Ascarelli's club becomes Napoli: 100 years since the 1926 founding

Born out of an English-named club in a fascist Italy that frowned on foreign words, the club that took the city's name faced Bodø/Glimt at the Maradona on Tuesday 20 October, less than two months after its centenary.

by Rosaria CimminoTuesday 20 October, 15:14 CET· yesterday

25 agosto 1926: nasce l'Associazione Calcio Napoli di Giorgio Ascarelli — Grafica Arena Napoli

The Napoli side that faced Bodø/Glimt at the Maradona on the evening of Tuesday 20 October was a club that had turned 100 less than two months earlier.

The date is 25 August 1926, although tradition puts it at 1 August. That was the day the Associazione Calcio Napoli was born, on the initiative of Giorgio Ascarelli.

It did not start from scratch. It took over from Foot-Ball Club Internazionale-Naples, formed in 1922 by the merger of Naples FC, founded in 1905, and US Internazionale Napoli, founded in 1911.

A name forced by the regime

The change of name was not a matter of taste. The fascist regime disapproved of foreign words, and Internazionale-Naples had more than one.

So the club went Italian. The English was dropped and Napoli remained. It was the name of the city, and from then on it was the name of the team too.

The colours were sky blue and white. The historic emblem was the Corsiero del Sole (the Steed of the Sun), with the ciuccio (the donkey) as mascot.

From Garbutt to De Laurentiis

The first seasons that counted came under William Garbutt, coach from 1929 to 1935: two third-place finishes in a row, in 1932-33 and 1933-34.

Achille Lauro joined the club in 1936, and the story took the path the city knows well, through relegations and fourth-place finishes, up to the first Coppa Italia (Italy's cup competition) in 1961-62, won as a Serie B side.

On 25 June 1964 the Associazione became a joint-stock company: SSC Napoli S.p.A. was born. Under that name came the Serie A titles of 1986-87 and 1989-90 and the UEFA Cup of 1988-89.

In 2004 bankruptcy wiped out the club's sporting licence. Aurelio De Laurentiis refounded it as Napoli Soccer and entered it in Serie C1. In 2006 the name SSC Napoli returned, the same name under which the titles of 2022-23 and 2024-25 were won.

The present

The current Napoli sat ninth in the league after seven rounds and had zero points in the Champions League after games against Arsenal and Villarreal.

The Bodø/Glimt match was not about history but about the season's first European points. A hundred years after Ascarelli, the one thing nobody in Fuorigrotta (the district around the stadium) questions is the name on the scoreboard: the city's.