De Laurentiis wants a Serie A that works harder for Napoli

Speaking to business leaders in Rome, the Napoli president compared Serie A with the NBA, NFL and MLB and asked whether the 15-minute half-time break should be shortened or scrapped to stop young fans drifting to their phones.

by Rosaria CimminoThursday 1 October, 18:20 CET· 1 hour ago

De Laurentiis con la maglia del Napoli — Foto: goal.com

Aurelio De Laurentiis stepped away from the transfer market to address a room of business leaders, opening up a debate about the whole of Italian football, not just Napoli. At the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Rome, in front of around forty managers from TEHA Club (The European House – Ambrosetti), the Napoli president gave a talk titled "Cinema and football: the end of the monopoly on attention" and set Serie A alongside the major United States leagues.

«Guardate che cosa fanno le leghe americane. NBA, NFL, MLB: sono macchine commerciali enormi. Lavorano sul prodotto, sulla distribuzione, sugli sponsor, sui mercati internazionali. Fanno conoscere i campioni. Sono al servizio delle squadre. Creano valore. Io voglio una Lega che mi aiuti a far valere di più il Napoli. E per riuscirci deve far valere di più tutto il campionato».

The US model should not be copied wholesale, he said. "We have a different history, different competitions, a relationship with our territory that is unique in Europe. But we have to learn from their mentality." From there came a concrete proposal aimed at football's governing bodies: De Laurentiis asked whether the 15-minute half-time break should be shortened or scrapped altogether. Fans inside the stadium live for the wait, he argued, but a kid at home faced with the same pause puts the match down for a phone or a PlayStation, and only catches the goals afterwards, in the highlights.

His argument went beyond ninety minutes. "The relationship with that kid can't start at kick-off and end at the final whistle [...] Today's clubs have to become media companies too." For De Laurentiis, the issue is the speed at which younger audiences move. "YouTube doesn't wait for the League. TikTok doesn't wait for UEFA. The digital world our young people live in moves at extraordinary speed. And we can't assume football is immortal just because it mattered so much for a hundred years."

It is not the first intervention of this kind from the Napoli president. In recent days he had already described Cardinale's demands in football as those of "a financier, not an entrepreneur", asserted a right to be paid by foreign clubs for friendlies shown on pay-per-view at €9.99, and alleged political pressure to force Giovanni Malagò out of the Coni presidency.

The contrast with the table

The subject that had prompted his talk in the first place — the stadium — was left out of the speech in Rome. Italy is backing the Maradona for Euro 2032, not a new ground funded by the club. And the comparison with America's commercial machines comes in a week when the president himself is under fire in the city: on the night of 25-26 September a banner appeared against him, also aimed at his children Edoardo and Valentina, followed on 27 September by the insult "gone senile".

Talking about product, media companies and kids slipping away to TikTok while his Napoli side sit ninth with 7 points from 5 games, fresh from a 1-1 draw at Florence and their worst start in ten years, risks sounding like a way of steering the conversation elsewhere. The real verdict comes from the pitch again on Saturday 10 October at 20:45 CET, when Frosinone visit the Maradona.