Naples, it's the worst start of the De Laurentiis era: after twenty years has a cycle come to an end?
NAPLES - Fifteen points after eleven games. Four wins, three draws and four defeats. Eighteen goals scored, fourteen conceded and a tenth place that photographs the moment of Massimiliano Allegri's Napoli better than any analysis.
The home draw against Lazio is not enough to change the picture. The Azzurri go down with Frattesi, find the 1-1 in the second half thanks to Pedraza's own goal and also try to win it, wasting a great opportunity for overtaking with De Bruyne. In the end, however, another point arrives that serves little to the standings: Lazio leaders rise to 29, Napoli remains in the middle of the standings with just 15 points.
A very heavy figure especially when compared to the recent history of the club. In the twenty-team Serie A of the De Laurentiis era, no Napoli had collected fewer points after eleven games. Allegri equals the previous low of the 2007-08 season, when Edy Reja's Napoli, who had just returned to Serie A, had won the same 15 points. But the comparison, in some ways, makes the current figure even more difficult to digest.
The 2007 one was the Napoli of reconstruction, a newly promoted team that was trying to carve out a space for itself again in great Italian football. The 2026 one, on the other hand, comes after two Scudetti, years of European participations, important investments and growth that had brought the club permanently into the elite of Italian football.
From Spalletti to Sarri, passing through Benitez, Ancelotti, Gattuso, Mazzarri and Conte, everyone had done better at this point of the season. Napoli in the 2022-23 Scudetto had 29 points after eleven games, Spalletti's the previous year even 31. Even Conte's Napoli champions of Italy had already collected 25 points. Allegri is stuck at 15.
The problem would be even easier to deal with if it only concerned points. Napoli, on the other hand, appears to be a team still looking for an identity. It alternates good moments with others of inexplicable passivity, concedes too much and above all fails to give continuity to its performances. The 4-1 defeat in Porto has further aggravated an already delicate situation: in the first fourteen official matches of the season, Napoli have conceded 24 goals, the worst figure ever recorded by a team coached by Allegri in the same number of games. A paradox for a coach who has built much of his career on solidity, on managing the moments of the game and on the ability to get results even on less brilliant days. In Naples, at least so far, exactly the opposite is happening.
And this is probably the aspect that should worry the most. In recent years, Naples has experienced something that for decades had seemed almost unattainable. The 2023 Scudetto interrupted a 33-year wait. The 2025 one showed that it was not just the unrepeatable astral conjunction of Spalletti's team. Two titles in three years had definitively transformed the size of the club. For this reason, the current tenth place cannot be considered a normal transitional season. Napoli is no longer the newly promoted team of 2007. It cannot think like a team that simply has to consolidate the category. Squad, turnover, ambitions and recent history impose other parameters. And above all, they make inevitable a question that goes beyond Allegri.
Aurelio De Laurentiis took Napoli from the rubble of bankruptcy and brought it back from Serie C to the Champions League, until it won two Scudetti. It is a story that, however you judge it, has profoundly changed the destiny of the club. But every cycle sooner or later must know how to renew itself. The risk is that what we are seeing is not just the initial failure of a new coach, but the sign of a model that has reached the limit. In recent years, Napoli has alternated extraordinary intuitions with radical changes, technical revolutions and continuous reconstructions. It has been able to start again several times, even after disastrous seasons, immediately returning to winning. This time, however, the feeling is different, not because 15 points after eleven games can erase twenty years of history. And not even because a season that started badly is necessarily compromised in November, but because for the first time Napoli seems to be faced with a deeper choice: to limit themselves once again to changing coach and players, or to wonder if the time has come to rethink the structure, programming and ambitions of the club.
Allegri today inevitably represents the face of the crisis. The numbers are merciless and the standings do not allow interpretations. But it would be too simple to think that everything begins and ends with the coach. After eleven games, Napoli has 15 points and is tenth. Lazio, first, has 29. Fourteen points away after just eleven games.
For a club that in recent years had learned to look down on everyone, this is perhaps the most difficult fact to accept. De Laurentiis' Napoli has already shown several times that it knows how to be reborn. The question, now, is whether we are facing yet another reconstruction or the definitive conclusion of the cycle that has characterized the last twenty years of Azzurri history.