Forgione: Napoli can't do stadium and training ground together

Angelo Forgione, the journalist and writer, has told Aurelio De Laurentiis to stop announcing and start building. On Radio Tutto Napoli, he said: "So many announcements have been made, and it's tiresome — high time we talked only when there is something concrete." His target was the president's latest proclamation on Napoli's new facilities: the training ground at Qualiano, and the newer plan for a 70,000-seat stadium with 120 sky-boxes in Napoli Est, on a 38-hectare site tied to a letter of intent signed with Q8.

The core of the criticism is about resources. Napoli have just come through a transfer window Forgione called "genuinely short on emotions", closed on 1 September with a deficit of around €47.5m. That's the basis for his question to the board: if building a stadium and a training ground demands huge investment, can the same budget also cover the first team's transfer business? His answer is blunt.

A club like Napoli can't do this and that together: one or the other. As they say round here.

There's also a broader argument that goes beyond the stadium. Forgione says Napoli's business model — "all concentrated on the first team, buying players, player trading, reselling at certain prices" — has left the youth section behind. On the Primavera, the club's U19 side, he says "there is no investment", just "a duty that gets fulfilled", and the same goes for facilities. He wants the club, if it does decide to invest in the stadium and training ground, to tell supporters just as clearly — including, if necessary, that in a given season the target of Champions League qualification takes a back seat.

On the stadium itself, Forgione accepts the Maradona shows its age despite the work done for the Universiade, the student games hosted in the city: "We need an absolutely modern stadium. It's 2026, we can't keep dragging along with the Maradona, formerly the San Paolo, built in 1959." It isn't hostility towards the president, he insists — "I'm a supporter of De Laurentiis, I wouldn't want to come across as the opposite" — but weariness with a script he has seen before.

That script is the one supporters have already nicknamed "from the first stone to the first sheet of paper", a comparison born on social media between the foundation stone that was never laid at Qualiano and the latest letter of intent on Napoli Est. Forgione adds a new argument to the debate — the finances that don't add up if the club tries to do everything at once — and leaves the decision where it belongs: with those at Castel Volturno, the training ground, and in via Campana, who must decide what to build first.