Aurelio De Laurentiis, owner of Napoli, is a guy who doesn’t mince his words. He says what he thinks, and that has occasionally made him enemies in Italian football.
Now, during a meeting at the Department of Law of the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, he made some statements about the time his Napoli, Bari (also under his ownership) and football in general are going through.
His passion for Napoli: “I would like to clear up any doubts about whether or not I am a Napoli fan. Since you live in this doubt: as a child my father Luigi used to take me to the stadium when I was still wearing a pacifier. Then, in 1954, my family produced “L’oro di Napoli”… Do you think that if I wasn’t a Napoli fan I would have stayed here for 19 years?
“I’ll tell you more, I’m a fan of Naples, of the city of Naples. I consider it a possible central city at the European level, as it was in past centuries. In many ways I fight to promote the image of Naples in the world.”
Bari: “Obviously I’m asked ‘what will happen if you get to Serie A with Bari?’ We will sell it, but to someone who will give us the guarantee that he will be able to manage it as a work of genius.”
Italian soccer, debts and agents: “The Melandri law has been breaking our balls for 20 years, how can you say you look after the financial statements of clubs that are making losses? To ‘cure’ them you have to wipe the slate clean. The Italian state is absent and procrastinates.
“Agents are a big problem, why can’t clubs exercise a power of attorney? If there is an industry, why should contracts be for five years (rule in Italy, ed.) Why can’t I make an eight-year contract? After two years, especially if the footballer has changed agents and still hasn’t made any money, he starts to get angry. So you push for him to give in and take commissions of 5-10 million euros.
“There was an agent, Mino Raiola, may he rest in peace, very nice, who took 30-50 million euro commissions on the shoulders of the clubs.
“Have you seen on Netflix what FIFA has been doing in recent years? They have stolen billions and billions, they who are in Switzerland, in Geneva and Zurich, outside any European jurisdiction and nobody controls them.”
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