THE CASTE OF FOOTBALL - In the coming football, what role will Naples play? This is the fundamental question that Aurelio De Laurentiis will be asking and that the environment should also be created. Quite decidedly more stringent than those concerning the winning project, and all that the readers of the Napolist know well about papponismo.
Republica today has unveiled another piece of football that will come. The Champions from 2024 onwards. That could / should become a sort of European club championship. At invitations. The caste of football would be born. Because entry would not be at the big table would not depend on the results. It would depend on other factors. "Invitations - writes Repubblica - related to the history of the clubs, but also to the attractiveness of the cities. A project based on the Six Nations rugby model, which thanks to the races at the weekend (the championships would be moved during the week) would allow to increase the induced even with tourist packages"
It is a hypothesis. Because if we talk about the attractiveness of the cities, it becomes difficult to exclude Rome, or even Florence. And the same Naples. Since there's Turin inside. In reality, the factors would be different. It would count history, but it would also count the fan base and spending power of its fans, the ability to attract foreign players to the stadium, not just fans of their city. The future could be a strange mix, a football no longer based only on results. In fact, a division into classes. Virtually permanent division. In this the example of the Six Nations is fitting.
It is hard to imagine what the De Laurentiis club should do - which in 2024 would be 75 years old - to avoid such a scenario. Today Ancelotti has recalled what are the factors that count most in the wealth of a club: TV rights (especially those sold abroad), sponsorships and ownership stages. Ancelotti recalled that "every match Bayern sells thirty thousand liters of beer to the stadium. It affects the turnover. If you win or go ahead in the Champions League, your turnover increases but it's little stuff ». It counts systemic richness, no longer tied to results. It's zero to do with sport, we know.
What could SSC Napoli do? It is difficult for society, at least this society, to endow itself with a stage of ownership. He should - and he is doing it with Amazon - address the many fans he has far from Naples. With us, we wrote, there is a claim of the fan who is convinced that he is in credit with the club. A mentality impossible to explain to those who do not live immersed in the Neapolitan environment. The video with Ancelotti who delivered the shirts to Napoli to blue fans in Milan, went in that direction. De Laurentiis is no coincidence that it beats a lot on that research of Nielsen on the 30 million sympathizers in the world. Naples will have to show that it can count on an appreciable spending capacity of its fans. It will be hard. The same arrival of Ancelotti, as we wrote months ago, goes in the direction of the internationalization of the club.
Paradoxically, but not so much, in this world we are hypothesizing Naples would have more chances to be playing far from the city. Naples would have no problem filling any stadium in Northern Italy, even Milan. A future in which Napoli would play the championship at the San Paolo and the SuperLega matches between Milan and Turin. It sounds like science fiction, and it probably is. But we must begin to think about the future of this sport and the future of Naples. The only other Italian reality - in addition to Juventus Inter and Milan - that is getting ready to be ready is Rome. None of these - except Juventus - can currently compete from the competitive point of view with Napoli. But the competitive aspect, in this perspective, risks not being so decisive anymore