you a dimension of the’importance of soccer, which in my opinion those who run soccer from an institutional point of view haven&#8217t yet understood: they are too tied to their armchair and thinking about how to get reelected and not considering the’importance of not destroying a game by playing too much. They are giving us nightmares of injuries because you play too much. They should change the employment relationship, they should be freelancers, who don”t subject themselves to binding stresses even from a union point of view.

De Laurentiis’ outburst then continued: “We have great squires who run soccer and think that at some point their re-eligibility goes through formulas that just make people smile. The problem is that everyone wants to add and no one wants to take away: our players, paid by us, are given to the national team with incredible levity, when it should be the club that decides”.

“These gentlemen who govern soccer worldwide do not care about protecting the fan for whom the national championship has real value. One has to go over the’atlas of problems plaguing Italian soccer and only the owners have the ability in 24h to make the appropriate decisions: the CEOs and general managers who have to keep their salaries intact cannot care about taking a risk” concluded the Napoli president.