De Laurentiis rejects €2.1bn offer for Napoli

Aurelio De Laurentiis has turned down an offer of €2.1bn to sell Napoli. It came from a consortium of US investors led by the fund Underdog Global Partners (UGP). The two sides held talks for eight months, in private, before the president rejected the bid.

The rejected figure says a lot on its own about the gap between perception and official valuations. CIES values Napoli at under €900m, less than half the €2.1bn offered by the American fund. For anyone judging the club by standard financial measures, this would be an easy deal to close. The president is said to have said no regardless, and according to the reporting, he would not sell at any price.

The refusal has to be read against the history of the man making it. De Laurentiis took over the club's sporting licence in 2004, after Napoli's bankruptcy, rebuilding from Serie C1 (Italy's third tier) as Napoli Soccer. More than twenty years after that restart, the Napoli he is being asked to sell for over €2bn is the same club that has won two Scudetti in the last four years and finished last season second with 76 points.

That raises the uncomfortable question supporters have been asking for weeks, one this story makes sharper: a sizeable part of the fanbase wants the president to resign, with one banner calling him "gone senile". Yet the same president is turning down a vast sum to stay in charge. We don't know whether this is conviction in the sporting project or attachment to something he built piece by piece — the facts don't say, and it isn't ours to decide for him. But the contrast between those who want him out and his refusal of billions to stay is the real heart of this story.

On the pitch, meanwhile, the team behind all these numbers sits ninth with 7 points from 5 games, and faces Frosinone at the Maradona on Saturday 10 October at 20:45 CET. That, not the accounts of an American fund, is where Massimiliano Allegri's mandate from Aurelio De Laurentiis is judged each week.